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    A Gee's Bend Quilt by Mary L. Bennett

     
    Upper Level Galleries
    June 12, 2021 — October 03, 2021
    Viewpoints is a rotating series that highlights artwork from the Henry's collection, paired with commentary and insights from members of the University of Washington community.
    This iteration of Viewpoints features “Housetop”—nine-block variation (1975) by Mary L. Bennett (b. 1942), a quiltmaker from Gee’s Bend, Alabama. Since at least the second half of the nineteenth century, women from this small and geographically remote community of mostly slave decedents have made quilts using a range of available materials, including flour and fertilizer sacks, old work clothes, and factory remnants, with the practical purpose of keeping their families warm. The quilts, however, are much more than utilitarian objects, and the range of patterns and styles exemplifies ingenuity, creativity, and resourcefulness. The pattern variations are also markers of cultural continuity as the practice of quilting is passed down through generations, illustrating a rich history of resistance to and survival within the realities of economic and racial oppression. One of the most enduring patterns in Gee’s Bend is the “housetop,” which features blocks of fabric pieced in concentric formation around a central patch. In Bennett’s nine-block variation, she creates a dynamic composition that emphasizes her individual expression within a shared, collective history and quilt-making tradition.

    Members of the University of Washington community responding to Bennett’s quilt include Rachel Chapman, Associate Professor of Anthropology; Deirdre Raynor, Associate Professor of Social and Historical Studies; and Phillip Russell, English MFA Alumni.

    On view in complement to Bennett’s quilt are intaglio prints made by Gee’s Bend quilters that represent an evolution in the design, production, and distribution of their historic craft. These prints by Mary Lee Bendolph, Essie Pettway Bendolph, and Louisiana Bendolph illustrate the generational yet individual continuation of a creative lineage.

    Faculty Contributions

    Grandmother’s Dream Housetop, Nine Block, 173 Haiku Variation with Multiple Borders
    Rachel Chapman
    Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Washington, Seattle


    This quilt-poem is built from a series of 80 individual patches chronicling and connecting the paths of my responses, reflections, research, and reverence for the original quilt, Housetop—Nine Block Variation. The patches are pieced together, bordered, and then laid in a clockwise, inward-moving spiral leading back around toward the center touchstone, Mary L. Bennett herself. Mary’s Housetop—Nine Block Variation is floating dreamily toward the surface through her and the spirit, hands, memories, stories, lives, and afterlives of the Gee’s Bend community into the present. Its spirit quilt top is also dissolving downward with time to reveal Mary Bennett’s grandmother, Delia Bennett, whose work and presence are sampled throughout, embroidered in as an echo and honoring signature of her inspiration to her granddaughter, Mary, becoming a quilter. While the coil of the quilt starts in the top left corner and continues clockwise to the right and inward, there is no right or wrong way to read this quilt-poem. As with coded quilts made by liberation quilters during American chattel slavery, each viewer begins where they are, and will take away and decode exactly the pieces of the map they need for this leg of their own freedom journey.

    Listen to a reading of Grandmother’s Dream Housetop by writer Rachel Chapman with musical accompaniment by Paul Ciechanowski »

    Read the transcript »

    A soundtrack for Housetop 9 Block Variation:

     

    Quilting: The Visual Representation of the Black Struggle in America
    Deirdre Raynor
    Associate Professor; Executive Director, Office of Undergraduate Education, University of Washington, Tacoma


    Mary L. Bennett is part of a long tradition of Black women from slavery to the present who design quilts representative of the lived experiences of Blacks in the United States, the profound beauty found in Black art, and the socio-political purpose of Black art. Quilts developed during slavery chronicle the impact of American slavery on Black people and the journey to freedom using intricate patterns of the North Star, Jacob’s Ladder, The Underground Railroad, Flying Geese, and other symbols of Blacks escaping bondage. In the late nineteenth century Harriet Powers’s quilts Bible Quilt and Sermon in Patchwork pay homage to the Black sermon. In the 1930s, Ruth Clement Bond’s Black Power Quilt foregrounds the iconic symbol of a Black fist that recurs in art. During the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which called for racial justice centering contemporary Black culture and experience, the Freedom Quilting Bee Collective formed. Black quilters continue to foreground activism and community building, as found in the recent 56 panels in the AIDS Memorial Quilt or Melissa Blount’s Black Lives Matter Quilt focusing on the lives of Black girls and women.

    Bennet’s Housetop illustrates the simplicity of the houses of Black sharecroppers. The rhythm and order found in Housetop is representative of the order Black people painstakingly try to achieve despite the chaos surrounding Black life in the United States as a result of systemic racism. Housetop provides a visual representation of the Black self-determination and cultural pride associated with Black American life and the fight for freedom.


    Stitching Through Time
    Phillip Russell
    Graduate of the University of Washington Creative Writing MFA


    Black folks in this country know that the preservation of our histories has never been a given. In fact, they have been actively destroyed. Much like quilts, we stitch together a patchwork of markers, records, stories, and artifacts to reveal and preserve our families’ lives.

    Mary L. Bennett’s work exemplifies the power of quilting’s ability to save and uncover histories that are often cast to the wayside and, in turn, adds to a conversation generations in the making.

    The nine sections of Bennett’s quilt start with a central solid cloth. Then Bennett stitches together cotton, denim, and other fabric scraps to complete the Housetop pattern. This pattern echoes the ways in which familial histories are compounded, layered, and overlapping and speaks to how the past interweaves with and resurfaces in the present.

    In the wake of our fragmented histories, a key form of resistance and resilience can be found through the reconstruction of what remains. Black folks have done and continue to do the work of filling in the gaps in our histories by imagining new possibilities, and reframing, reseeing, and restitching what does exist around us to see the world anew. Through the creation of these quilts, Bennett does more than preserve the histories that could be found around her, she stitches together a new story.

    As your eyes wander the quilt, notice the stains, marks, and blemishes scattered throughout. They’re beautiful, aren’t they? These quilts are living objects. Mediations on what has, is, and will, sustain our lives.

    CREDITS

    This iteration of Viewpoints is organized in collaboration with graduate assistants Giordano Conticelli and Kira Sue. The exhibition is made possible through a generous gift of art from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation and William L. True.