Gee’s Bend Quilts and The Circle of Life

In the CQA Quilting News

from the Idaho Statesman, 11/05/09, by BY DANA OLAND doland@idahostatesman.com

Artists from Gee’s Bend see life and history in every quilt they make

Louisana Pettway Bendolph

To Louisiana Pettway Bendolph, the beautiful quilts she makes are like her children.

“You have to love them first, and then you have to let them go,” she says softly, as she gestured to the large rich square of fabric hanging on the wall at the Boise Art Museum. Her quilt is titled simply “Blocks and Strips.”

“The quilts are about my life. A lot of people want to forget where they came from, but you always remember,” she said. “You draw from it.”

“When I was working in the cotton fields, I never thought that some of that same cotton would be

Mary Lee Bendolph & To Honor Mr. Dial

blocks and strips, Mary Lee Bendolph, 2002

also by Mary Lee Bendolph

hanging up on a museum wall some day. This fabric could have been made with cotton from my community. To me that’s the circle of life.”

Bendolph, 49, is a woman of Gee’s Bend, a community nestled in a bow along the Alabama River, long isolated from the outside world. She and her cousin China Pettway, 57, are in Boise to share their spirit, culture and art for A Survey of Gee’s Bend Quilts, now on exhibit at the Boise Art Museum. (works by Mary Lee Bendolph as well)

The show includes quilts made over the past 50 years and some new limited edition etchings made from maquettes, or small versions of quilts, that Bendolph and a few other women made for Paulson Press in Berkeley, Calif.

Bendolph and Pettway grew up in Gee’s Bend, learning to make quilts from their female relatives through the generations. They can trace their lineage to the Old South when Gee’s Bend was on the Pettway Plantation. After the Civil War, many of the newly freed slaves took the Pettway name as their own and stayed. They made quilts for practical purposes, and because they were so isolated and inspired by each other, they created a unique artistic expression that continues today, Pettway says. And all the quilting is still done by hand. Quilt making is so ingrained in their lives that the idea that these quilts are anything special takes some getting used to, Bendolph said.

“We’re not artists, yet. We’re working on it. We accept that the world calls them art. We consider them as quilts,” she said. They were well used – and well loved – as quilts, some for many years, before making their way to larger audience. Some have tattered edges, others are stained.

What is truly remarkable is the blend of color and shapes that explode with abstract and geometric form, evocative of Modern art works by the likes of Paul Klee, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.