Teaching about Race and Racism Across the Disciplines

The Quilting Tradition

Harriet Powers was once a slave in rural Georgia, but her intricate quilts make her a celebrated artist today. Her story quilts depict biblical tales and local histories. She began exhibiting them in 1886 at the Cotton States and International Expo. Now her quilts, Bible Quilt, is at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History and Pictorial Quilt is at Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (blackartinamerica.com) As a slave and bearing at least nine children, Powers was subjected to a racist and sexist society yet seemed to have remained unwavering in her faith. The function of her quilts is similar to the story quilts of contemporary artists who use this medium to express their own devotion in what they believe to be significant.

The traditional African textile usage of bright colors, asymmetry, and large shapes is seen in the quilt of the Gee’s Bend quilters. In 2002, The Quilts of Gee’s Bend, an exhibition highlighting the work of these African American women quilters traveled to several museums around the country including the Smithsonian. The Gee’s Bend community is actually Boykin, Alabama, but it is known for the plantation owned by Joseph Gee. The women of Gee’s Bend—a small, remote, black community in Alabama—have created hundreds of quilt masterpieces dating from the early twentieth century to the present. Gee’s Bend is an inland island, surrounded on three sides by the Alabama River. The roughly seven hundred inhabitants of this small, rural community are mostly descendants of slaves who for generations worked the fields belonging to the local Pettway plantation. Quiltmakers there have produced countless patchwork masterpieces beginning as far back as the mid-nineteenth century, with the oldest existing examples dating from the 1920s, models that represent an important chapter in the history of African American art.¹⁰

Gee’s Bend quilts continue an old and proud tradition of textiles made for home and family. They represent only a part of the incredible group of African American quilts, but they are unique in many ways - the extent of Gee’s Bend’s artistic achievement, the result of both geographical isolation and an unusual degree of cultural continuity. These works have been formed by three and sometimes four generations of women in the same family and “bear witness to visual conversations among community quilting groups and lineages. Gee’s Bend’s art also stands out for its flair—quilts composed boldly and improvisationally, in geometries that transform recycled work clothes and dresses, feed sacks, and fabric remnants.” ¹¹

In traditional African cultures, art is functional first. Traditional African art is meant to be used. The tradition of quilt making that has been passed down through generations of women might be considered a skill because quilts are generally thought to have some functional purpose. Their artworks are founded on traditions handed down to them from mothers and grandmothers. They serve the function of keeping bodies warm in cold weather, but they also serve the function of telling African American narratives through the African artistic traditions.  During slavery, women patch-worked quilts out of scraps of fabric to keep themselves and their families warm. As many quilt makers provided warmth for themselves and their family members through the production of quilts, they also created quilts that demanded considerable skill and that were incredibly artistic. The function of the quilt works together with their beauty.

Quilts became a means of getting her own story out there. “I have always wanted to tell my story or, more to the point, my side of the story,” Ringgold writes in the preface to her memoir, We Flew Over the Bridge,  published in 1995 “It was then that I hit on the strategy of self-publication through masked performance pieces and readings of my story quilts at college lecture dates and exhibitions,” she explains in her book.

Quilts have been both a functional and determined medium. As Ringgold says in a 2019 article in The Guardian, “It was an art form that slaves used to keep themselves warm and to also import their art because they couldn’t bring the art forms that they practiced in Africa. This was a way of them being able to continue their art in a way that was acceptable to the slavers because it was keeping them warm.”

Understanding the tradition of quilting can help the students learn about communal traditions of family, kinship and relations that have long strengthened black communities and other communities of color. It really provides an opportunity to talk about slavery, and the ways enslavement sought to disorganize and control people’s decisions about families and kinship. Traditions like Gee’s Bend represent how Black communities and people survived and responded to that violence.