In
May 2012 a new exhibition of quilts from Gee�s Bend, Alabama
will open in Nashville. William Arnett, with his companies
that all have �Tinwood� in their names, has won recognition
as art for patchwork from this African American hamlet.
But there has been criticism. A remark, made in an interview
on Alabama Public Television in 2005, when museum-goers
were tremendously excited by these gorgeous textiles,
indicates part of the problem. Bill Arnett said, �The
people, their ideals, the culture itself, and the quilts
have not changed a great deal in the past 150 years.�
In
the 1960s and 1970s Gee�s Bend was known for the Freedom
Quilting Bee, a cooperative that emerged from the Civil
Rights Movement. At the end of 2008 at the Philadelphia
Museum of Art, in front of a large audience, Bill Arnett
was asked about the relationship between the work from
Gee�s Bend that he bought and was showing and the patchwork
that the Bee had produced. I heard him bellow, �The best
thing the Freedom Quilting Bee ever did for Gee�s Bend
was fail.�
I
knew this was wrong because in 1968 as a civil rights
worker I lived in the Bend (officially, Boykin). In 2009,
I made a return visit to find out about what the Arnetts
had done there. After talking to those involved with the
Bee long ago, interviewing current residents, and doing
research on Gee�s Bend�s past, the motives for Bill Arnett�s
attitude toward the Quilting Bee and the Bend became clear
to me. The Arnetts are not the community�s benefactors,
though the place and the quilts have become famous (again)
through them. To understand what happened there since
Bill Arnett came, it is important to examine, in the context
of its experience after slavery, the history of Gee�s
Bend and its environs with an eye for the ramifications
of a conflict between versions of the American Dream.
What has happened there shows the hollowness of the Dream
for many Americans.� Individual effort, so fundamental
to the ideal, is useless when it comes up against powerful
people whose version of the American success myth is domination
on the basis of unmodulated self-interest.
Back
in 1968 I first became aware of Nettie Young, the co-manager
at the Freedom Quilting Bee, when I heard someone ask
her if the last landowner her family rented from, had
been mean. Her reply: �Sometimes. You know if blacks was
over whites instead of how it was, we be as bad.� (It
took me about thirty years to recognize how wise she was:
any group, depending on circumstances, can be a victim
or a victimizer.) Nettie�s life shows something that is
not a surprise, especially now that questions are being
raised about how the bottom 99% of the American population
fares. It illustrates how even an American with spectacular
personal gifts may not find it possible to sustain the
reasonable relationship between work and fair compensation
that is the basis of even a modest version of the vaunted
Dream.
Her
experience - and that of her family - contrasts with the
enterprising zealotry of the Arnetts, who have used the
art produced by poor rural blacks as a basis for the family
business, a career that it almost seems Matt Arnett, Bill�s
third eldest son, was preparing for when he majored in
African American Studies at Emory University. It is through
profiting from their sponsorship of rural black outsider
artists like the quilters of Gee�s Bend that the Arnetts
have pursued a version of the American Dream that centers
on money, power, and the willingness to manipulate others.
One
technique was sentimental capitalism, an ostentatious
show of affection for people they regarded as commodities.
Lovett Bennett was only one of the people from the Bend
in 2009 that said, �They treat us like family.� The Arnetts
understood that sentiment for the hamlet�s people and
their history would appeal to the public even as they
distorted and fabricated the identity of both. They endowed
the local people with the qualities of simplicity, self-abnegating
humility, relentless good nature, unreflective religiosity,
timeless values and habits, and a penchant for bursting
into gospel songs, giving them a dubious �authenticity�
that makes them folk characters,
When
I lived in the Bend there were high hopes that things
were changing for the better in large part because of
the Freedom Quilting Bee. There was high excitement about
communal self-help. For me, the decent living conditions
alone made the community seem safe and attractive, especially
in contrast to the state and state of mind of the tenant
farmers in the rest of Wilcox County. Crammed into flimsy,
unpainted shacks, often with cotton growing right up to
their doors, those tenants often were not even allowed
to plant a garden - sometimes not even one tomato plant
- on the owner�s land.
The
Benders traversed dirt roads on foot or in mule-driven
wagons. But, in contrast, they owned their neat little
four - or five- room houses and the land they tilled.
They had held title to their land for over two decades,
and though poor by the standard of annual income, consumer
goods, and modern amenities, they appeared comfortable
and healthy. The older adults told us about their own
past as tenants: brutalizing work from which they often
earned nothing; cold, drafty log-and-mortar cabins and
pine board shacks that were no better; inadequate clothing;
pellagra (a niacin deficiency disease); and schools that
were not publicly-provided and met only when there was
no field work (with attendance only when students had
adequate shoes and clothes).
After
lifetimes, separately and together, of sharecropping and
tenancy in adjacent Rehobeth, Nettie and Clint Young bought
a house and farm in Gee�s Bend in 1955, improving their
lot immeasurably. Clint had to leave for months at a time,
taking jobs for the money they needed to buy the property
while Nettie and the children did the farm work. By 1965
Nettie somehow found time to be an activist for voting
rights and to be jailed for it in Camden, the county seat.
In 1966 when the Quilting Bee got underway, she became,
with almost no formal education, its modestly paid co-manager.
