A question of quilts.
The easy, fluid beauty and the compositional poise of the quilts currently on display at the Museum of International Folk Art (MOIFA) tear into pat academic assertions about the development of art, while simultaneously emphasizing the monstrous appetite of the dominant culture.***image1***
The glossy version of the history of modern painting credits, for example, European intellectuals and cubist icons like Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso for instigating the bridge from subject-intensive painting toward the conceptualizing of the painted surface and the focus on abstraction.
This is a transition that eventually led to paint for its own sake, to beauty in pure composition rather than from the celebration of object, subject or, sometimes, even expertise. Piet Mondrian, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell-these are a few of the names that swell the 20th century and grandfather much of contemporary aestheticism and design. From them, through pop and minimalism, we've evolved to a position of post-modernity, of self-indulgent, ironic use of icons and symbols that are meant to emulate meaning and trigger appreciation among those in the know.
Comprehensive histories obviously will tell more complex stories about where we've arrived and how. Some histories will note a debt owed as much to pottery, graphics, architecture and mosaic artists as to the early lions of 20th century modern painting. A few will offer engaging comparisons between the modern and the primitive, between the intellectual assertions and the vernacular crafts of similar eras. A very few will suggest that a group of impoverished women, especially black women, might have spent the century innovating compositions as keen as those offered by the white, wine-swilling, skirt-chasing darlings of art history.
But quilters prove otherwise. In particular, the now-famous quilters of Gee's Bend, Ala.-made famous by the 2002 Houston Museum of Fine Arts exhibition
The Quilts of Gee's Bend
-have demonstrated a legacy of quilts that ***image2***has been distilling ancient African motifs and sensibilities into thoroughly contemporary compositions for more than a century now.
Gee's Bend Quilts and Beyond
, at MOIFA, focuses on the family and friends of quilter Mary Lee Bendolph. Bendolph's daughter, Essie B Pettway shows in her 1973 "Two-Sided Quilt" as sophisticated an arrangement of form, pattern and color-with, to be art-speaky about it, explorations of the surface plane and bold intrusions into the work's perimeter while retaining a formalist purity-as any celebrated painter of the past 100 years. A c.1955 quilt by Bendolph's mother, Aolar Mosely, presages current painting trends with its disjointed and fractured landscapes, its intuitive deconstruction of narrative elements in favor of practical beauty and its instinctive adherence to a kind of personal, economical rigor.
Rather than being constructed from relative financial and intellectual privilege, these works were created from abject poverty. As Bendolph says in a video interview in the exhibition, "We lived a hard life. We lived a starvation life."
Now that there is fame and regular income for the Gee's Bend quilters, life is curiously less hard. Bendolph explains how quickly the charm of new fabric faded, recalling how it was once a treat to work with brand new material. Regarding her "Work-Clothes Quilt" of salvaged denim and cotton, she says, "I see the value of the leftover cloth. Old clothes have the spirit and I can't leave the spirit out." Bendolph's talk of spirit, and her aesthetic kinship with artists of entirely different circumstance, recall Oliver Sach's recent ruminations on the geometry of the human mind, most often experienced through migraines.
Certain patterns, alleges Sachs, "are seen not only in Islamic art, but in classical and medieval motifs, in Zapotec architecture, in the bark paintings of Aboriginal artists in Australia, in Acoma pottery, in Swazi basketry-in virtually every culture. There seems to have been, throughout human history, a need to externalize."
Certainly the idea that Gee's Bend quilts are, effectively, on equal terms with masterpieces of modern art has been gobbled up by essayists, curators and collectors. One portion of the MOIFA exhibition hosts color aquatint etchings made by Bendolph et al, at Paulson Press in Berkley, Calif. The women worked with the printers there to transfer small quilt maquettes onto paper and then to finish the prints by handworking the ink. The works are magnificent; absorbing, effusing, forever suggestive. But, like some of the more recent quilts coming out of Gee's Bend, they smell less like old jeans and recycled curtains and more like art with a capital "A."
There's nothing untoward going on. No one is trying to sell these women's souls or anything. But when the culture at-large latches on to something, it can end up being adored to a fault. When a quilter wakes up one morning and doesn't make a quilt from need, or from camaraderie or even from whimsy, but because the next book, museum exhibition, collector, etc., demands it, spirit can find itself fighting for its life.
