a day in an artists life....

i received this link to the philadelphia museum from a friend - beth stahl - she is a lover of game boards...and thought we all would be interested....which we are!

she said that the exhibit will be coming to philadelphia this fall, so if any of you are in the area, you must make the time to visit...

Blocks and Strips Quilt,

2003 - Ruth Kennedy,

AmericanCorduroy

86 x 75 inches (218.4 x 190.5 cm)

Collection of the Tinwood Alliance.

Photo: Steve Pitkin, Pitkin StudioRockford, IL
Gee’s Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt

September 16, 2008 - December 14, 2008

This exhibition takes a fresh look at the quilting traditions in the community of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, introducing new artists and motifs in works dating from the early twentieth century through 2005.

Presented are approximately seventy-four extraordinary quilts that demonstrate how the artists play upon the structure or "architecture" of traditional quilt patterns. Each quilt is unique, yet shares a common visual vocabulary with others made in Gee’s Bend. With newly discovered work from the 1930s to the 1980s, as well as more recent designs by established quilt makers and the younger generation they have inspired, the exhibition documents the development of key patterns—such as housetop, courthouse steps, flying geese, and strip quilting—through outstanding examples.

Sponsors

This exhibition is supported by a MetLife Foundation Museum and Community Connections grant, by The Pew Charitable Trusts, and by The Women's Committee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Education and community outreach programs are funded by The Delphi Project Foundation, Reliance Standard Life Insurance Company, the Connelly Foundation, Paul K. Kania, and Lynne and Harold Honickman. Promotional support is provided by NBC 10 WCAU and The Philadelphia Tribune.

you know when you are surfing the web....you click on one link and then another and another until eventually you are so lost in the internet that you can't remember where you started from? i was link clicking from the philadelphia site and found so many more things to read about gee's bend...

so here is more info about the little, now famous, town.

About Gee's Bend - Named after Joseph Gee, the first white man to settle in the area in the early 1800s, the community is home to some seven hundred residents, many of who are descendants of the slaves who worked Gee’s plantation (sold to his relative, Mark Pettway, in 1845). After emancipation many freed slaves took the name Pettway and continued to make their living off the land as tenant farmers or sharecroppers. Quilt making had always been a domestic responsibility for the women of the community, and had always been considered as well as a form of personal expression.

Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke in Gee’s Bend in 1965; shortly after, many residents attempted to register to vote. Those who marched were sent to jail, fired from their jobs, and often lost their homes. The Freedom Quilting Bee was organized in 1966, and the townswomen subsequently earned income by creating quilts sold at large department stores such as Bloomingdale’s, Saks, and Sears.

The quilts in this exhibition are drawn from the collection of the Tinwood Alliance, Atlanta, a nonprofit foundation for the support of African American vernacular art founded by William Arnett. Arnett first traveled to Gee’s Bend, a small and isolated rural community situated on a peninsula on the Alabama River, in 1997 in search of Annie Mae Young, whose quilt he had seen in Roland Freeman’s book on African American quilters, Communion of the Spirit.

there will be another exhibit that will go hand and hand with the quilt exhibit -

Linda Day Clark: The Gee's Bend Photographs

photo titled:

The Road to Paradise, 2002

by linda day clark

September 16, 2008 - December 14, 2008

In conjunction with Gee’s Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt, the Museum is presenting an installation of approximately twenty-five photographs by Baltimore photographer Linda Day Clark, who has traveled to Gee’s Bend annually since 2002 when she made her first visit on assignment for The New York Times.

Clark’s photographs capture the richness of the rural landscape as well as the strong sense of community forged by the women who are carrying on the quilt making tradition in Gee's Bend. One image, titled The Road to Paradise (shown here), shows a narrow lane of red clay earth surrounded by pine trees that leads to a vista known as Paradise Point among locals. Also included in this exhibition are powerful photographic portraits of the artists such as Mary Lee Bendolph, Creola Pettway, Arlonzia Pettway, and Annie Mae Young, whose work is featured in the Gee’s Bend exhibition.
CuratorDilys Blum • Curator of Costume and Textiles

i looked at linda's site and she is an amazing photographer - maybe one day i'll be lucky enough for her to invite me to carry her cameras...i put her link above...