About her sharecropper childhood, she told me, �There
was sixteen head of chillen in our two-room shack - we
have bunk beds all around the walls. We all work in the
fields, and sometimes we be hungry. A hard life, but our
mama and daddy was good to us.�
Susan
Youngblood Ashmore�s Carry It On, The War on Poverty
and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama (2008)
opens with a critique of the 2006 Gee�s Bend quilt
show at the Atlanta Museum of Art, targeting its failure
to explain what followed Reconstruction in the South:
�Issues of power, dominance, and politics were
hidden. The curators assumed that the audience naturally
carried enough knowledge about . . . tenant farming and
sharecropping.� In the Bend, like elsewhere, the plantation
owners got a work force that was nearly without cost,
and the farm workers became a caste based on race that
had working conditions hardly better than before Emancipation.
In Bob Adelman�s Down
home, Camden, Alabama
(1972), an African American interviewee from Camden says
that blacks were �un-free slaves before the Civil War
and free slaves after.�
Millions
of Southern blacks had already migrated North when tenancy
ended in the early 1970s, but it was over sooner in Gee�s
Bend. The plantation, owned from 1845 to 1895 by white
Pettways, had absentee owners in 1932 when the price of
cotton dropped. Unable to pay their debts, the Benders
had all of their property seized and nearly starved. In
1935 the federal government bought the land, creating
an agricultural cooperative and helping residents to build
what continue to be called� �project� (or �Roosevelt�)
houses. Congress ended Gee�s Bend Farms in 1945, and the
Farm Security Administration (FSA) began to sell the land
cheaply, with low interest rates, to those with roots
there. The people were glad to be landowners, but one
hundred acres is too small for truly profitable cotton
farming.
Olive
Stone, a white anthropologist who lived in Gee�s Bend
in the early forties and in 1961, prepared notes for a
book she never wrote (archived at the University of North
Carolina, Chapel Hill). About being tenants, a man told
her, �We done sucked some hard bones till the Project
started.� Writing of this period in 1932, Stone makes
a judgment: �They could not lick the system of exorbitant
interest rates and profits,� and so �when they were cleaned
out completely . . . it was as much of a relief to have
a halt called to the system of secret bookkeeping and
exploitation as it was a calamity.�
The
Arnetts (and their publicist) until recently have been
reluctant to mention the New Deal transformations that
occurred in the 1930s and 40s, probably because these
connected the Bend to the larger world. These are
noted in their catalogs, where the Arnetts give, in addition
to images of quilts, much accurate information, along
with many untruths and considerable nonsense. (Often the
nonsense is, in my view, in the art criticism, which I
will not examine, but the untruths can be about the Bend�s
history, some of which I will note).
The
�facts� on the Internet, many from newspaper articles,
reviews of shows, and even advertisements for products
related to the quilts are far more problematic. After
Bill put his third eldest son Matt at the helm of the
Gee�s Bend project, the Internet accounts became closer
to honest, but even now, if one knows enough, it is impossible
to read the new Wikipedia entry without seeing the distortions
of the Arnett vantage point, e.g., the insistence, against
the facts, that many residents �now have real incomes
for the first time.�
Bill
Arnett�s versions of the Gee�s Bend fable focus on changelessness
and unity. In his interview, Bill said, �For the most
part . . . people stay in one place, and they marry within
the community.� Painting all of its people as descendants
of slaves on the plantation, he gave life in the Bend
organic coherence. This narrative became the Arnetts�
�brand,� the image of purity that prompted a white-owned
corporation to put the name �Gee�s Bend� on their water,
bottled across the river in the county seat, Camden.
Paul
Arnett is executive editor of Tinwood Books. In The
Quilts of Gee�s Bend, in an essay Bill and Paul wrote
together, they describe the hamlet as a place that �still
is, amazingly, an isolated black community with little
influence from Western Art traditions.� Because the river
surrounds the Bend on three sides, it was hard to reach,
but the Arnetts overstate the case for remoteness. Before
the 1970s when automobiles became common, the Benders
were relatively isolated, but they were never totally
cut off. There was always some contact with others and
with Western art (conventions trickle down into popular
iconography.) The women got their ideas for quilts from
the marriage of disparate conventions intrinsic to all
art.
After
slavery ended, some people from the plantation earned
money off-season working on the roads or in white homes.
They brought back the magazine and newspaper pages they
used as insulation, and these may have influenced their
sense of design. And from early on some residents came
and left. The Census data from 1860 and 1870 shows this
two-way flow, as do stories in the catalogs and other
accounts. One instances among a great many: Nettie�s father,
much older than her mother, was sold as a slave to the
owners of Gee�s Bend as a child, but after Emancipation
moved to the Young plantation nearby to be a sharecropper.
Gee�s
Bend Farms, the New Deal agricultural cooperative, was
the catalyst for a 1937 article in the New York Times.
The co-op had a sizable staff, health workers and teachers,
who may have had an impact on the quilters� sensibility.
In the sixties, long after the Benders were small landowners
and the Bee was founded, outsiders came to live in the
Bend. Its hired professional manager, a white art student,
left the position but stayed on with her own family for
seventeen years. VISTA workers came in numbers, and one
famous artist (Lee Krasner). When progeny moved to cities,
visits became routine. In the seventies Benders drove
to jobs in textile factories, and that experience with
fabrics must have again stretched their visual imaginations.
