The Quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend (20th Century-Now) (EMPIRE LINES x Royal Academy)

Raina Lampkins-Felder, Curator at the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, weaves together the histories of Black artists who stayed in Southern America during the Great Migration, like the Quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend.

Black artists based in the American South have always forged unique artistic practices - as multigenerational as multimedia in form. Using found and ‘reclaimed’ materials, these sculptures, paintings, drawings, and quilts speak to their makers’ individual ingenuity - and the enslavement, Jim Crow-era segregation, and institutionalised racism which continues to colour America’s past and present.

Geographically isolated, but well-connected within communities, artists like Thornton Dial, Estelle Witherspoon, and the Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers have challenged conventions about the education and display of art - perhaps why they’ve been overlooked in the canons of art history. Now, though, they are often placed in conversation with abstract expressionism, for their use of bold colours and geometric patterns, which combine African American textile traditions and modernist art and design.

As a landmark exhibition opens in London, ‘activist curator’ Raina Lampkins-Felder shares why so many artists stayed on their lands, and why last names like Lockett, Bendolph, and Pettway crop up time and again. We travel from plantations and kitchen tables, to yard shows, typically Southern sculpture parks, where artists self-represent and directly communicate with their publics. We hear about the women at the fore of the first Black-owned businesses in the US, the Freedom Quilting Bee and local churches working with the Civil Rights Movement and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and how contemporary housetop textiles continue to ‘bend and break’ traditions today.

Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers: Black Artists from the American South runs at the Royal Academy in London until 18 June 2023.

WITH: Raina Lampkins-Felder, Curator at the Souls Grown Deep Foundation. She is the curator of Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers: Black Artists from the American South.

ART: Quilts by the Quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend.

IMAGE: Installation View.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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