News & Events

In 2019, the Copyright Office released a blog entry titled “Copyright Office Staff Finds Inspiration in African American Works.” It featured staff members inspired by poets, people they see every day, and the work of the Gee’s Bend quilters. Staff member Lauren Fasceski had seen a book come through the Copyright Office about the quilters, and she was fascinated by their work, especially a quilt made by Loretta Pettway from jeans and work pants. “It was an interesting story about her quilts,” Lauren told me. “I made my own pattern based on this quilt, because I really liked the pattern and the fact that it was made of old work clothes.”

When you step foot into the Cargill Gallery on the first floor of the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia), you will see an assortment of assemblages, quilts and works of found wood, metal, paint and more. Curated by Starasea Nidiala Camara, Mia’s newest exhibition, “In the Presence of Our Ancestors: Southern Perspectives in African American Art,” will be open and free to view until December 2021.

As part of its $100 million Racial Equity and Justice Initiative, Apple is supporting six global organizations to help advance their missions in promoting and achieving equality and civil rights in the US and around the world: Black Lives Matter Support Fund via the Tides Foundation; European Network Against Racism; International Institute on Race, Equality and Human Rights; Leadership Conference Education Fund; NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc.; and Souls Grown Deep.

The National Gallery of Art in Washington DC (NGA) has acquired 40 works by 21 African American artists from the non-profit organisation Souls Grown Deep Foundation, a move described as a “milestone” by the foundation president Maxwell Anderson. Souls Grown Deep Foundation is dedicated to documenting and promoting the work of African American artists from the US South. Anderson says that the purchase of numerous works by Black painters, quilters and sculptors is significant “because the NGA is not an encyclopaedic museum given to making acquisitions of multiple works at one time, tending more often to acquire single significant objects made at the apogee of a noted artist's career”.

The National Gallery of Art in Washington has announced the acquisition of 40 works from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, a nonprofit organization that for the last decade has dedicated itself to promoting the contributions of African-American artists from the South. The purchase adds the work of 21 Black painters, quilters and sculptors to the museum’s art collection.

The National Gallery of Art is pleased to announce a major acquisition of 40 works from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation by 21 African American artists from the southern United States. The acquisition is made possible through the generosity of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation in addition to funds from the Patrons’ Permanent Fund. Some highlights of this important acquisition are nine quilts by the artists of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, including Mary Lee Bendolph and Irene Williams; three paintings, three drawings, and one sculpture by Thornton Dial; works on paper by Nellie Mae Rowe, Henry Speller, Georgia Speller, and “Prophet” Royal Robertson; four sculpted heads by James “Son Ford” Thomas, which were featured in the National Gallery’s Outliers and American Vanguard Art exhibition (January 28–May 13, 2018); and three sculptures by Lonnie Holley.

At Alison Jacques Gallery there is an opportunity to see some 13 quilts made by three generations of women from Gee’s Bend, Alabama. This is the first European solo outing for the Gee’s Bend quilts, a selection of which were included in the recent exhibition ‘We Will Walk: Art and Resistance in the American South’ at Turner Contemporary, Margate. There have been several shows in the United States, the most important being ‘The Quilts of Gee’s Bend’, organised by the collector and entrepreneur William Arnett (1939–2020) for the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and travelling to a dozen other venues to great acclaim in 2002. They are for sale and have been sourced via the Souls Grown Deep Foundation set up by Arnett, as part of the foundation’s Collection Transfer Program that grants a five per cent resale royalty to the quilt-makers.

Since 2018, the Louvre Museum in Paris has allocated five percent of its €250 million (~$301 million) endowment to socially-responsible investments, including artisan and traditional craft, cultural tourism, and cultural heritage. It’s one example of how an institution with a sizable endowment — a pool of money whose principal is reinvested to yield an income — can grow its own assets while benefiting the greater good. In financial parlance, the practice is known as “impact investing”: making investments to generate positive social or environmental change, in addition to financial returns. And while some institutions like the Louvre are already doing so, a new guide released by Upstart Co-Lab, a think tank of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, argues that impact investing could be much more widespread in the US, where museums hold more than $40 billion in their combined endowments.

Loretta Pettway Bennett remembers well the moment everything changed for her tight-knit, rural community. The 20th century was drawing to a close. She was in her late 30s, living with her husband and sons on the site of an old cotton plantation on a deep bend in the Alabama River. Any spare time she could muster was spent stitching quilts alongside her grandmother, mother and aunt, to pile on beds or hang on walls to stop the damp river air from snaking in between the logs of their cabin walls.