The
remoteness of home may have given them a sense of safety
from white predation that threatened most African Americans
during the Jim Crow years, and their relative isolation
may have encouraged them to enjoy themselves and one another
when they could. Stone, the anthropologist, says, �It
would be difficult to imagine a more thoroughly relaxed
group of people than the heads of households gathered
around the community store on a Saturday afternoon, after
knocking off work in the fields and getting into clean
overalls . . . lounging and joshing.� The women had some
fun too. A resident told me, �In the old days the women
go �round to each other�s houses at night in the fall
after picking cotton, to do the quilting part. We didn�t
have no telephones, so there was joy in being together.�
The
Benders could enjoy social relations only when they were
not brutalized by their work. Isabel Wilkerson, in The
Warmth of Other Suns (2011), explains that picking
a hundred pounds of cotton by hand, a goal on most plantations,
was �one of the most backbreaking forms of stoop labor
ever known.� It required �pulling a soft lock of cotton�
from the flower �seven thousand times . . . turning around
and doing the same thing the next day and the next.�
After
seeing �The Quilts of Gee�s Bend� at the Whitney in 2002,
the New York Times�s reviewer Michael Kimmelman
described the quilts those former cotton farmers made
as �some of the most miraculous works of modernist art
America has produced,� comparing them to the paintings
of Frank Stella and Barnett Newman. They have been compared
to a plethora of other modern artists since.
In
December 2007 quilters Annie May Young and Loretta Pettway
sued Bill, son Matt, son Paul, and some corporations that
had bought the designs (son Harrison was not named). The
plaintiffs rejected the Arnetts� claim that they owned
the intellectual property for all quilts made before 1984,
Annie Mae charged that she was not paid for the Tinwood�s
use of images of her quilts, and she and Loretta charged
that they were paid only a �pittance� for the sale of
their artistic ideas to corporate entities.
In
the Seattle Times that July Sheila Farr examines
the legal briefs, noting that in compensation for the
use of quilt designs on items sold by Kathy Ireland World
Marketing, money was to be paid into a foundation. (The
Foundation, however, did not yet, exist.) She continues,
�The Seattle Art Museum purchased one of the quilts. .
. . When museum officials learned of the lawsuit they
contacted Burke [lawyer for the plaintiffs]. . . .They
wanted to make sure that the artist had been paid her
share of the quilt's $20, 000 price tag. . . . � Burke
replies, �She has received some sums from the Arnetts
but not anything that states what the payments are for
and how much they take as a commission.�
Loretta
Pettway�s legal brief includes her charge that Matt Arnett
dropped by her house to offer her $2,000 if she signed
a document stating that the money was �full compensation�
for copyright to all images of her art. Illiterate,
she wanted to make a copy. Told that if she did, she�d
lose the money, she signed what her attorney called �Exhibit
A.� In August 2008 the cases were settled out of court.
In
Crafted
Lives: Stories and Studies of African American Quilters
(2009), Patricia Turner observes that after the
news of the lawsuits, �Journalists tended to privilege
Tinwood�s position� and that the December 2008 issue of
Quilter�s Newsletter �used only materials from
the Arnetts� side of the case, offering a story on the
lawsuits with no perspective from any of the Gee�s Bend
quilters or their attorneys.� Shaila Dewan�s wrote in
the New York Times (July 29, 2007) that
the critics of the Arnetts picked on them as �city slickers�
and that the quilters are mostly �satisfied.� Turner (who
tried to be neutral about the lawsuits because she believed
when her book was published that the case would be settled
fairly by a jury trial) told me that some black collectors,
fans since Quilting Bee days, worry about the Arnetts�
ethics.
While
the Tinwood impresarios value the improvisational kind
of patchwork, historically Benders made both types. Turner
says that in the 1970s and later, scholars such as Maude
Wahlman �proclaimed . . . the beautiful Africanness of
Alabama quilts� often by selecting improvised quilts �from
communities like Gee�s Bend.� Not being one to leave to
chance the dissemination of scholarly ideas that could
serve his purposes, Bill Arnett had Tinwood Books bring
out a second edition of Wahlman�s study in 2001.
Turner
maintains that not all black-made quilts in the United
States adhere to the same aesthetic, that some poor whites
did similar work, and that impoverished women often had
to take what cloth they could get, often poor in quality.
From this kind of work we learn that while such quilts
can be homely, beauty can also come out of the constraints
of poverty. The Quilting Bee let quilters use better cloth
and also borrow scissors, thimbles, and other sewing tools
in good condition. Inspired creatively by working there,
many worked on a one-of-a-kind quilt at night at home.
Returning
in 2009 after forty years, I found that Gee�s Bend remains
a pretty place, with its fir trees, winding and hilly
roads, and, these days, the river easily accessible to
view at the ferry dock and roads made bright with painted
wooden murals of some of the quilts. But the Bend did
not exist outside of time. It had shrunk to about 750
residents from twice that number in 1968. Present were
cars, paved roads, and cell phones, and gone was the buzz
of young males - local youths and a few VISTA workers
- hanging out together in front of the general store.
No one farms for profit in Gee�s Bend anymore. Congress
built a dam on the river just below Gee�s Bend, in 1968
a third of the rich bottomland was flooded. Soon the state
took half of what was left for a park, paying $200 an
acre.
