: Connoisseurs have long known that art is often born of adversity,
and many biographies have been written on the rough lives of
famous painters. But their hardships seem tame compared to the
challenges faced by the women quilt makers of the rural
agricultural community of Gee's Bend, Ala., during the Twentieth
Century.
Yet the 65 quilts on display in the traveling exhibition "The
Quilts of Gee's Bend," currently at the Cleveland Museum of Art
through September 12, are examples of a pure aesthetic form,
practiced by women who worked hard as field hands or domestic
workers in their nonquilting hours. Cleveland is the sixth stop
on a three-year tour, which began at the organizing institution,
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and has been extended to 11
museums due to fervent popular interest in the exhibition.
When the exhibition opened at the Whitney in New York City in
2002, art critic Michael Kimmelman, writing in The New York
Times, called the quilts "some of the most miraculous works
of modern art America has produced." The Whitney's interest in
the quilts - often made from utilitarian fabrics, such as sheets
or work clothes - stemmed from their very painterly use of color
and design.
