By 
Chadd Scott is an Arts & Travel Writer for Forbes.com and Founder of SeeGreatArt.com.
It’s a story of American history. African American history. Women’s history. Civil rights history. Art history.
It’s a story of capture and enslavement. Resilience and survival. Poverty and Jim Crow. Entrepreneurship, and, ultimately, worldwide fame.
For one day a year, the public is welcome to experience it all in person.
The airing of quilts in Gee’s Bend, Alabama dates back to the 19th century when enslaved people worked a cotton plantation here; 2023 marks only the second time in which the community of quilters there has invited visitors to see the tradition up close.
“Back in the day when folks were living in uninsulated homes–shacks–quilts were the method of keeping you warm at night, but in the in the spring and the summer, you’d put them up, put them in your chest of drawers,” Kim Kelly, a volunteer Executive Consultant for the Freedom Quilting Bee Legacy, told Forbes.com. “You’d have to bring them out around October to air them out to prepare them for the winter. You’d hang them on the line. You’d beat then out. Air them out so that they could be fresh to put on beds for the coming winter. That’s literally the term, airing of the quilts.”
Guests can join the Gee’s Bend (Boykin, AL) community on Saturday, October 7, from 9 AM to 5 PM in this now annual celebration of its generations-old quilt making tradition, which for 2023 also features quilt displays and sales, workshops, guided tours, food, music, and more.
“At this festival, you’ll get introduced to the quilters and to the lifestyle of Gee’s Bend,” Claudia Pettway Charley, Gee’s Bend Quiltmaker, said. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get hands-on experience, from workshops to storytelling, and learn what our community is really like. We have a whole different language here, and this is your chance to learn it.”
Known for their bold, improvisational designs and use of reused fabrics, Gee’s Bend quilts are among the most celebrated works of art in the world. If they were oil on canvas instead of scrap shirts and jeans, you would swear the abstract compositions came from Paul Klee or Pete Mondrian. Quilts from this tiny community are now in the permanent collection of over 30 leading art museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.
“There is great interest to the general public, collectors, gallerists to experience the community and to experience these artists,” Kelly said. “What was once only a community happening, we wanted to share it with the world.”
Kelly’s grandmother, who lived in nearby Catherine was a quilter, “all our grandmothers were quilters,” he’s quick to remind.
Over 1,000 people made the trip to Wilcox County, 75 miles west of Montgomery, in 2022 for the inaugural event. They followed in the footsteps of thousands more who for years have been traveling there looking for a way to meet and engage with the artists, the quilters. Prior to the “Gee’s Bend Airing of the Quilts Festival,” no formal opportunity existed to do so.
“This is an art form that’s appreciated, and you get to be one-on-one with these women whose work is in museums; it’s an amazing experience and they want to show it, show what they know, what they do,” Kelly said. “This is generations old, hundreds of years of textile art that has influenced American culture and American art and to experience it right here where it all began, it’s a powerful thing.”
The Freedom Quilting Bee Legacy
The Freedom Quilting Bee Legacy museum (4295 County Road 29, Alberta, AL 36720) debuted last October along with the festival. It occupies a former quilting manufacturing plant opened by the Freedom Quilting Bee co-op in 1966 to produce stock, hand-crafted quilts in volume for large retailers like Bloomingdale’s and Sears and Roebuck.
“What this building represented in this community was women coming out of the sharecropping fields and having a nine-to-five place to go to work, gaining an income that they had never anticipated,” Kelly explained. “They were able to buy washing machines, buy refrigerators, because they worked in a manufacturing operation. They were able to send their kids to college.”
The plant featured a daycare center.
“When we think about the Civil Rights Movement and that period of time, we think about terror,” Kelly said. “This Freedom Quilting Bee was an inspirational story, 150 women working two shifts at the height of this operation. We want to share that in this little enclave of the Black Belt, Black women made a business, some of them didn’t have more than a fifth-grade education, but they had a co-op of women, manufacturing quilts, for some of the largest retailers in America.”
The Freedom Quilting Bee disbanded in 2012. When the United States signed onto the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994–NAFTA–textile jobs were sent out of the country; foreign machines could produce items more cheaply than American labor.
The Freedom Quilting Bee Legacy, with exhibitions curated by the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, is open year-round ensuring the heroic, historic, innovative, and artistic odds-beating work of the women of the original Freedom Quilting Bee isn’t lost to history.
During the Festival, the Freedom Quilting Bee Legacy will be used for panel discussions on community involvement during the Civil Rights Movement. Year one of the event revealed that visitors weren’t only interested in the items produced in Gee’s Bend, but the history produced there as well.
Gee’s Bend Ferry Terminal/Welcome Center
This year’s edition of the festival will also offer access to the Gee’s Bend Ferry Terminal. Gee’s Bend, as the name implies, sits at a bend in the Alabama River. To get from Gee’s Bend to the county seat of Camden, by car, takes 40 minutes even today on paved roads. In the times of dirt roads and uncommon car ownership among the area’s poor residents, the ferry provided essential access to Camden to pay bills, sell produce, shop.
And vote.
Martin Luther King, Jr. came to the area during the voting rights drive–Selma’s 45 miles from here–encouraging the Black population to go to Camden to learn to vote. The ferry was suddenly taken out of commission without official explanation as a result of these efforts, restricting access to the polls located there.
It remained out of service until the 2000s.
The intersection of Civil Rights history and art history present in Gee’s Bend is reflected through the event’s sponsors which include the Southern Poverty Law Center, the nation’s leading civil rights legal advocacy organization based in nearby Montgomery, and Hauser & Wirth, one of the world’s most prominent art galleries, based in faraway Manhattan.
The Gee’s Bend Ferry Terminal/Welcome Center (12021 County Road 29, Boykin, AL 36723) will host the Festival’s grounds, quilt making workshops, guided tours of the Gee’s Bend Heritage Trail, exhibitions, music and food vendors.
And ferry rides.
Living History
Wilcox County is the smallest county in Alabama. It is the most impoverished county in Alabama. Alberta and Gee’s Bend are the most impoverished communities there. It’s been that way for 100 years.
Quilting there has always been less a way to make money–although money has been made–more a way of life.
“Quilts are made by these women as art, but they’re also still made for the purpose of giving them as gifts to your children, or getting married, giving them to newborn babies, it’s just a part of the culture,” Kelly explains. “One of the women, an amazing fourth generation quilter, Claudia Charley, she’s quoted as having said, ‘we just can’t stop quilting.’ It’s what they do. It’s what they know. It’s an expression of love. It’s an expression of the belief in their family and their culture. It’s kind of like farming. Why do farmers continue to farm? It’s what they know.”
Quilts like the ones you can view and are for sale during the “Gee’s Bend Airing of the Quilts Festival” can be appreciated in museums and galleries, seeing them in person, however, on the line where they were made, meeting the artists, purchasing directly from them, elevates an exercise in art appreciation or a retail opportunity into living history, not merely observing or acquiring, but participating.
