 Then Mary Lee Bendolph would go home and stitch by hand until the shreds
became pieces, and the pieces became quilts. Sometimes she laid them
lovingly on a bed made from corn husks to keep the younger children warm.
Sometimes she hung them against the wooden walls to slow the winds that
crept through the cracks..
Of course, that was before all this business about her lifetime’s accumulation
of quilts’ somehow belonging on big white walls in big fancy museums because
they tell us something about Southern living and being black and being with
and being without. It doesn’t make all that much sense to Bendolph, 71, these
complicated discussions about race and class; the praise and comparisons to
fine artists; the new U.S. postage stamps; the long bus rides with her quilting
sisters, tours in which she stands in church clothes before strangers, but not on
Sundays, and talks about her beloved quilts. What Bendolph, and all the other
ladies of Gee’s Bend have constructed from a history of people who simply
made do, is now considered modern American art, and ain’t that something?
“Downright funny isn’t it? I always loved my quilts, but I never thought it was art
like a picture or a sculpture,” says Bendolph. ‘I just made them because we needed
something to keep us warm, and I didn’t’ have nothing else. I didn’t have nothing.”
The exhibition represents the handiwork of 38 women, all of whom learned from
mamas and grandmamas and aunts and cousins to make poetry from abandoned
fabric – faded dungarees and overalls, corduroy shirts, tobacco and fertilizer sacks.
Gee’s Bend remained this precious, almost forgotten place until 1997 when
an art dealer named Bill Arnett came down from Atlanta and discovered the
women and their quilts.
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