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When the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts bought Manuel Mathieu's painting of his late grandmother in 2018, he learned that it would be the first work the museum had ever owned by a Haitian-Canadian artist. "I automatically started thinking, 'OK, how can I make sure that I'm not the only one?,' " Mathieu recalls. Mathieu, 33, decided to donate the money from the sale of his painting back to the museum, to start a fund to acquire other pieces by under-represented artists. Soon donors were eager to give to the Marie-Solange Apollon Fund, named for Mathieu's grandmother. "There's something that happened that I wasn't expecting," Mathieu says. "The switch in the psyche of people that an artist can do something like that. ... I saw it in people's eyes, not in their words."

What began as an exercise in making beauty out of necessity (the quilts were historically used to keep warm at home) has become a multigenerational art form that marries spirituality, ancestral legacy and community (stitching is largely a group activity), not to mention an exceptional command of colour, form and compositional rhythm. By combining well-known quilting techniques with a specific blend of “controlled improvisation”, each maker creates something distinct and mesmeric, and every bit as complex as the European modernists who were once reconceiving line, colour and space thousands of miles away.

Deep in Alabama’s Black Belt, the village of Gee’s Bend is almost an island, cut off by a loop in the Alabama River. The ferry that linked the Bend to Camden, the local county seat, was stopped by white segregationists in 1962, and not reinstated until 2006. Once enslaved plantation workers, then sharecroppers, then struggling New Deal farmers, the people of the Bend remained largely unnoticed by mainstream history, despite Martin Luther King’s visit in 1965 a few weeks before the civil rights march on Selma.

Upstart Co-Lab, a research and laboratory project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, is aiming to boost investments made in arts and culture-related industries that are designed to stimulate local economies and generate jobs.The plan is to do this with investment capital from a new 10-member coalition of investors ranging from art institutions and artists to individual funders. Collectively, this member group—which includes the U.S.-based arts institutions and foundations Souls Grown Deep, an organization promoting the African-American artwork from the Southern U.S.; BRIC, a Brooklyn-based arts and media institution; and Denver’s Bonfils-Stanton Foundation—has $1 billion in funding capacity.

Since 2010, Atlanta-based foundation Souls Grown Deep (SGD) has introduced the works of the women quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend, Alabama into museum collections. Now, the foundation’s parent organization, Souls Grown Deep Community Partnership, has opened the Gee’s Bend Resource Center, a free public space to help increase census participation, voting registration, and economic stimulus check payment in one of the most underserved communities in the country. The foundation recently opened the Gee’s Bend Resource Center, a free public space staffed by members of the community in Alabama. Equipped with free internet access, the center’s paid staff assists residents in registering to vote, completing the 2020 Census, and receiving federal stimulus checks. The foundation has also partnered with the US Census Bureau to establish a phone bank to reach out to households that have never before participated in the census.

The Freedom Quilting Bee and Souls Grown Deep recently collaborated to provide internet access service to the community of Gee’s Bend and Alberta. This ensured they were able to interact with the IRS to check on and receive their stimulus payments. There are people who don’t realize they are eligible to receive this stimulus payment, and others who will not automatically receive it without providing the IRS with information. Souls Grown Deep (SGD), in its continuing commitment to the Alberta/Gee’s Bend community, supplied the laptops and personnel to make this access happen. Census 2020 completion was included in this project in an effort to increase participation in the census. 

One of Boykin, Alabama’s storied Gee’s Bend quilters, Mary Margaret Pettway is an Alabama Humanities Foundation fellow and an instructor at the Black Belt Treasures Cultural Arts Center, and also serves as board chair of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving and promoting African American artists in the South. Here, she shares more about the history and quilting culture of Gee’s Bend, in her own words.