The exhibition “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend,” organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and Tinwood Alliance, toured major museums around the country for more than two years. The exhibition and accompanying publications have been praised by many influential art critics. Shelly Zegart, past board president and co-founder of The Alliance for American Quilts, was a consultant on the publications and continues to work with the Gee's Bend Quilters Collective. This film was produced to accompany the exhibition, takes us inside this remarkable community and allows the women to speak for themselves.

"The most ebullient exhibition of the New York art season has arrived at the Whitney Museum in the unlikely guise of a show of hand-stitched quilts from Gee's Bend, Ala. Gee's Bend is a remote, historically black community occupying a bulb of bottom land, a U-shaped peninsula five miles across and seven miles long, hemmed in on three sides by the Alabama River.

The results, not incidentally, turn out to be some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced. Imagine Matisse and Klee (if you think I'm wildly exaggerating, see the show) arising not from rarefied Europe, but from the caramel soil of the rural South in the form of women, descendants of slaves when Gee's Bend was a plantation. These women, closely bound by family and custom (many Benders bear the slaveowner's name, Pettway), spent their precious spare time - while not rearing children, chopping wood, hauling water and plowing fields - splicing scraps of old cloth to make robust objects of amazingly refined, eccentric abstract designs. 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."

-Michael Kimmelman
Chief Art Critic, The New York Times

"The Quilts of Gee's Bend" premiered at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and has been shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Mobile (AL) Museum of Art, and the Milwaukee Art Museum.

A new exhibition, "Gee's Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt," examines the resurgence of interest in quilting in the Gee´s Bend community and documents the development of key traditional quilt patterns—housetop, courthouse steps, flying geese, and strip quilting through the presentation of outstanding examples created from the 1930s into the twenty-first century.

The 70 quilts in the exhibition, none previously presented to the public, will demonstrate how the quilters improvise upon the structure or "architecture" of the quilt to create a work of art that is based upon a traditional quilt pattern while simultaneously creating a visual vocabulary that is stylistically identifiable as Gee's Bend. Each pattern will be examined with visual examples detailing various interpretations. New works by granddaughters and great-granddaughters of some of the master quiltmakers will be shown, along with quilts not previously exhibited by quiltmakers Mary Lee Bendolph and Mary L. Bennett.

Accompanying the exhibition is an extensive catalogue by former Alliance board member Bernard Herman, Edward F. and Elizabeth Goodman Rosenberg Professor of Art History at the University of Delaware. In his catalogue essay, Herman compares the works in the exhibition to the structured compositions of both Piet Mondrian and Esther Mahlangu, a Ndebele house painter from South Africa. Other catalogue contributors include Lauren Whitley, Dilys Blum, Diane Mott, Joanne Cubbs, and Maggie Gordon.