Dis/Cover/ing the Quilts of Gee's Bend, Alabama

Abstract

The phenomenally popular US exhibitions of quilts from the rural African-American community of Gee's Bend, Alabama, are analyzed here with a view to cultural politics, including issues of race, class and the stakes entailed in aesthetic taxonomy and description. The exhibition organizers, the catalog authors and enthusiastic critics generally classified the quilt makers' remarkable textiles not as “mere” craft but as art. The present essay, while concurring in that high opinion of the objects in question, argues instead for the prospective merits—both for the quilt makers themselves and for the “art world”—of reclaiming their status as craft production.

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