I
talked with Tinnie (pronounced Tiny) Pettway, from what
had long been the Bend�s most entrepreneurial family.�
She spent decades in Bridgeport, Connecticut, the hub
of the Gee�s Bend diaspora. Home now, she owns �That�s
�Sew� Gee�s Bend,� and sells quilted items on line, in
her daughter�s store in Birmingham, and to tourists that
now come to shop, in what had been the Bend�s general
store owned by her family. Tinnie had belonged to the
Arnett-organized Quilters Collective, and she had traveled
to exhibits until Bill threw her out when she began her
own quilt-making business.
In
her living room cluttered with copies of her first self-published
book of verse, The Gee�s Bend Experience (others
have followed), Tinnie said in her emphatic, candid manner,
�Bill want us to seem as if we don�t go nowhere and don�t
know nothin�. At museums he has us go in front of audiences
an� talk. But he tell us how to dress when we do! Almost
everybody my age - I was born in �38 -� move to cities
and only a few, like me, come back. He act like people
who stay here was trapped in the Bend when the ferry was
stopped for forty-four years �cause of our activity for
civil rights. You never know there is a back road out!
It even got paved. In 2006 we get the new ferry, but we
still takes the road a lot though it take an hour to get
to Camden.�
I
read aloud to her a piece about the San Francisco exhibit
in the on-line Shotgun Review: �The humble
women take little credit for the impact that their quilts
have on a viewer.� She responded: �They always say we
humble. But we got some pushy women too.� (In her field
notes, Stone says that the ideal in 1941, even for women,
was �one of quiet dignity. They were not to be too �humblish�
when there�s no call for humbling oneself.�)
Rennie
Young Miller returned to the Bend after graduating from
college in Rochester, New York and having a career as
a hospital administrator. Before changing her mind about
the Arnetts, she was the first manager of the Collective.
Next she tried to revive the Freedom Quilting Bee instead,
which, despite slowing down, had sold patchwork into the
1990s. Seated in the spacious workshop that a New York
architect designed for the Bee in 1969, Rennie said, in
her quiet way, �Bill came grabbing quilts in 1997, paying
only very little for them. I thought he would do right
at first, and the Quilting Bee seemed finished. Only three
people have benefited financially in a big way, and they
are closely related. Bill�s favorite is Mary Lee Bendolph,
and everyone still involved now is from her family. Right
away Bill thought of us as his goldmine. If he�d mentioned
museums, people might�ve held out for more money. The
quilts are still in his warehouse, and he takes some out
for� each exhibit. When my mother told him I was going
to start the Bee up again after hurricane damage closed
it, he snapped, �She is not going to do that!���
Qunnie
Pettway, a Collective member, nevertheless complained
to me that those who now come to shop usually buy only
quilted potholders or bags because the quilts are priced
too high. She (like others) tried to sell improvisational
work to me privately. Knowing her work, I noted that her
�Housetop� quilt from 1975, made after work at the Bee,
shows how appealing patterned Gee�s Bend patchwork
can be, how original in the subtle ways it deviates from
its paradigm and in its offbeat use of color. She defended
the Arnett: �Bill took a chance. No one knew if the project
would take off when he laid out money to buy the quilts.�
Arnett�s
catalogs dwell on the stories of Arlonzia Pettway, then
eighty-three (now deceased). Her anecdotes about Dinah
Miller, Arlonzia�s great-grandmother, purportedly brought
from Africa when she was thirteen, are retold, with legend
hardening into supposed fact. We read that Dinah probably
arrived in 1859, on the last (illegal) slave ship. Qunnie,
also one of Dinah�s great-granddaughters, mumbled that
she didn�t �know about her� when she was a girl. �Only
she was my grandmother mother.� Rennie Miller commented,
�I never talked to anyone who had ever heard of Dinah
before it came out in the book,� and then quipped,
�The slave traders said, �We�re taking you to America.
Go gather up your things, and don�t forget your quilts.�
Back
in Philadelphia, I saw Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder�s feel-good
play titled �Gee�s Bend.� It starts in 1939. In 2009,
when I saw it, there was no mention of the New Deal programs,
and nothing about how a government agency ultimately created
affordable independent farms. There was no mention of
the back road nor of the Freedom Quilting Bee. It�s hard
not to feel that Wilder was influenced by the Arnetts�
�script,� which usually has the same omissions.
The
Arnetts have attacked the Quilting Bee directly and by
proxy. In Patricia McKissack�s picture book Stitchin�
and �Pullin�: A Gee�s Bend Quilt (2008), a
child asks �Great-Gran� if she had belonged to the Bee.
Referring to its �rules,� the old woman says, �more money./Less
freedom./I chose to stay free.� The introduction, by Matt
Arnett, says, predictably, �Gee�s Bend has remained unchanged
over the years.� But the Quilting Bee itself brought
changes. Members sent children to college with the money
they earned there. They acquired indoor plumbing, refrigerators,
washing machines, and added rooms to their homes. Many
today have Social Security only because of employment
at the Bee.
