User:Happywriter1/sandbox

Welcome!
Hello, I am a student at the University of Wisconsin in Madison! I'm working on a project called Wikipedia-Edit-A-Thon for my Gender and Women Studies class focused on feminist art.

Editing Experience
This is my first time editing on Wikepedia, as I have had no previous knowledge that it was accessible for me to be able to contribute to Wikepedia pages. However, I'm very excited to able to engage with this platform and add to the content. Testing: this sentence is highlighted this sentence is italicized. this sentence is bolded.

The Artists
For my project I choose the Quilts of the Gee's Bend. I choose to focus on these artists because they embody a rich cultural heritage through their quilting traditions.These remarkable artists, predominantly African American women, have transformed the act of quilting into a powerful form of storytelling. The Quilts of Gee's Bend are not just artworks, but they are women's narratives that reflect the history, resilience, and creativity of the Black community in the rural towns of Gee's Bend Alabama..

The Quilt's of Gee's Bend
The quilts of Gee's Bend are quilts created by a group of women and their ancestors who live or have lived in the isolated African-American hamlet of Gee's Bend, Alabama along the Alabama River. The quilts of Gee's Bend are among the most important African-American visual and cultural contributions to the history of art within the United States. Many of the residents in the community can trace their ancestry back to enslaved people from the Pettway Plantation. Arlonzia Pettway can recall her grandmother's stories of her ancestors, specifically of Dinah Miller, who was brought to the United States by slave ship in 1859.

== The Women Behind the Quilts == Nellie Mar Abrams, Willie “Ma Willie” Abrams, Mary Lee Bendolph, Ella Bendolph ,Lousiana P. Bendolph, Annie Bendolph ,Amelia Bennett,Agatha Bennett,Loretta Pettway Bennett,Delia Bennett, Polly Bennett,Margaret Bennett,Mary L Bennett, Linda Diane Bennett,Willie Ann Benning ,Maggie Benning, Sarah Benning, Della Mae Bridges, Emma Lee Pettway Campbell,Minnie, Sue Coleman, Ruby Gamble,Minder Coleman,Eddie Lee Pettway Green, Rachel Carey George, Pearlie, Pettway Hall, Queen Hall, Ella Mae Irby Gloria Hoppins, Sally Bennett Jones, America Irby, Rebecca Myles Jones, Marlene Bennett Jones, Mary Elizabeth Kennedy, Nettie Jane Kennedy, Seebell Kennedy, Clementine Kennedy, Lizzie Major Ruth Kennedy, Nazareth Major, Vera Pettway Major, Lue Ida McCloud, Gertrude Miller, Lucy Mingo, Lottie Mooney,Lucy Mooney,Aolar Carson Mosely,Flora Moore, Sadie Bell Nelson, Ruth Pettway Mosely, Mertlene Perkins, Addie Pearl Nicolson, Annie Bell Pettway, Malissia Pettway, Rita Mae Pettway, Loretta Pettway, Lucy P. Pettway, Lorraine Pettway, Missouri Pettway, Nell Parker Pettway, Pearlie Kennedy Pettway, Lutisha Pettway, Linda Pettway, Girlie Irby, Qunnie Pettway, Arcola Pettway, Lucy T. Pettway, Stella Mae Pettway, Martha Pettway, Candis Pettway, Leola Pettway, Lottie Pettway, China Pettway, Henrietta Pettway, Emma Mae Hall Pettway, Lola Pettway, Nellie Pettway, Louella Pettway, Plummer T. Pettway, Arie Pettway, Arlonzia Pettway, Beatrice Pettway, Essie Bendolph Pettway, Edwina Pettway, Belinda Pettway, Joerina Pettway, Mensie Lee Pettway, Jennie Pettway, Nancy Pettway, Lillie Mae Pettway,Joanna Pettway, Annie E. Pettway, Lucille Bennett Pettway, Creola Bennett Pettway, Mary Ann Pettway,Katie Mae Pettway, Annette Pettway, Caster Pettway Allie Pettway, Sweet T. Pettway, Jessie T. Pettway, Indiana Bendolph Pettway, Marie Pettway, Sally Mae Pettway Mixon, Sue Willie Seltzer,Beetle Bendolph Seltzer, Mary Spencer, Florine Smith, Hannah Wilcox, Geraldine Westbrook, Liza Jane Williams,Irene Williams, Andrea Williams, Nell Hall Williams, Patty Ann Williams, Magdalene Wilson, Estelle Witherspoon, Lucy L. Witherspoon, Ethel Young,Annie Mae Young,Nettie Young, Aestean P. Young, and Deborah Pettway Young.

