For generations, the women of Gee’s Bend, Alabama—a small Black community on the Alabama River—have produced remarkable quantities of distinctive, abstract-patterned quilts of extraordinary inventiveness. They represent only a fraction of African American quilts made in America, but they are in a class by themselves. Geographical and social isolation created an unusual degree of cultural coherence in Gee’s Bend: three and four generations of quilters can be identified in the same families, passing down a flair for bold and improvisational geometries that transform salvaged work cloths and dresses, feed sacks, and fabric remnants into masterful designs.  Continue Reading The Quilts of Gees Bend