For
sheer mendacity nothing beats remarks that appeared in
2006 on a United States Postal Service Website about Gee�s
Bend commemorative stamps: �Many quilters from Gee�s Bend
felt constricted by the standardization of their improvisational
techniques, however, and soon left the Freedom Quilting
Bee. Most preferred to give up the minimal monetary benefits
the cooperative gave them rather than lose the unique
aesthetic practices that the community had long nurtured.�
Subsequent sites about the stamps omit these two sentences,
probably because the USPS Webmaster became aware the information
was false.
Once
the cooperative began to sell to stores such as Bloomingdale�s,
it had to make quilts to specifications, with many women
turning out each kind. Designed in Gee�s Bend, the quilts
sold were patterned, using some traditional templates
and some new ones. The attention the Quilting Bee got
in the sixties and seventies exposes the falsity of Arnett�s
claim that he is the �discoverer,� and this may explain
his animus toward it. His narrative involves Roland Freeman�s
A Communion of the Spirits (1993), where
the discussion of Gee�s Bend and nearby Alberta (Rehobeth
is the old name) makes it clear that for Freeman quilts
from that area were still asssociated with the Bee. A
photo of a quilt made by Annie Mae Young bowled Arnett
over, and says he went looking for the artist - and discovered
Gee�s Bend.
The
place was hardly unknown. First the Bend got attention
for the New Deal programs. In the 1930s there were articles
about it in the New York Times Magazine and The Christian
Century and photos that became famous taken by Arthur
Rothstein and Marion Post Wolcott; in 1941 Robert
Sonkin recorded its spiritual music. (In 1968 Roman Pettway,
Jr., one of Tinnie�s uncles, made a hilarious story out
of going to the Smithsonian on the way back from military
service after WWII: �I come from a quiet country place,
but on the wall was a big old photograph of my Aunt Sally
stirring some greens in a huge pot!�)
In
1965 Martin Luther King made a speech in the Bend. Toward
the end of the sixties the Quilting Bee exhibited
its work at a folk art show run by the Smithsonian. The
abstract expressionist Krasner returned to New York City
to talk about the quilts to the art world (failing to
get the quilts shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art).
The Quilting Bee prompted articles in the New
Yorker and in the Times in 1969, and quilts
from the cooperative were in high-end New York stores.
Vogue ran photos of items made by the Bee. Even
in the 1980s and �90s there was Nancy Callahan�s
1987 Freedom Quilting Bee, a 1995 documentary film
�From Fields of Promises� (narrated by Ossie Davis), and
J.R. Moehringer�s 1999 �Crossing Over" in
the Los Angeles Times Magazine.
A
white civil rights worker, Father Francis X. Walter, an
Episcopal priest from an Alabama Gulf town, was the outsider
who truly did something for Gee�s Bend and parts of Wilcox
County nearby. (Then and now, many �Gee�s Bend� quilters
lived in the other hamlets, usually on or near
the back road.) Francis always mentions the crucial role
of able local women. Of his co-founder, the co-op�s primary
manager Estelle Witherspoon, from Rehobeth, he said, �With
more education Estelle could have run a state.�
Lost
in Wilcox County while working for the Movement in 1965,
he realized that local women could become involved with
the civil rights movement through creating� a patchwork
cooperative that would bring in some cash.� In a year
or so, working with Mrs. Witherspoon and others, the Bee
began work. In 2008 Francis wrote to Times reporter
Shaila Dewan that while he had known many of the quilts
had value as art, the Bee didn�t try to sell them
that way because it �lacked the financial resources and
connections� and that the members wanted mainly �to provide
an income� to the impoverished women of the county. He
added that �the 1960 census recorded that Wilcox County
families made less than $1, 550 a year.�
Starting
around 2002, the Internet made it easier to circulate
the Tinwood perspective. An example (from the Gadsden
Times): �Gee�s Bend was barely a blip on the map when
the handmade quilts were discovered by Bill Arnett.� Yet,
thirty-two years earlier Francis almost certainly had
slept under Gee�s Bend quilts when he spent nights
at Estelle and Eugene Witherspoon�s house. In June of
2007 in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, Matt
said, �For forty years a lot of people came
. . . and never did anything. We cared enough to do
what had to be done.� The Arnetts claimed to put a million
dollars into the community and said they�d put in another
million, but they did neither.
Residents
have told me that only three women - Mary Lee Bendolph;
Loretta Bennett (Mary Lee�s niece), who designs at home
in Huntsville; and Louisiana Bendolph (Mary Lee�s daughter-in-law),
who designs at home in Mobile - have made any real money.
Asking why this family is favored, I was told that these
chosen artists are gifted, but it is not irrelevant
that Mary Lee is agreeable to the point of docility, and,
with one exception, her close relatives know not to make
trouble.
Because
Loretta Pettway is Mary Lee�s first cousin and was one
of the plaintiffs, she became almost a pariah in her extended
family. In 2007 the two Lorettas and Louisiana Bendolph
had been invited to work at Paulson Press in Berkeley
to learn how to translate their quilts into prints (etchings).
After the lawsuits the followng year, the dealers did
not want more legal challenges. Focusing increasingly
on Mary Lee�s other kin, the Arnetts called their next
exhibit �Mary Lee Bendolph, Gee�s Bend Quilts, and Beyond.�
These close relatives have facilitated Tinwood�s �mission,�
stated on its Website, which is to increase �public awareness
and appreciation of the vernacular visual arts of the
American South.�
Arnett
casts himself as the one to whom these people owe all.
