Gee's Bend Quilts, and Beyond:
Louisiana Bendolph, Mary Lee Bendolph, Thornton Dial and Lonnie Holley

The Artists

Group Portrait:
Lonnie Holley, Lousianna P. Bendolph, Thornton Dial and Mary Lee Bendolph photographed at Dial Metal Patterns, Bessemer, Alabama.
July 18, 2006. Photo:Matt Arnett.



As a child, Lousianna P. Bendolph would play under the quilts while her mother, Rita Mae, her great-grandmother, Annie E. Pettway, and other aunts and relatives would quilt. She recalls, "I remember doing that when I was six or seven years old, but I'm sure we did it earlier that that. We would sit under the quilt and I would watch the needle going in and out of the fabric. I loved watching and playing under the quilts." Now, when Louisiana pieces or quilts, it is not uncommon to find her daughter, Alleeanna, or her grand-daughter Tausyanna, sitting nearby, watching and drawing their own quilt designs.

Louisiana usually designs quilts in one of two ways. Either she has a design in mind and then gets the cloth she needs to help her realize that design, or she has a cloth and comes up with a design to use the cloth. In many cases, she draws the design out before starting to piece the quilt.

Most of Mary Lee's quilts are created from fabric that began life as clothing. "The materials I use is mostly old material. People loved their pants or dresses, and they have worn out or don't fit anymore. I make quilts out of it because I hate throwing away things, because somebody can use things that people throw away. People are so wasteful now. It hurts me to see people waste up things. Everything you throw away, it can be used and make something beautiful out of it… Old clothes have spirit in them. They also have love. When I make a quilt, that's what I want it to have too, the love and the spirit of the people who wore it."
- Mary Lee Bendolph

In 2001, two self-taught Alabama artists, longtime friends Lonnie Holley and Thornton Dial, visited Gee's Bend with a group of arts professionals who were traveling in the area. Mary Lee Bendolph quickly developed a friendship with them.

Dial and Holley were both raised by women and have made women and women's roles in African American life a central theme of their art. Both men use found objects and found materials to create assemblage sculpture and painting-sculpture hybrids. Holley (b. 1950), from Birmingham, is one of the foremost practitioners of African American "yard art," having built a multi-acre outdoor art environment devoted to a range of philosophical issues and social concerns. Dial (b. 1928), from industrial Bessemer (where he worked in a factory as a box car builder), is one of the most widely known African American vernacular artists living and working today. He has likewise used the grassroots tradition of the African American "yard show" - to create cultural epics.


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