My Way: The Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers and Contemporary Abstraction
June 27 - August 9, 2020
“People are not really expressing enough love anymore.
It’s at the center of what we do.”
- Essie Pettway
Parts & Labor Beacon is pleased to present My Way: The Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers and Contemporary Abstraction, featuring quilts by six quiltmakers from Gee’s Bend, Alabama, and recent works by six artists whose impulses and gestures similarly reflect elements of storytelling and abstraction rooted in the history of Gee’s Bend quilts.
Since the mid-nineteenth century, descendants of the Pettway family plantation’s enslaved laborers and the subsequent sharecroppers and “tenant farmers” in Gee’s Bend – a remote, rural Black community southwest of Selma, Alabama – have made richly textured quilts using diversely sourced materials. Marlene Bennett Jones (b. 1960), Lou Ida McCloud (b. 1951), Essie Pettway (b. 1956), Mary Leathea Pettway (b. 1961), Mary Margaret Pettway (b. 1963), and Stella Pettway (b. 1952) extend the legacy of their predecessors by continuing in the practice of repurposing salvaged cloth and fabric scraps—feed sacks, faded denim, work clothes, and remnants alike—and stitching them together in singular, transformative geometries. In his review of the Whitney Museum’s 2002 blockbuster exhibition The Quilts of Gee’s Bend (organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston), New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman wrote: “The best of these designs, unusually minimalist and spare, are so eye-poppingly gorgeous that it’s hard to know how to begin to account for them. But then, good art can never be fully accounted for, just described.” Long admired by out-of-towners—including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who visited Gee’s Bend on his way to Montgomery in 1965; Lee Krasner, who touted the quilters’ works to curators at the Metropolitan Museum of Art following a visit to Gee’s Bend in 1967; and Diana Vreeland of Vogue magazine—the quilts of Gee’s Bend are regarded as masterpieces of American Abstraction.
The majority of Gee’s Bend works are ‘My Way’ quilts: their improvisational, abstract imagery and patterning is informed by the particular quilter’s personal vision, rather than that of a guide or template. Loretta Pettway, for example, has emphasized the value of spontaneity while quilting, saying, “My quilts looked beautiful to me, because I made what I could make from my head. When I start I don’t stop until I finish, because if I stop, the ideas are going to go one way and my mind another way, so I just try to do it while I have ideas in my mind.” Further labels have been assigned to distinguish particular styles: Mary Margaret Pettway and Lou Ida McCloud’s ‘Housetop’ and ‘Bricklayer’ quilts detail concentric squares and right angles that mimic the quilts’ borders. The quilts in this exhibition descend from the ongoing legacy of many generations of Gee’s Bend’s quilters, and the diverse, experimental, and interpretive pattern-making inherent to the work of the Gee’s Bend quiltmakers as a whole.
Recent works by N. Dash (b. 1980), Christina Forrer (b. 1978), Marley Freeman (b. 1981), Xylor Jane (b. 1963), and Julia Rommel (b. 1980), as well as a significant collage from the early 1990s by Al Loving (b. 1935-d. 2005), appear in this exhibition in direct visual dialogue with the Gee’s Bend quilts on view. Throughout this exhibition, the ties that connect each work to precedents in abstraction that are historically rooted in Gee’s Bend quilts are distinctly present. Visual associations with intuitive systems of pattern-making including arrangements of color, texture, and chance are consistent. Roots of a free flowing, improvisational approach to abstraction materialize in My Way, from its origins in Gee’s Bend to contemporaries working throughout the United States today.
For images, biographies, and further information, please contact the gallery at [email protected].
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My Way: The Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers and Contemporary Abstraction opens on Saturday, June 27 and will remain on view through Sunday, August 9, 2020. No reception will take place. Gallery hours are Saturday and Sunday from 12-6 pm, by appointment. Appointments may be made by texting or calling (207) 460-0768.
Quotation: Essie Pettway, as quoted by Maris Curran in “The Master Quilters of Gee’s Bend, Ala.” [New York Times, Nov. 13, 2018]