text: To see these quilts on the walls of an elegant museum gave me some cognitive dissonance, because they reverberate with this story of scarcity few of us could overcome, and strength that most of us would be hard-pressed to find; it's in every stitch. This story is in many patchwork quilts, but it is especially poignant here. It's also a story of joy and creativity and the deep relations that have held this community together.
  Today, thankfully, many of the Gee's Bend quilters have benefited from the popularity of the quilts, though there have been some lawsuits regarding payments, intellectual property rights and licensing agreements. I was moved by the story of one woman who stopped quilting for 20 years because of illness and depression, overcome by a life harder than I can imagine. When the Gee's Bend quilts were "discovered" and began to sell and return some benefits to the women, her despondency also began to life, and she was able to stitch again.
  A book on display at the exhibition said that she had prayed all her life that her last years would be her best years. She felt that her prayers had been answered.
  Posted on July 06, 2008 in African-American artists, Art Quilts, Quilting-Traditional, Textile Anthropology and Culture, USA | Permalink
  Love the new banner! The Gee's Bend project raising so many subjects that relate to matters of slow cloth and women's reality - far beyond the quilts themselves.
  
  Our main objective right now isn’t to erase the differences between the richest and the poorest layers of the population. This is the goal for the future.
  Right now, we face two urgent issues: The first is to raise everyone’s standard of living above the poverty line, and the second is to oblige everyone to learn about mutual guarantee, the new world, the new economy, the new relationships between people, and the changes that nature is obliging us to make. A university that will teach these things must be built, and studying there must be obligatory, just as it’s obligatory for children to obtain a secondary school education.