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. 

Their quilts are both vessels of individual and community memory and assertions of personal identity. Although the women often quilted together, they pieced their tops for the most part on their own and seemingly in a spirit of friendly competition, taking pride in modifying familiar patterns in unexpected ways.