Gee's Bend

Thursday
Out at Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park this evening to see Gee's Bend. Interwoven with gospel music, the play is based on fact and is a celebration of the resilience of the human spirit, following the life and family of Sadie Pettway. Through segregation, family turmoil and the Civil Rights Movement, the women turn to quilting, (using castoff clothing, old sheets and flour sacks), to provide comfort and context to their lives.
Gee's Bend is a small rural community nestled into a curve in the Alabama River southwest of Selma, Alabama. Founded in antebellum times, it was the site of cotton plantations, primarily the lands of Joseph Gee and his relative Mark Pettway, who bought the Gee estate in 1850. After the Civil War, the freed slaves took the name Pettway, became tenant farmers for the Pettway family, and founded an all-black community nearly isolated from the surrounding world. The town's women developed a distinctive, bold, and sophisticated quilting style based on traditional American (and African American) quilts, but with a geometric simplicity reminiscent of Amish quilts and modern art. The women of Gee's Bend passed their skills and aesthetic down through at least six generations to the present. In 2002, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in partnership with the nonprofit Tinwood Alliance, of Atlanta, presented an exhibition of seventy quilt masterpieces from the Bend. The exhibition received tremendous international acclaim, beginning at its showing in Houston, then at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the other museums on its twelve-city American tour. Many of the quilt makers have become well known and have traveled extensively to talk about their community and their art.

One year ago: Celebration!