Souls Grown Deep Fall Programs Celebrate Gee's Bend Quilters At National Gallery And In Alabama

Souls Grown Deep Foundation and Community Partnership (SGD) today announced its fall 2022 initiatives, featuring a significant exhibition of recent acquisitions from the Foundation by the National Gallery of Art, as well as the inaugural Gee's Bend Airing of the Quilts Festival inviting the public to celebrate the quilting tradition and support local artists.

The festival will feature the unveiling of the first phase of the Gee's Bend Heritage Trail, an ongoing project to expand landmark signage commemorating quilters and significant sites in Gee's Bend, drawing attention to the artistic traditions within the community. This programming builds on SGD's history of collaboration with dozens of leading museums around the world and ongoing community reinvestment projects in Gee's Bend, continuing to advocate for not only artistic and historical recognition but also the intellectual property rights and economic empowerment of Black artists across the South.

These programs coincide with the 20th anniversary of the 2002 exhibition The Quilts of Gee's Bend, first presented at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Whitney Museum of American Art and then exhibited at nearly a dozen institutions around the country, which helped to cement the Gee's Bend quilters' place in the American artistic canon.

"The exhibition of notable works by artists from our collection at the National Gallery-our nation's museum-signifies their essential inclusion in the canon of art history, exposing new audiences to their artistic mastery and contemporary relevance," said Dr. Maxwell L. Anderson, president of Souls Grown Deep Foundation and Community Partnership. "In tandem with the Gee's Bend Heritage Trail and quilt festival, this fall represents a crucial moment of recognition and celebration for the artists whose work has been a vibrant current in American culture for over a century, two decades after their initial presentation in leading museums."

Called to Create: Black Artists of the American South

at the National Gallery of Art

Washington, D.C. | September 18, 2022 - March 26, 2023

Called to Create: Black Artists of the American South is the first exhibition highlighting the 40 works the museum acquired from Souls Grown Deep in 2020. Comprising quilts, paintings, drawings, sculptures, and large-scale assemblages, it features works by artists including Mary Lee Bendolph, Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley, and James "Son Ford" Thomas.

Gee's Bend Airing of the Quilts Festival

Gee's Bend, AL (also referred to as Boykin, AL)

October 8, 2022 | 10:00am - 4:00pm

(Festival updates available at www.geesbend.org)

With support from Souls Grown Deep, Nest, and the Freedom Quilting Bee Legacy, the Gee's Bend quilters will present the first-ever Gee's Bend Airing of the Quilts Festival, a day-long public celebration of the community's vibrant creative culture. "Airing of the Quilts" follows on the age-old tradition in which the warm, handmade quilts used during the winter were taken out of summer storage and hung out to air in the sun before being spread across beds for the cooler months, with beautiful, hand-quilted creations displayed in front of homes throughout the town. The event is open to the public and will provide attendees with the opportunity to connect with and buy directly from quilters, meet and support local business owners, learn about the artistry and heritage of Gee's Bend quilts, and experience the rich-but overlooked-history present in the community.

Souls Grown Deep curated exhibitions at Airing of the Quilts Festival

Gee's Bend and Alberta, AL| On view beginning October 8, 2022

The Freedom Quilting Bee Legacy (at The Freedom Quilting Bee Legacy in Alberta)

The inaugural exhibition at the historic Freedom Quilting Bee building will explore the enduring economic, political, and artistic legacy of the Freedom Quilting Bee, the Black women's quilting cooperative in Alberta, Alabama. Founded in 1966 at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, the Freedom Quilting Bee was one of the few Black women's cooperatives in the United States, and it operated at the forefront of the civil rights, women's rights, and cooperative movements of the 1960s and 70s, all the while having an impact nationally on the worlds of fashion, craft, and art.

The Gee's Bend Style (at Gee's Bend Welcome Center)

In just the past year, garments from collaborations between Gee's Bend quiltmakers and fashion designers have appeared on the runway of Paris Fashion Week, the stage of the Oscars, and at the Fashion Institute at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. This exhibition will feature garments and photographs from recent collaborations, including Greg Lauren, Chloé, and Marfa Stance.

Gee's Bend Heritage Trail Unveiling

Gee's Bend, AL | October 8, 2022

On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the seminal The Quilts of Gee's Bend exhibition, the inauguration of the Gee's Bend Heritage Trail celebrates the centuries-long tradition of quiltmaking ingenuity in Gee's Bend. The trail's grand unveiling will take place during the Gee's Bend Airing of the Quilts Festival on October 8.

The first phase of the Heritage Trail features new trail markers commemorating the 10 Gee's Bend quilts that appeared on U.S. postage stamps in 2006, with large-scale, full-color images of each quilt alongside a biography of its maker, designed by Pentagram. The Heritage Trail is the largest cultural tourism and creative placemaking project in Gee's Bend's history, advancing local economic development and providing a new window into the vibrant artistic community whose influential works now hang in major museums around the world. Through Souls Grown Deep's Collection Transfer Program, the featured quilts have been added to the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Phillips Collection, RISD Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Souls Grown Deep has also worked to ensure intellectual property rights and crediting for the quilters, securing copyright for their work in partnership with Artists Rights Society. Additional support for the Gee's Bend Heritage Trail was provided by the University of Alabama's Center for Economic Development.

A corresponding virtual experience on Google Earth will enable visitors to explore and learn about the community's heritage both in person and remotely. Future phases of the Gee's Bend Heritage Trail will present stories of this extraordinary community's history and contributions to the history of American art.

Tate Modern is in the process of acquiring four quilts by Mary Lee Bendolph, Aolar Mosely, Louella Pettway, and Annie Mae Young from Souls Grown Deep. These four artists are all from Gees' Bend, a remote community in Alabama that has created hundreds of quilt masterpieces dating from the early 20th century to the present. Tate Modern houses the United Kingdom's national collection of international modern and contemporary art and began to collect and exhibit work from the U.S. after the Second World War. As post-war American art is often dominated by white abstractionists, this group of acquisitions from Southern Black artists represent a foundational shift in how Tate will present the story of 20th century American art.

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