FORT LAUDERDALE.-The Museum of Art | Fort Lauderdale will host a major exhibition celebrating the multi-generational artistry of African American women from Gee’s Bend, Alabama from September 7, 2007 through January 7, 2008 with The Quilts of Gee’s Bend, presented by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida. Along with the exhibition, the Museum will also host 16 of the quilters in a residency during the opening weekend September 6-9, providing inspiration, history and education in an extraordinary cultural experience. These women and their ancestors, isolated for decades by geography, outside indifference, and extreme poverty but in lives rich with family, faith, and community, have quietly created one of the most astonishingly beautiful and original bodies of art work.

The Quilts of Gee’s Bend exhibitions have received international acclaim at art museums throughout the United States including the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and the Whitney Museum in New York . The Quilts of Gee’s Bend features sixty-three quilts by forty-six quilters. This tradition of quiltmaking in Gee’s Bend goes back many generations; the remarkable quilts have survived from the 1920s to the present. Improvisational designs, asymmetry, multiple patterns, and an almost minimalist aesthetic characterize the Gee’s Bend quilts. While they are based on conventional quilting techniques and approaches, Gee’s Bend quilt designs are often likened to abstract modern painting, and bear little resemblance to familiar quilt patterns such as wedding rings and rising suns.

“The quilts are evidence of a great American success story. Gee’s Bend , Alabama , is a community that has suffered through slavery, sharecropping, and the depression, but has found deliverance through their art. Out of the isolation of Gee’s Bend come quilts which by no means are stereotypical designs. Here we have that which is utilitarian made into an art of masterful abstractions,” says Irvin M. Lippman, resident and executive director of the Museum of Art | Fort Lauderdale .

The quilts are grouped as Work Clothes, My Way, Patterns, Housetop, Triangles, and Corduroy. Made for the practical purpose of warmth, the shapes and colors of these quilts pulsate with a disciplined beauty that is rooted in both symmetry and a conscious decision to deviate from that order. As with all great works of art, these quilts are both traditional and revolutionary.

The area known as Gee’s Bend occupies the land some five miles across and seven miles deep inside a horseshoe-shaped bend in the Alabama River . Geography has defined life in Gee’s Bend over several generations. The first African Americans to settle in the area were the slaves of Joseph Gee, for whom the Bend is named. Cut off on three sides from the outside world by the Alabama River , a ferry operated sporadically until the 1960s. But whites in the area stopped the ferry when Benders became active in the Civil Rights Movement. Today, the ferry has recently resumed service across the Alabama River . What nature created at the Bend , history has reinforced.

Isolation is only half the story of Gee’s Bend ; the other half is tradition. Because the inhabitants of Gee’s Bend were left largely to themselves for nearly one hundred years after the end of the Civil War in 1865, many of the community’s traditions and folkways survived virtually unchanged well into the 20th century. Quilting is one of the most important of these traditions.