Weekend art picks...

Gee's Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt
Philadelphia Museum of Art

Gee's Bend Exhibit

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 quiltmakers 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.






Linda Day Clark: The Gee's Bend Photographs

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 quiltmaking 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.

Linda Day Clark