History of Gee's Bend, Alabama
Just southwest of Selma, in the Black Belt of Alabama, Gee's Bend (officially called Boykin) is an isolated, rural community of about seven hundred inhabitants. The area is named after Joseph Gee, a landowner who came from North Carolina and established a cotton plantation in 1816 with his seventeen slaves. In 1845, the plantation was sold to Mark H. Pettway. Many members of the community still carry the name. After emancipation, many freed slaves and family members stayed on the plantation as sharecroppers.



In the 1930s, Gee's Bend saw a significant shift in their community, as a merchant who had given credit to the families of the Bend died, and the family of this merchant collected on debts owed to him in brutal fashion. These indebted families watched as their food, animals, tools and seed were taken away, and the community was saved by the distribution of Red Cross rations. Much of the land of this area was sold to the federal government and the Farm Security Administration, and those organizations set up Gee's Bend Farms, Inc., a pilot project that was a cooperative-based program intended to help sustain the inhabitants of the area. The government sold tracts of land to the families of the bend, thus giving the Native and African American population control over the land, which at the time was still rare. The community of Gee's Bend was also the subject of several Farm Security Administration photographers, like Dorothea Lange. During the latter half of the Great Depression the inhabitants of the area faced challenges as farming practices became increasingly mechanized, and consequently, a large portion of the community left.

However, many inhabitants of the community stayed. In 1949, a U.S Post Office was established in Gee's Bend.

In the 1960's, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King Jr. visted Gee's Bend and inspired residents to take the ferry to the county and vote. In response, to the influx of Black voter registrations, government authorities eliminated the Gee's bend ferry service, which isolated the town from many years of essential goods and service. The ferry service was not restored to Gee's Bend until forty years later in 2006 with the help of the Freedom Quilting Bee

From the 1960s onward, the community of Gee's Bend, as well as the Freedom Quilting Bee in nearby Alabama, gained attention for the production of their quilts. Folk art collector, historian, and curator William Arnett brought further attention to this artistic production with his Souls Grown Deep Foundation in Atlanta, Georgia. Arnett organized an exhibition titled, "The Quilts of Gee's Bend", which debuted in 2002 at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and later travelled to a dozen other locations across the country. The exhibition featured sixty quilts created by forty-five artists. This exhibition brought fame to the quilts. Arnett's management of Gee's Bend quilts was not always viewed positively. In 2007, two Gee's Bend quiltmakers, Annie Mae Young and Loretta Pettway, filed lawsuits saying that Arnett cheated them out of thousands of dollars from the sales of their quilts. The lawsuit was resolved and dismissed without comment from lawyers on either side in 2008.

Despite this former controversy, Arnett's foundation Souls Grown Deep Foundation continues to collect and organize exhibitions for Gees Bend Quilts. The foundation manages multiple campaigns to support Gees Bend Quiltmakers. They aim to provide documentation, marketing, and fund-raising, as well as education and opportunity for quiltmakers. The foundation is also involved in a multi-year campaign with the Artists Rights Society to gain intellectual property rights for the artists of Gee's Bend.

Quilts
The quilting tradition in Gee's Bend goes back beyond the 19th century and may have been influenced in part by patterned Native American textiles and African textiles. African-American women pieced together strips of cloth to make bedcovers. Throughout the post-bellum years and into the 20th century, Gee's Bend women made quilts to keep themselves and their children warm in unheated shacks that lacked running water, telephones and electricity. The women pieced together found materials and creative inspiration from the community was an approach to quilting, born out of necessity when access to new materials was limited, and the town of Gee's Bend was geographically isolated.

Along the way they developed a distinctive style, noted for its lively improvisations and geometric simplicity. Many of the quilts are a departure from classical quilt making, bringing to mind a minimalist quality. This could also have been influenced by the isolation of their location, which necessitated using whatever materials were on hand, often recycling from old clothing and textiles.

