Anyone who thought abstract art was a club of white, male “lone geniuses” got an unexpected wake-up call in 2002, when quilts from the Alabama hamlet of Gee’s Bend first toured US museums. The quilts’ luscious hues, scissored shapes and improvised visual rhythms garnered comparisons to Paul Klee and Henri Matisse. Their creators were an intergenerational community of African American women who, to this day, work in the tiny conurbation that was once a slave-owner’s plantation.
For Legacy Russell, an American feminist theorist and curator, the quilters’ impact has only grown in the two decades since that stunning museum tour. The New Bend, the travelling exhibition she has curated, explores the legacy of the Gee’s Bend quilters and the artists still working in their lineage, bringing together a 13-strong lineup of radical textile artists.