In The Last Folk Hero (2006), Andrew
Dietz quotes Bill: �They feed themselves with welfare
checks. Gee�s Bend was a welfare state forever until we
got there, and [we] made it more or less self-sufficient.�
(Angered by this, Rennie said, �Not many ever got welfare
here. Benders did such hard work from dawn to sundown.
That man ought to be made to plow and pick cotton!�) Bill
and Matt made countless visits, one Easter bringing Jane
Fonda, dressed as a bunny. (She owns 50% of the quilts
bought initially, and her daughter has two children by
Matt.)
At
the end of 2007, after the economic downturn and the lawsuits,
the quilts stopped selling in galleries. Usually made
by the two women that sued and the favored three, they
went for hefty sums. (At the peak the quilts in Seattle
were for sale for $11,000 to $35,000 each.) I believe
that gallery sales were meant to be the big sources
of profit for the Arnetts. Lovett Bennett told me that
until the gallery sales stopped, the checks with payment
were not sent directly to the quilter or to the Collective.
They were made out to and sent to Tinwood, rewritten at
its office in Atlanta, and sent on to Gee�s Bend. No one
knows if �costs� were deducted in the process or in some
cases if any money at all went to the artists. In 2009
Bennett, who headed the Gee�s Bend the Foundation, said
that it had no money at all. He �had words� with Matt
Arnett on whether the Collective should sell on the Internet
(still not possible), and some time after that Lovett
resigned as President. (In 2011, his wife Loretta broke
with Tinwood to sell her work independently.)
The
affectionate Arnetts are tough businessmen. In 1997 Mensie
Lee Pettway, who was given her house and land by the Freedom
Quilting Bee, sold her quilts to him, and several made
by her mother, for $100 each, trying and failing to receive
a better price. Mensie Lee�s daughter, a single mother,
who lives in the Bend has a grueling, low-paying job filleting
catfish at a plant in Uniontown. There are others too
who feel they exchanged a birthright for a handful of
dollars, with two women claiming they were never paid
for theirs.
As
tenants the Benders were used to knowing that they had
been cheated. Stone records that former renters told her
about how they had fared economically each year,which,
since few had had schooling, they had memorized in detail.
She was struck �by the remarkable grasp for figures, the
memory for details of operation, credit, production, profits
and indebtedness. . . . [They] could tell with accuracy
what the state of affairs was currently and for as far
back as the 1890�s, in some instances.� While renting
they broke even only 40% of the time and often lost money.
Things got considerably better with land ownership. But,
she wrote, �It rankled . . . that all roads in the country
[were] hard surfaced except their own.� And not all racism
was local. The Gee�s Bend farmers, once independent, had
a harder time than their white counterparts because the
U.S. Department of Agriculture was reluctant to extend
credit and subsidies to blacks.
Museums
ought to be especially responsible about what they tell
the public about outsider art, and art professionals critical
of what they are told by entrepreneurs. A review of a show in Florida, about social workers discovering
the quilts, is totally made up. The reporter told me that
the curator of the exhibit had given her the (mis)information
at Media Day. Instead of repeating uncritically what they
are told, the staff should� explain the history
of exploitation in the tenant system, the role of the
Department of Agriculture, and the the concept of intellectual
property.
Many
art professionals continue to believe in the Arnetts,
with whom they have been or become chummy. Bernard Herman,
in Gee�s Bend, The Architecture of the Quilt,
refers to the �many conversations� he had with Bill and
�time spent in Gee�s Bend with Matt.� In the March 2009
issue of The Journal of Modern Craftsmanship Herman
says that in regard to the lawsuits the entrepreneurs
and art itself are the losers. Yet accusations about Arnett�s
treatment of the black folk artists under his sway are
not new.
Among
other things, in 1993 Morley Safer on �60 Minutes� charged
him with shady practices in his dealings with outsider
artists, and in 2006 Dietz�s The Last Folk Hero
reveals similar behavior.
The
profiteering continues. The Arnetts are still selling
the Gee�s Bend name and quilt designs to corporations
for the manufacture of housewares such as rugs, lamps,
and quilt-making kits. Most of these are now only generally
reminiscent of the Bend�s artwork, and the artists are
unnamed. But some are exact copies. Mary Ann Pettway,
the Collective�s manager (Mary Lee�s niece), says,� �No
royalties. I don�t know of any checks.��
The
Pottery Barn is selling replicas of Gee�s Bend quilts,
and Barbara Barran has rugs and mats made in India. Once
more I haven�t heard of a quilter getting paid for the
use of her original design. I don�t see much art
in most of Barran�s Classic Rug Collection nor in some
of the commodities sold earlier. Images on the rugs and
other items bear only a vague or grotesque relationship
to a beautiful original. This works against the Arnetts�
expressed goal that vernacular art �be recognized as simply
�art�� in that they have helped turn the crafted designs
of the Bend�s artists into, at best, ordinary household
objects. Tinwood was administratively dissolved as a nonprofit
in Georgia in 2005, but got nonprofit status in Delaware,
a �corporate haven.� If the Arnetts� companies are not
for profit, why sell designs to home decorating corporations?
