About the Film

This one-hour high-definition film documents a group of internationally-acclaimed black quiltmakers from Gee's Bend, Alabama. Their work has been hailed by Michael Kimmelman of The New York Times as "some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced." The Quiltmakers of Gee's Bend explores the extraordinary lives, inspirations, and history of these artists, and also follows them on a poignant and sometimes very comical bus journey to see their quilts exhibited at The Milwaukee Art Museum.

The quiltmakers are all descended from slaves who worked a plantation owned by Mark Pettway, and located on the Alabama River. All slaves were given the slaver's surname, Pettway, and that surname is still ubiquitous in the black community. What is more, the people still inhabit the land their forefathers once worked. Over the decades, their economic situation has changed very little. In fact, for most of their lives, our main characters, women who are primarily in their 70s and 80s, have lived in indigence. After emancipation from slavery, the Gee's Bend community graduated to cotton-farming share-croppers, a system in which they could never quite get ahead of the proverbial economic curve. It depended on an arrangement called "advancing", in which white merchants would supply the tenant farmers with seed and other home necessities at the beginning of the season, for which they paid with exorbitant interest at the end of the season. The gamble very much depended on stable cotton prices.

By 1931, the price of cotton had fallen to 5 cents a pound, from 40 cents a pound in the early 1920s. Many people fell into debt, and then in 1932, the wife of a prominent recently-deceased merchant foreclosed on all his debtors, and sent men to carry away all their belongings--including farm animals and food. The Red Cross had to feed the people. President Franklin Roosevelt declared Gee's Bend the poorest community within the poorest county (Wilcox) in America. The federal government finally intervened. By presidential order, The Resettlement Administration was established in 1935, which subsequently became the Farm Security Administration. In 1937 the Administration purchased all the former Pettway plantation land. Then they granted low-interest loans to the Gee's Bend families to buy the land and build houses.

By helping make Gee's Bend families property owners, the government forever changed their lives. In the decades to come, although they never achieved any pecuniary wealth, the community was safe and independent. This proved particularly important during Civil Rights era, when many black people in the area were fired or kicked out of their homes for trying to register to vote.

There is only one road into Gee's Bend. And because of its geographical location, the area has remained culturally secluded from other communities. For more than 150 years, the women of Gee's Band have worked in near isolation, teaching their daughters to quilt, using any piece of material available--from feed sacks to old work clothes. Techniques and styles were left to develop with little outside influence. During times when self-expression was discouraged, religion, singing and the unique quilt patterns represented the only creative outlets. Religion, especially, has and continues to play a major role in their lives.

About twenty years ago, an art historian named William Arnett "discovered" these quiltmakers, and began introducing their work to prominent museum curators. Quilts that once kept families of sometimes 16 children warm inside drafty log slave cabins, now hang inside some of the world's greatest museums. Quilts that were once thought worthless, now sell for thousands of dollars. And what is more perhaps, this quilting coterie is being compared to the great artistic enclaves of the Italian Renaissance. A new sense of self-respect has evolved in this tightly-knit, family-oriented place. And what is most extraordinary, despite their many struggles, they are not bitter--always humbly praising God for helping them through the hard times. Wherever they, go, they leave behind a sort of inexplicable residual joy--as though they are unwitting ambassadors of goodwill, and examples to the world that the key to true happiness possibly does exist in positive human relationships, not material wealth.