With geographic and social isolation came artistic isolation. The tradition of quilting in Gee’s Bend began before the Emancipation of enslaved people in the 19th century and was passed from mothers to daughters by generations of Gee’s Bend women, most of whom remained in the community and made quilts throughout their entire lives. The quilters gain technical expertise from a lifetime by practicing their craft and carefully observing the processes and finished products of their fellow quilters. The quilters rely on intuition while improvising their own complex various, as the women are taught so many different ways to build a quilt.

Work-clothes quilts made from reused denim, cotton, flannel work shirts, and other assorted materials are much more frequently found in the African American quilting tradition and establish the tone of this exhibition. For these work clothes, their evident history of wear and time and hard effort radiates the poignant of gee’s bend. A very tangible sense of time is reflected in these textiles. A single composition of work clothes adorned in the center with a well-worn bandana captures our attention on several levels.

The Initial Art World Discrimination
The mainstream art market has long neglected the significant artistic contributions of African American quilters.In 1966, the Freedom Quilting Bee was established by a collective of African American quilters with the dual purpose of advancing economic opportunities in their communities and advocating for civil rights. Despite the crucial role of this organization, it faced a notable lack of recognition with the mainstream art world.

In the early 1900s to the 1950s representations of African American quilt making were largely omitted from quilt histories or portrayed in a limited way. In the 1980s-1990s, the interpretation saw improvisational quilts by working class rural African American women as separate from mainstream eurocentric quilt aesthetics

Quilts on Display
The quilts have been exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Tacoma Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Turner Contemporary in the UK, among others. The reception of the work has been mostly positive, as Alvia Wardlaw, curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston wrote, "The compositions of these quilts contrast dramatically with the ordered regularity associated with many styles of Euro-American quiltmaking. There's a brilliant, improvisational range of approaches to composition that is more often associated with the inventiveness and power of the leading 20th-century abstract painters than it is with textile-making". The Whitney venue, in particular, brought a great deal of art-world attention to the work, starting with Michael Kimmelman's 2002 review in The New York Times which called the quilts "some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced" and went on to describe them as a version of Matisse and Klee arising in the rural South. Comparable effect can be seen in the quilts of isolated individuals such as Rosie Lee Tompkins, but the Gee's Bend quilters had the advantage of numbers and backstory.

In 2003, 50 quilt makers founded the Gee's Bend Collective, which is owned and operated by the women of Gee's Bend. Every quilt sold by the Gee's Bend Quilt Collective is unique and individually produced.Each woman has established her vocabulary of forms, stitches, and approaches, and these approaches are shared with family members, creating circles of expression within family groups..

In recent years, members of the Collective have traveled nationwide to talk about Gee's Bend's history and their art. Many of the ladies have become well known for their wit, engaging personality and, in some cases, singing abilities.

In 2011, the Gee's Bend quilters were featured in the episode "Gee's Bend: The Most Famous Quilts in America", which was part five of a nine-part series titled Why Quilts Matter: History, Art & Politics.

In 2015, Gee's Bend quilters Mary Lee Bendolph, Lucy Mingo, and Loretta Pettway were joint recipients of a National Heritage Fellowship awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts, which is the United States government's highest honor in the folk and traditional arts.

In 2008, the development of the Quilt Index was created, a digital library created through partnerships through Alliance of American Quilts and Michigan State University The Quilt index brings together documentation on quilts and quilt making that were previously scattered across many collections.

In 2022, the Gee's Bend quilters provided the guiding metaphor of a quilt for a book about women's work by Ferren Gipson in which they were included.

In 2023, the quilters collaborated with generative artist Anna Lucia to create digital works of art on the blockchain in a project called Generations.

The Legacy of Gee's Bend
Few other places can boast the density of Gee's bend artistic achievement, which is the result both of geographical isolation and an usually degree of cultural continuity. In few places can we find so many quilts with so much flair, pieced in bold, improvised geometries from salavalged work clothes, dresses, cotton sacks and fabric samples. The quilts of Gee's Bend presents a particular place and its people who have created a body of art so rich in its content and so remarkable in its execution.