HOUSE LEDGER · MM-INDEX-2025-OBJ-003
INAUGURAL ADMISSION · SEASON 01 (2025)

GEE’S BEND QUILTS

A living, intergenerational practice in Boykin, Alabama that turned necessity into abstraction and community into canon. This record covers the quilts and their makers as an artistic lineage and cultural archive. We keep it as evidence of authorship, impact, endurance, and record in women’s culture.

Women’s Culture Scope

Authorship. Impact. Endurance. Record.

Identifiers

Wikidata: Q7759116
House Ledger ID: MM-INDEX-2025-OBJ-003
Admission: Inaugural Class · Season 01 (2025)

Hand-pieced quilts in cotton, denim, wool, and corduroy, often from work clothes and mill ends, composed as bold blocks, strips, housetops, and concentric logics. Individual makers are named where documented. Family and community authorship remains visible where not.
- Place: Boykin, Alabama
- Timeframe: 1930s to present
- Makers: named quilters and families where documented; community authorship where not
- Techniques: hand piecing; improvisational composition; quilting and binding
- Materials: cotton; denim; corduroy; repurposed textiles
- Formats: bedcovers; wall-hung quilts; documented series
- Scope note: commercial reproductions are out of scope unless cited for reception
- 19th–20th centuries: Techniques and patterns transmitted through families.
- 1966: Freedom Quilting Bee organizes production and markets.
- 2002–present: National exhibitions and acquisitions establish standing.
- Ongoing: Scholarship and programs deepen the record.
Major museum exhibitions and accessions. Souls Grown Deep collections and research. USPS commemorative stamps in 2006. Continuing interviews and publications that attribute makers and contextualize place.
Souls Grown Deep histories and catalogues. Museum accession and exhibition pages. Records of the Freedom Quilting Bee. Stamp bulletins and reputable art-historical essays. Oral histories and interviews with named quilters.