CREATIVITY NEEDS NO WEALTH




One of my favorite places to go is the DeYoung Museum. I'm fortunate to live close by so I try to go there fairly often. Besides their permanent collections, they have a good variety of "traveling" exhibits. Currently the Quilts of Gees Bend are on display.....



WOW.......

This is an incredible exhibit of the creative minds of some of this country's poorest people. The women on Gees Bend, Alabama are all descendants of the slaves who worked the cotton plantations. After the civil war, these "freed slaves" stayed and became tenant farmers in this all black community...

They worked hard doing physical labor all day in the fields, took care of their families and children and started making quilts as a way to keep warm. They had no money, no extra resourses so their quilts were made from the salvagable pieces of fabric from their work clothes, dresses sheets etc. Nothing went to waste. The batting came from the empty fertilizer bags (which they bleached and boiled) along with the lint from the cotton gins.

These people had no outlets, no opportunity for education, yet created a wonderful artistic environment of banding together and creating quilts. They used no patterns, simply improvised and did what they envisioned and felt along the way. True art, almost like jazz music, where there seems to be a pattern and wham, another thought comes at you just when you don't expect it...True art, made from the hearts and souls who had no other way to express their emotions....

At the DeYoung exhibit, there is a 20 minute film highlighing the women of Gees Bend. Every one of them expresses their love of quilting, how poor they were but how happy they were/are.

In 2003 the surviving quilters started a collective and the quilts are now marketed and for sale.