Very occasionally, the art establishment opens its doors to outsiders: those whose talent is not the product of formal schooling or the desire for acclaim, and whose work is judged all the more remarkable for it. So it is with the quiltmakers of a tiny community in Alabama, who rose to celebrity in the US around the turn of the century following the blockbuster touring exhibition The Quilts of Gee’s Bend.
Long before they hung in museums and appeared on US postage stamps, these quilts warmed uninsulated homes in the riverside hamlet of Gee’s Bend. The earliest date back to the 1920s, although the tradition is presumed to be far older. Sally Mae Pettway Mixon, who made this quilt in 2003, shares the Pettway name with many of her neighbours because all are descended from the enslaved people who once worked Mark H Pettway’s cotton plantation.
Extreme poverty endured long after abolition. Gee’s Bend was identified by Franklin D Roosevelt’s administration as one of the poorest places in the US. In the leanest years, quilts were often made of nothing more than old work clothes, their patterns consisting of judiciously placed patches of sun fade.
The quilters’ fame comes from the dashing artistry with which they transformed these materials into huge compositions that are improvisational, abstract and often a little peculiar. Critics responded to the exhibition with excitement at seeing the syncopated rhythms of modern art replicated — and perhaps therefore validated — by people working entirely outside its traditions.
There was also an impulse to exoticise. “Imagine Matisse and Klee . . . arising not from rarefied Europe, but from the caramel soil of the rural South,” wrote The New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman in 2002. He judged the quilts to be “some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced”.
The quilters point out that their bold designs were often born out of necessity, because a scarcity of time and materials made finicky patterns unviable. Some of the most acclaimed quilts were originally intended as unseen layers on beds topped with more conventionally pretty throws.
As a child Pettway Mixon threaded needles and cut pieces for her mother’s quilts. She turned away from the craft as a young adult, only returning to it when she heard it was finding an appreciative — and affluent — audience. Today this quilt made of old skirts and blouses hangs proud in the Blanton Museum of Art.
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