The Quilts of Gee's Bend The quilts of Gee’s Bend are both culturally informative and emotionally evocative art objects. The quilts resonate with cultural insight and context, and suggest a modern art aesthetic.
The African-Americans that originally settled in Gee’s Bend were slaves to Joseph Gee. Gee’s Bend, as it still stands today, is isolated on three sides by the Alabama River, and stopped supporting a ferry service to town after the Civil Rights movement in the sixties. This small, rural community was forced to be essentially self-sufficient and struggled to be economically sustaining. One of the key indicators of this is the material used to create the quilts.
Rather than using expensive materials such as silk or large