African American Quilters, Preservers, and their Stories. Already intrigued by the culture and arts of the Deep South and struck by the beautiful geometries and colors, he decided to track down the quilts. What he found was a generations-old quilting tradition of unique and striking style. He immediately purchased a selection of the quilts from the surprised but pleased quilters and brought them back north to document. Together with his son, Arnett pitched the idea for an exhibition to curators John Beardsley and Jane Livingston, who had pioneered the exhibition of African-American art Black Folk Art in America 1930-1980.4 In partnership with financial backing from Jane Fonda, planning for the exhibition began. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, agreed to host the first exhibition with New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art signing on to be the second venue, and in September 2002, it opened to the Texan public. When the show came to New York, it really hit its stride, blossoming and exploding with rave reviews. A noted New York Times art critic, Michael Kimmelman called it “the database d liveliest exhibition of the New York art season.”4 Within days, many museums across the country wanted to host the exhibition, and nine more venues were secured—a coup for any curator. With such wide acclaim, the exhibition sent ripples throughout the art world, challenging the hitherto held exclusion of quilts from high art.
Sophisticated Design & Abstract Canvases
Although previously considered folk art, the strategically staged quilts in the Gee's Bend exhibition strove to oppose such classification. The Whitney, specifically, employed three approaches to challenge such assumptions. First, the exhibition emphasized the quilts' sophisticated design. Hung with few contextual notes or stories, the quilts were widely spaced on the walls and hung like canvases, allowing the composition and design of each quilt to be viewed in the same way as an abstract painting. Michael J Prokopow, a critic of the exhibition, stated: "In many ways the explanatory texts were tangential, if not at times intrusive. "In the context of other high art, its abstract geometries and bold syncopated colours lik compared to paintings by Matisse and Klee." NPR compared the improvisation to that of powerful and inventive abstract painters of the 20th century, and curator Livingston agreed in the exhibition catalogue, commenting that the stripes and geometries clearly paralleled famous minimalists Noland and Stella, among others. Staged as high art, the viewer was encouraged to consider the quilts to reside in such a class.