Gee's Bend

Gee's Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt is a major book and museum exhibition that will premiere at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), in June 2006 before traveling to seven American museums through 2008. Organized jointly by the Tinwood Alliance and the MFAH, in conjunction with the Gee's Bend Foundation, the exhibition will present seventy quilt masterpieces from the Alabama town of Gee's Bend. In 2002, Gee's Bend burst into international prominence through the success of Tinwood's Quilts of Gee's Bend exhibition and book, which revealed an important and previously invisible art tradition from the African American South. Critics and popular audiences alike marveled at these black-made quilts that combined the best of contemporary design with a deeply rooted ethnic heritage and compelling human stories about the women. Michael Kimmelman, chief critic for the New York Times, set the tone for the quilts' reception when he wrote that they represent “some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced." The exhibition has subsequently received unanimously stellar praise and wide coverage in the print and broadcast media, broken attendance records at museums throughout the United States, and attracted audiences of unprecedented diversity. In 2006, Gee's Bend quilts will be commemorated in a series of postage stamps, “American Treasures," by the United States Postal Service.The Architecture of Gee's Bend Quilts explores the origins, aesthetics, family structures, and community roots of this crucial American cultural legacy; presents newly discovered masterworks from the second half of the twentieth century; and, by spotlighting more than a dozen quilts created in the last four years, celebrates the recent and dazzling revitalization of Gee's Bend's artmaking in the twenty-first century. As such, the book offers evidencs that a once-dying art form may now continue to thrive and to inspire art lovers well into the new millennium.