When I was significantly younger, I went with my mother to an exhibition of Gee’s Bend quilts at the Mingei Museum in San Diego. This was possibly on the quilts' first major tour, which began in 2002.
Gee’s Bend is a community descended from former enslaved people in Alabama, many of whom became sharecroppers after emancipation and stayed on the land through various travails, some intentionally inflicted upon them. The community has traditionally been extremely rural and extremely poor: poor enough that when clothes wore out beyond their ability to be patched, the remaining useable fabric then got pieced into quilts. The quilts’ purpose was to keep people warm. They were not show-pieces made to display the evenness of one’s stitching or the amount of leisure time one had or the size of one’s work table. They did not, in other words, need to be beautiful. They were utilitarian objects; winters were cold, even in Alabama, and no one in that community could boast central heating.
On the other hand, if it is possible – and not significantly more difficult – to make a utilitarian object beautiful, it would almost be a sin not to. So they did. Compared to the European-American ideal of quilting, the Gee’s Bend quilts are not beautiful. They boast uneven stitches and mismatched fabrics (both color and texture) and irregular patterns, and they tend to come more trapezoidal than rectangular. It is not really surprising that these odd quilts were first embraced by the modern art community rather than the quilting one. Much like modern art, they are beautiful on their own terms, but that requires the viewer to shift the terms, and some viewers are reluctant.
At the time, my young self, scornfully at first, thought, “well, I could do that.” But it clicked for me upon seeing a quilt a widow had made out of her husband’s old worn overalls. It was a memorial as much as anything else; jeans, as you may know, are personal. The soft, quiet beauty of the piece was incredibly moving. And in that moment I felt an epiphany: “I could do that!” And ever since, I’ve dreamed of making a jeans quilt.
So I did. It’s currently pieced and about halfway quilted. It’s rectangular (I gave that much to convention, though I made it that way by messily splicing the trapezoid I initially created) but otherwise it’s very much inspired by Gee’s Bend. For starters, I am not a quilter, and it shows. But even beyond that, the sizes of my rectangles conform to the amount of useable fabric in the old jeans I gleaned from family members, and not to any predetermined pattern. The stitches are casual, careless; I rarely take one out for its lack of grace. There are various indelible stains; one, I found out later, is blood from a carpentry mishap. It aches with story. It’s beautiful. It’s absolutely beautiful.
I have been told that perfectionism is largely a white person’s affliction, and in my experience this is true. I grew up sleeping beneath the beautiful, regular, show-piece quilts crafted by my grandmothers, and have always known that I am far too impatient to make that kind of quilt work. So I never tried; I felt that quilting, as an art form, was closed to me. But it’s not. The quilters of Gee’s Bend give me permission to try, on my own terms, to make something new. In my struggle against the impulse to perfection I have been previously blessed by choral music, in those moments when you miss a note and your only option is to forget it and move on to the next one. There, you have no other choice. But quilting this way is a new experience, full of moments where I could go back but I choose not to. It’s beautiful even though it’s not perfect. It’s beautiful because it’s not perfect.
That, for me, is the lesson of Gee’s Bend. And it doesn’t just apply to quilts.
