the Quilts of Gee's Bend

In Wilcox County, Alabama, descendants of enslaved laborers, sharecroppers, and tenant farmers have communed in Gee’s Bend—a geographically isolated, rural Black community on the Alabama River (formally known as Boykin)—since the mid-19^th century. Generation after generation, the women of Gee’s Bend have made asymmetrical, provocative quilts noted for their stylistic ingenuity, bold materiality, and improvisational use of geometry; an endeavor passed down for both its utility and its rich visual culture. This textile tradition, taught by mothers to their daughters and families to their friends, is a well-practiced vernacular art form within Black communities across the American South. Quilting became a social pillar within towns and counties as woman gathered together to stitch, share stories, sing songs, and discuss politics.

Repurposing remnants of old work clothes, discarded choir robes, feed sacks, faded denim and found materials, the Quiltmakers stitch storied compositions, flaws and all, into handmade quilts with lively, syncopated patterning employed by the women with improvisation and individuality. Stains, patches, and tears on these fabrics index tangible records of lives lived in the deep South, during the Great Depression, under Jim Crow, the Civil Rights movement, and the Vietnam War. Each quilt thus serves as a distinct marker of its time as told through fabric, the labor of its making, and the vision of those who brought it to life. Hailed and regarded as masterpieces of American Abstraction, these quilts inherently reflect and demonstrate the boundless iterations of the quilting medium.

In 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. visited the Bend, impressing upon residents the tenets of political enfranchisement and of the civil rights movement at large. Deeply affected, many Quiltmakers and their families participated in marches with Dr. King to Selma and throughout the state, actions leading President Johnson to sign the Voting Rights Act later that year. Shortly thereafter in 1966, the Freedom Quilting Bee was formed in Rehoboth, north of Boykin, a hub that politically and financially mobilized quiltmakers across Wilcox County. Through the Bee, nationwide attention and markets for African-American quilts were established for the first time.

Audiences across the United States and internationally were first introduced to the work of generations of Quiltmakers in the critically acclaimed exhibition The Quilts of Gee’s Bend, a survey organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, which toured nationwide from 2002-2008. This exhibition, dove deeper into the formal nature of the quilts, concretizing the work of the Quiltmakers firmly within the canon of 20th and 21st century American art.

In his oft-quoted New York Times review of the exhibition’s stop at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Michael Kimmelman remarked that the Quilts of Gee’s Bend are; 

 “Some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced.”

Textiles and prints by the Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers can be found in numerous public collections, including those of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; National Museum of African History and Culture, Washington D.C; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York;  Birmingham Museum of Art, AL; Brooklyn Museum, NY; Dallas Museum of Art, TX; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; New Orleans Museum of Art, LA; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA, among many others.

   photo:   Girl at Gee's Bend, Arthur Rothstein, 1937, Library of Congress

More detailed information about Gee's Bend, past and present

From the Encyclopedia of Alabama

Known officially since 1949 as the town of Boykin, the community of Gee's Bend is situated in Wilcox County, Alabama. Today, mostly descendants of enslaved African Americans live in the community on the banks of the Alabama river. Although beset by the same poverty and economic underdevelopment that characterize other sections of west Alabama, Gee's Bend has demonstrated a persistent cultural wealth in the vibrant art of its quilt makers, whose work has gained international attention and critical acclaim.

Early inhabitants of Alabama tended to create communities along the many waterways of the state, and thus Gee's Bend's location is typical of many Alabama settlements. Joseph Gee, a large landowner from Halifax County in North Carolina, settled in 1816 on the north side of a large bend in the Alabama River, Gee's Bend, near what would become the northeastern border of Wilcox County. He brought 18 enslaved Black people with him and established a cotton plantation. When he died, he left 47 enslaved individuals and his estate to two of his nephews, Sterling and Charles Gee. In 1845, the Gee brothers sold the plantation to a relative, Mark H. Pettway, and the Pettway family name remains prominent in Wilcox County. After emancipation, many of the formally enslaved stayed on at the plantation worked as tenant farmers. The Pettway family held the land until 1895, when they sold it to Adrian Sebastian Van de Graaff, an attorney from Tuscaloosa who operated the plantation as an absentee landowner.

The 1930s was a period of significant change in Gee's Bend. A local merchant who had extended credit to the residents of the town died, and his family demanded immediate payment of all debts owed to him. Families watched as all their food, animals, tools, and seed were taken from them. Members of the community might have perished but for rations distributed by the Red Cross and a decision by the Van de Graaff family to waive rents. In 1937, the Van de Graaff family sold their land to the federal government, and the Farm Security Administration (FSA) established Gee's Bend Farms Inc., a pilot project of a cooperative program designed to sustain the inhabitants. The government built houses, subdivided the property, and sold tracts of land to the local families, for the first time giving the African American population control of the land they worked. During this period, the community also became the subject of several FSA-sponsored photographers, including Marion Post Wolcott and Arthur Rothstein.

In the later years of the Great Depression the advent of widespread mechanization in agriculture brought additional hardships to small farmers and caused the first major exodus from Gee's Bend. Many residents, however, stayed on their land because it belonged to them. In 1949, a U.S. post office was established in Gee's Bend, and the federal government imposed the name Boykin on the community, against the wishes of most of the residents. Then in 1962, a dam was constructed on the Alabama River, flooding thousands of acres of the most fertile land in the Gee's Bend community. During the civil rights era Wilcox County officials terminated ferry service across the Alabama River, necessitating a two-hour drive to Camden, the county seat. At the time, not a single black person was registered to vote in Wilcox County, and the cessation of ferry service was one of many efforts to prevent them from doing so.

Since the 1960s, Gee's Bend has gained significant national attention from the quilts produced by women in the community, as well as those produced by the Freedom Quilting Bee in neighboring Alberta.

Demographics

According to 2020 Census estimates, the population of the Boykin community was 544. Of that number, 99.4 percent of respondents identified themselves as African American and 0.6 percent as white.

Education

There are no schools in the Boykin Community. Education is overseen by the Wilcox County Public Schools.

Transportation

County Road 29 runs east-west through Boykin. There is a ferry service between Boykin and the city of Camden on the south side of the Alabama River.

Further Reading

• Beardsley, John. The Quilts of Gee's Bend. Atlanta, Ga.: Tinwood Books/Houston Museum of Fine Arts, 2002.
• Jackson, Harvey H., III. Rivers of History: Life on the Coosa, Tallapoosa, Cahaba, and Alabama. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995.
• Keurten, Bruce, and John DiJulio, directors. From Fields of Promise. DVD. 57 mins. Auburn, Ala.: Auburn Television, 1993.
• Windham, Kathryn Tucker. Twice Blessed. Montgomery, Ala.: Black Belt, 1996.