andrewwelsby

Rita Mae Pettway, “Housetop” – nine-block “Half-Log Cabin” variation, c. 1945, corduroy, 182.9 × 182.9 cm, Souls Grown Deep Foundation , Atlanta, © Estate of Martha Jane Pettway / ARS, NY and DACS, London 2022, © photo: Stephen Pitkin / Pitkin Studio.

The quilts of Gee’s Bend, produced by African American women in an isolated region of Alabama, are today celebrated for their vibrant aesthetic and historical significance. Yet their transformation from everyday artefacts into commodified artworks invites critical reflection. In this essay I explore how the quilts have been reframed and commodified for white audiences, particularly through aesthetic appropriation, market exploitation, and cultural fetishisation. These dynamics echo broader colonial patterns in which Black cultural production is reinterpreted, resold, and revalued through dominant white frameworks.

Aesthetic Reframing for the White Modernist Canon

The critical reception of the Gee’s Bend quilts in the early 2000s often centred on their resemblance to the aesthetics of European modernism. Exhibitions at major institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art presented them in terms associated with abstraction, minimalism, and the avant-garde (Beardsley, 2002). Quilts were compared to works by Paul Klee and Henri Matisse, positioning them within a Euro-American lineage of high art. This reframing detached the quilts from their historical and material contexts—namely the legacy of slavery, economic disenfranchisement, and African diasporic craft traditions.

As hooks (1992) argues, dominant cultural institutions often ‘colonise’ Black creativity by celebrating it only when it aligns with existing (white) aesthetic values. In the case of the Gee’s Bend quilts, value was attributed not to their cultural specificity, but to their perceived resonance with modernist visual codes. This reframing centres white taste while marginalising the distinct epistemologies that informed the quilts’ creation.

Market Appropriation

Following institutional recognition, the quilts entered the commercial art market and were reproduced in forms ranging from museum merchandise to licensed home décor. While the Gee’s Bend quilters gained some visibility and compensation, critics have raised concerns about inequitable financial returns and the centralisation of control in predominantly white hands (Cooks, 2011). The quilts—originally tools of survival crafted from worn garments and flour sacks—were now luxury commodities, with some selling for thousands of dollars.

This process illustrates what Fusco (1995) describes as the commodification of ethnic difference: the transformation of marginalised cultural forms into products for majority consumption. Within this logic, Black creative labour is extracted from its socio-political context and inserted into capitalist constructions of value. The risk, as hooks (1992) warns, is that this commodification becomes a mode of ‘eating the Other’—a form of cultural tourism that allows white audiences to consume Blackness without engaging in anti-racist conversation.

Romanticising Black Poverty and the Fetishisation of Resilience

The narrative surrounding Gee’s Bend often centres on themes of resilience and perseverance. Media representations frame the quilters as emblematic of human spirit and creativity in the face of poverty and marginalisation (Wallen, 2006). While such narratives may be intended to celebrate, they can also sentimentalise or aestheticise structural oppression.

This dynamic resonates with Hartman’s (2007) concept of the ‘afterlife of slavery’, in which the trauma and endurance of Black life are transformed into spectacles for moral and emotional consumption by others. In this sense, the Gee’s Bend quilts become objects through which white audiences can affirm their appreciation of ‘Black genius’, while remaining unaccountable to the enduring structures of racial inequality that gave rise to the quilts in the first place.

Displacement of Collective Cultural Memory

Quilting in Gee’s Bend has historically been a communal practice rooted in oral tradition, spiritual expression, and improvisation traced through ancestral, maternal lineages. However, institutional narratives often isolate individual artists—such as Mary Lee Bendolph or Annie Mae Young—and celebrate them as ‘folk geniuses’ or ‘outsider artists’ (Beardsley, 2002). While this may elevate individual visibility, it simultaneously risks erasing the collective nature of the quilting tradition.

This reflects what Moten (2003) refers to as the commodification of Black performativity: the reduction of complex, collaborative cultural expressions into consumable fragments. In sidelining the social and ritual contexts of the quilts, the art world imposes a Eurocentric model of authorship and genius. Moreover, it detaches the quilts from their roots in African diasporic aesthetics, which emphasise repetition, improvisation, and community—a heritage shared with forms such as jazz, ring shouts, and storytelling (Thompson, 1983).

To conclude, the commodification of the Gee’s Bend quilts reflects the ongoing colonial dynamics that shape how Black cultural production is valued, displayed, and consumed. While institutional and market recognition has brought deserved visibility to the women of Gee’s Bend, it has also risked aestheticising their labour, displacing their cultural memory, and perpetuating structures of racial capitalism. A decolonial approach must resist these extractive logics and instead foreground the quilts as acts of cultural resilience, community knowledge, and resistance. Only by centring these histories can we honour the radical beauty embedded within their fabric.

Refs

Beardsley, J. (2002) The Quilts of Gee’s Bend. Atlanta: Tinwood Books.

Cooks, B. (2011) ‘The Quilts of Gee’s Bend: Communal Work and Women’s Art’, Third Text, 25(1), pp. 85–96. https://doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2011.545622

Fusco, C. (1995) ‘The Other History of Intercultural Performance’, The Drama Review, 38(1), pp. 143–167.

Hartman, S. (2007) Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

hooks, b. (1992) Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press.

Moten, F. (2003) In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Thompson, R.F. (1983) Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy. New York: Vintage Books.

Wallen, L. (2006) ‘From Folk Art to Fine Art: The Quilts of Gee’s Bend’, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, (20), pp. 56–65. https://doi.org/10.1215/10757163-2006-20-56