Today
even those quilters that are outraged by the Arnetts are
unwilling to sue. Some seem to feel, like the Benders
that Stone wrote about in 1943, �the futility of arguing�
. . . in an unevenly matched situation.� Knowing that
almost all of the incomes are meager at best, they�d have
been surprised to read in the Hartford Stage playbill
that Wilder�s play is "the story of the women of
Gee's Bend, who quilted their way to economic freedom.�
No one living in the community is better off as
the result of Tinwood, other than Mary Lee Bendolph. Some
in the extended Bendolph clan still enjoy traveling to
exhibits and various events, but most receive no benefit
except that they are proud of its international fame -
it�s mentioned in almost every reference to quilts as
art and has even inspired a symphony for guitar and orchestra
that has been performed by philharmonics in several cities.
The
Benders as a group have little money, but most of the
older folk can live without acute deprivation because
they own house and land (used for growing vegetables that
can be preserved). Many have grandchildren with them.
Sometimes now their adult children even live, with their
kids, in trailers on their land. Today they worry about
progeny who went to cities for a better life and often
sent money home. These descendants may be anxious about
holding on to jobs and homes, and some have lost both.
The real unemployment rate for blacks is at least 25 percent,
and African Americans were targeted for loans that led
to foreclosure.
Some
younger people who care about the Bend are doing well,
however, in spite of having moved away. Tinnie�s
daughter, Claudia Pettway Charley, owner of a store in
Birmingham that sells the items made by her mother�s quilt
business, described, what she and some others hope to
do in the Bend: �Our goals . . . include a gift shop,
restaurant and lodging.� Then she mentioned projects that
would bring tourism, improve public services, provide
jobs, training, and other opportunities (Birmingham
News, March 10, 2011). Tinnie, who recently
hired two more quilters, calls these plans �Taking Back
Gee�s Bend,� but she admits to concern about what will
happen.
Some
residents are concerned about the repeated stories that
the Benders burned old quilts to keep away mosquitos.
Mensie Lee Pettway said, �Arnett makes us look stupid.�
We only burned old raggly quilts,� Maybe we didn�t know
they was art, but we knowed what was beautiful.� Rennie
addressed the heart of the problem: �We�re not all alike.
My friends and I couldn�t wait to get out of the Bend.
I never learned to quilt as a girl. It was part of everything
we wanted to get away from. I wasn�t humble then, and,
while I�ve changed about quilting and the Bend, I�m still
not humble!� My aim has been to provide a glimpse of a
few Benders as people, not as simple, �natural� folk.
The unevenness of the match between the powerful and disempowered
is heightened by the erroneous assumption that the poor
and uneducated are essentially different from the advantaged.
Uncomfortable
with the Arnetts� methods, Greg Kucera, gallery owner
in Seattle, told Matt in conversation that they should
use bills of sale when they buy items and that they should
have started off by taking quilts on consignment instead
of grabbing on the cheap nearly everybody�s patchwork.
Loretta Pettway had a solo show in early fall, 2011 at
the Kucera gallery - a few etchings and a quilt made in
1987. Greg got the quilt on consignment from Loretta�s
family. He considers her �the singularly most gifted living
artist of her generation from the Gee�s Bend group,� and
admires that she �binds herself to her anger� about the
history of Gee�s Bend, especially after slavery and again
after the Arnetts came.
It
seems likely that if there had been a jury trial the lawsuits
would have been decided in favor of the artists (when
cases are settled out of court, the plaintiffs are not
allowed to talk about the resolution). Wouldn�t a jury
have wondered why Tinwood would have needed the signature
of Loretta Pettway if the Arnetts, as they claimed in
their legal defense, already owned the intellectual property
of all quilts made before 1984?� If the Arnetts had
won, royalties would have meant that the women had quilted
their way to more of life�s little comforts.
What
Tinwood has done amounts to a heist of the Bend�s heritage.
Quilts should at least have been bought for a fair price.�
Marketing ploys that exploit cultural fantasies by� people
and places may be business as usual, but they undermine
our sense of them as varied and competent. It would seem,
given their history of exploitation, that the Benders
would have been suspicious of Tinwood, but it is likely
that the Arnetts put them off guard by tactics such as
calling the quilters� group a �collective� (hardly part
of the rhetoric of 2003). Were they were trying to create
the sense that they were in some sense creating another
cooperative, with which the Bend had had such good experiences?
Bill Arnett denies the truth about the value of the Quilting
Bee, yet anyone old enough to remember its hey-day in
Wilcox County could tell you that it bettered conditions,
raised morale, was fun, and heightened confidence in the
civil rights comes movement.
The
humane behavior that the Arnetts can choose to demonstrate
at times is less significant for most of the quilters
than the dealers� predatory attitude towards those they
are hoping to profit from. When Mary Lee Bendolph had
a stroke, Bill moved her to a better hospital. The episodic
kindness of Tinwood�s entrepreneurs is �paternalistic,�
reminiscent of the old-time landowners under the caste
system. In Plantation County (1955) Morton Rubin,
a sociologist studying Wilcox County in the late forties,
quotes a planter: �You have to give an old woman a cabin
and some garden space, else the others will think you
don�t care for them and . . . and wouldn�t work so well.��
Today educated �worldly� men like the Arnetts are unlikely
to feel blacks are innately inferior, as Rubin�s planter
in the forties probably did.� Economic class can trump
race.
