In a silent Baltimore gallery, you can hear women?s lilting voices from Gee?s Bend, Ala.
Four generations of women from the isolated, black farming community wove the 45 quilts on display at the Walters Art Museum in “Gee?s Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt.”
The exhibit, presented with “The Gee?s Bend Photographs,” includes quilts made over the last 82 years as well as 25 portraits of the quilters and landscapes of Gee?s Bend by Linda Day Clark. A quilt by Baltimore?s nationally renowned fiber artist Elizabeth Talford Scott completes the examination of American quilts.
Gee?s Bend matriarchs are fierce women, Clark said.
“Try to live the life they have lived and see who among us would still have the capacity for joy, beauty and love that they have,” she said. “They have very little formal education, but their wisdom and understanding runs so deep.”
Clark, a professor at Coppin State University who visits Gee?s Bend at least once a year, first met the quilters on assignment for The New York Times.
“I just fell in with the place and community; they?ve truly adopted me.”
Quilters use remnants of their clothing, weaving their husbands work shirts to their own as well as use traditional fabrics such as cotton and wool for the quilts, Exhibit co-Curator Tosha Grantham said.
“As you walk through the gallery, you could spend as much time looking at each quilt as you would a painting.”
Grantham encourages viewers to look at the lines and think how much work went into the seemingly simple but quite complex designs. The exhibit demonstrates the development of traditional quilt patterns such as housetop, bricklayer, medallions and strip quilting.
The exhibit, organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and Tinwood Alliance, traveled to 11 museums across the country in 2006, reaching over 1 million viewers.
Most of Gee?s Bend?s 700 residents are descendants of slaves from the former Mark Pettway plantation.
“They are survivors ? but they don?t survive as victims, they survive victorious,” Clark said.
IF YOU GO
Gee?s Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt
Through Aug. 26
Linda Day Clark: The Gee?s Bend Photographs
Through Sept. 2
Free
600 N. Charles St., Baltimore
410-547-9000
Free Community Day: Meet the artists and hands-on quilt-making activities for children
11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday
The Walters Art Museum
600 N. Charles St., Baltimore
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