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Down in the north-central section of Wilcox County, Alabama, sits a little parcel of land. Five miles wide, seven miles long, and surrounded by the Alabama River on three sides, this area is known as Gee’s Bend, population 275. An hour’s drive from the county seat of Camden, which is the closest source of food and medical services, the area is geographically cut off from the world. Mostly left to themselves for nearly 100 years, this close-knit historically all-black community’s folkways and traditions survived well into the twentieth century and stand as a symbol of their resourcefulness during a time of great duress. Art admirers from all over the world come to this patch of fertile soil in Alabama’s Black Belt to get a glimpse of the artistic legacy of four generations of Southern quilters.

From creating visuals to promote public health tips, to producing posters that celebrate hospital workers, artists of every ilk are using their skills to help fight the coronavirus pandemic. Even down in Gee’s Bend—the tiny Alabama hamlet formally known as Boykin that has nurtured three generations of quiltmakers—artists are lending a hand, using their skills to make masks for members of their community. The project started when two of the community’s longtime quilters, Mary Margaret Pettway and Mary McCarthy, saw an article about medical professionals in a neighboring city dealing with a face mask shortage. Included in the story was a template for how to make masks at home—which is exactly what the quilters did.

“Visionary” is a term that has become somewhat overused in the outsider art field — and over on the contemporary-art side of the broader art market, too. In some ways, “visionary,” which is properly used to describe distinct or novel worldviews, as well as the sometimes bizarre imaginings of both self-taught and academically trained artists, has become, thanks to hyperbole-spewing publicists and dealers, as meaningless as “amazing,” “epic,” or “awesome” — a mere banality assigned to everything from bad pop songs to hamburgers. The current exhibition The Life and Death of Charles Williams, however, illuminates an unusual and varied body of work that is nothing if not genuinely, emblematically visionary.

Edward Hopper’s East Wind Over Weehawken (1934) was once one of just two paintings by the American realist in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA)’s collection. So in 2013, when the museum announced that it would sell the quiet streetscape to create an endowment fund, criticism followed. But what was then labeled by some as a “deplorable deaccession” was actually a measure to rectify institutional biases. The museum has since used proceeds from that $36-million sale to enrich its collections, with half of the draw going towards contemporary acquisitions, and the rest split evenly between modern and historic acquisitions. The priority, according to director Brooke Davis Anderson, was and continues to be on collecting artists who have historically been marginalized. “We are trying to build a collection that tells a truthful history of American art,” Anderson said.

The first exhibition in the UK to show art shaped by the American Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s opened last month at Turner Contemporary in the seaside town of Margate. It is due to run until May so hopefully there will still be an opportunity to see this inspirational exhibition. We Will Walk - Art and Resistance in the American South brings together civil rights photography, sculptures, paintings and installations by more than twenty African American artists from the Deep South, many of which have never been seen in Europe until now. The exhibition shows us the influence these artists had, and continue to have, on American culture, art that in the words of writer James Baldwin “illuminates the darkness.”

Over the years I must have been to dozens of exhibitions on black liberation. Some in Britain, some in Australia, some in the US and one in South Africa which had me in tears when I saw on display a “Free Mandela” sticker that I had designed for the Young Communist League in London in the 1960s. They were all about the politics and the campaigning but, this spring, the Turner Contemporary Gallery on Margate’s traditional seafront has an amazing exhibition that looks at this subject from a totally unique point of view. The exhibition looks at the way the various arts have reflected the amazing struggle of black people in the US’s southern states, particularly in the battle for civil rights.

An important exhibition opened at Turner Contemporary in Margate last week. We Will Walk: Art and Resistance in the American South is the first time the UK has seen a show devoted to African American art from the Deep South that was shaped by the American Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s. It is long overdue.This art is born of resilience, ingenuity and indomitable human spirit, made by more than 20 artists who often worked on the margins, using whatever found or recycled materials they could lay their hands on. But while very specific to a time and a place, We Will Walk addresses issues of race, class and resistance that reverberate strongly throughout today’s world, whether in the American South or on England’s south coast.

The quilters of Gee’s Bend make art out of recycled cloth. Lonnie Holley crafts sculptures out of car tyres and other human detritus. Self-taught luthier Freeman Vines carves guitars out of wood that came from a “hanging tree” once used to lynch black men. The “yard shows” of Dinah Young and Joe Minter are permanent exhibitions of their art – a cacophony of “scrap-iron elegies”. Almost all of this art comes from Alabama, and it all features in We Will Walk, Turner Contemporary’s groundbreaking new exhibition of African-American art from the southern state and its surroundings.

Souls Grown Deep (SGD) is planning to help revitalize Gee’s Bend, Alabama—the home of multiple generations of quiltmakers, many of which are represented in the organization’s collection. Established to promote the work of African American artists from the South, Souls Grown Deep has already succeeded in spotlighting the community, which consists of the towns of Boykin and Alberta, by fostering the acquisition of quilts and other works from artists in the region by major art museums in the United States—since 2014, the SGD has placed quilts by sixty-eight Gee’s Bend quilters into the permanent collections of twenty cultural institutions.

In a review of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s landmark 2002 exhibition of quilts from Gee’s Bend, New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman described the textiles as “some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced.” The quilts, he wrote, were “so eye-poppingly gorgeous that it’s hard to know how to begin to account for them. Since then, these dazzling geometric artworks have traveled around the globe, been reproduced on official US postage stamps, and become broadly recognized as an important part of American art history. But back in Gee’s Bend—the tiny Alabama hamlet formally known as Boykin that has nurtured three generations of quiltmakers—the impact of the quilts’ renown has been more subtle.