Jan and I have gotten around to a lot of art museums and galleries over the years, but rarely have we come away as impressed and excited as when we drove to San Francisco just after Thanksgiving to see the Quilts of Gee's Bend exhibit at the new de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park.
No, we weren't much interested in the folk craft of quilt-making either. That is, before we came upon some mainstream media coverage of the phenomenal work of a few dozen very humble women living and working--for several generations now--in rural Alabama. The artists are all the descendants of freed slaves, who after the Civil War took the surname of their former master, became tenant farmers, and founded an all-black community nearly isolated from the surrounding world.
Needing bedcovers for warmth and lacking any fabric beyond scraps of worn-out work clothes and the like, the town’s women developed a sophisticated quilting style that seems to intuitively echo--and parallel chronologically--some of the most characteristic developments of modern painting.
They emphatically belie the notion that modern art springs most naturally from the ferment and stimulation of urban centers, and that art school is the likeliest launching pad for artistic talent. In 2002, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston presented an exhibition of seventy quilt masterpieces from the Bend. From there to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and a twelve-city American tour, the work has become a major crowd-pleaser and has even shown up on U.S. postage stamps.
After thumbing through an exhibit catalog at friends' house, we knew we had to see this work for ourselves. It was clear something very special was going on in the art world that was far more exciting than the exhausted, minimalist/conceptual gallery product that's occupied the art world for decades.
From here, though, I'll curtail the commentary and merely make some visual comparisons. Decide for yourself where artistic genius comes from and how it is nourished:
Joseph Albers:
Annie Mae Young:
Ad Reinhart:
Annie Mae Young:
Joseph Albers:
Lola Pettway:
Barnett Newman:
Mary Lee Bendolph:
Yaacov Agam:
Louisiana Bendolph:
Mark Rothko:
Loretta Pettway:
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