A
hostile on-line comment in response to a forum on poverty
in the Nation expresses this bromide: �If someone
is wealthy that �wealth� has been created by their own
efforts and not taken from someone else.� Nettie Young
- capable, good-natured, wise and funny, willing to fight
for her rights, with a firm belief in God�s love
and justice - had reason to think otherwise. As the child
of sharecroppers, Nettie worked in fields owned by the
white, well-to-do Youngs and owned by the white and wealthy
Wilkinsons, contributing to their affluence. Rearing her
brood of eleven in shacks, she toiled on until age 38
- having almost nothing materially - when� it became possible
to purchase Gee�s Bend property. Then, as an old woman,
Nettie was again bilked out of compensation for her labor.
Tinwood sold the design of a quilt she made in 1971, and
different versions of a rug inspired by it are still being
sold by corporate Kathy Ireland.
The
attempt to revive the Freedom Quilting Bee has run out
of steam, and Tinwood�s Collective members earn little
from what tourists buy. They work in their own homes,
and the half of the price that was distributed among its
members when a quilt is sold is no longer shared. The
Arnetts would seem to be moving on to other enterprises,
yet the new exhibit is starting in May, organized by their
own foundation, Souls Grown Deep, and the Frist Center
for the Visual Arts.
Descriptions
of the show say it will highlight the parallels between
the quilts and the work of Thornton Dial (a self-taught
black assemblage artist) and the �African American aesthetic
traditions,� the most relevant being the �yard art of
the rural south.� The term is murky, but can refer to
art made from what is found in the yard (old tires, a
bottle) or what can be seen from the yard that generates
aesthetic representation, the small houses, outbuildings,
fences, and so on. The Arnetts are seeking control over
the definition of African American vernacular art.
To
disseminate their theories, those that are right and those
that are wrong, the Arnett family by now has the support
of the tangle of foundations and publishing resources
they own, the art historians they influence, and the art
centers with which they are connected. Tinwood has been
able to succeed because of this. Also, as this paper has
shown, the ease of manipulating public relations in the
age of the Internet; the attitudes, practices, and alliances
in the art community; bias in the media; and, not least,
its way of doing business solely in Tinwood�s interests
is part of the mix.
Nettie,
however, despite severe economic trials early on and injustice
near the end, held on to her property and had a responsible
position at the Bee, helping herself and others to benefit
from cooperative endeavor. She and her children exemplify
the disparity in what is meant by the American Dream in
that she rose from abject poverty by an extraordinary
work ethic, personal qualities, and good fortune, and
she saw her children rise from what most Americans would
consider near-poverty, through study or training to success
as salaried professionals� and skilled workers.
This
form of the archetypal American success story does not
depend on an untoward impact on others. But those who
strive to succeed, always wanting more - no matter what
their reaching higher and higher does to others - may
win praise, fame, wealth - and they may impede the efforts
of the first group to benefit from their own struggles.
It�s
well-known that more urbane talent seekers and dealers
have frequently been unscrupulous with less sophisticated
folk-artists of all races, and they have - mythologized
and cheated - them.� Indeed, this has been standard procedure
(that musicians have been exploited hardly shocks people
who know about the experience of blues, jazz, rock n�roll,
or country music performers and composers). It is an old
story, but certain aspects of what happened in Gee�s Bend
stand out.
First,
the hypocrisy of the family that owns Tinwood and the
lengths it has gone to convince the public: the Arnetts
represent themselves not just as businessmen in the arts,
but as persons deeply interested in advancing African
American culture in the South (and they see to it that
others depict them that way). Eugene Metcalf, an academic
in American Studies, have edited and contributed to Arnett�s
catalogs and is part of the pack of professors Tinwood
always draws on. He argues in Raw Vision, Volume
55, an on-line publication (Summer 2006), that
Arnett is a heroic fighter against exclusionary cultural
homogeneity in the field of vernacular art.
Second,
the Gee�s Bend story raises questions about the implications
of the supposedly unique opportunity that exists in America
to advance up the class ladder. We need to face the fact
that it is harder now for those at the bottom in the USA
to achieve upward mobility than in many other countries
- and that the success to which some aspire can get in
the way of the kind of prosperity most people pursue.
Should these two approaches to rising even have the same
name?
When
Nettie Young died in 2010 at ninety-two, Matt Arnett had
possession of two of her quilts. Her daughter asked him
to bring these to the funeral, and she told me that Matt
came and made an almost fulsome speech about her mother.
In keeping with the Arnetts� usual veneer of intense feeling,
he wept, but didn�t bring the quilts.
BlackCommentator.com Guest Commentator Linda Hunt Beckman is Professor Emerita
at Ohio University and has taught at the university of
Massachsuetts in Boston and Arcadia University in Philadelphia.
Her publications include A Woman�s Portion: Ideology,
Culture, and the Female Novel Tradition; Amy
Levy: Her Life & Letters,
and the entry on Amy Levy for the new Oxford Dictionary
of National Biography that Oxford University Press published
in 2004. At Ohio University, in addition to being Professor
of English, she was Director of Women�s Studies for ten
years. She participated in the Civil Rights Movement
in 1968, interviewing tenant farmers about hunger and
malnutrition and, with Gary Hunt and Nancy Scheper-Hughes,
writing an article that appeared in Ramparts magazine
in November, 1969.� Click here
to contact Ms. Beckman.