Last month, the Souls Grown Deep Foundation made a major gift of 57 artworks to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It’s a big score for the New York museum to garner so many gems from the African American south, including work by Nellie Mae Rowe, Thorton Dial, and – the biggest coup – 20 of the Gee’s Bend quilts.  If the star works of art of the Harlem Renaissance were Zora Neale Hurston’s novels, James Weldon Johnson’s poetry, and Romare Bearden’s paintings, the stars of the modern interest in southern African American folk art are unquestionably the quilts made by the women of the tiny hamlet of Gee’s Bend, Alabama. This is where a collective of women have become the reason you’ve seen so many quilting patterns in greeting cards, calendars and picture books in the past 10 years.  “The Gee’s Bend project has such a compelling story of origins in terms of its rootedness in civil rights,” says Riche Richardson, an associate professor of Africana Studies at Cornell University. A quilter herself whose work has been exhibited in museums, Richardson describes the quilting from Gee’s Bend as historically significant but also “breathtaking in its beauty, scope and composition. As a native Alabamian and artist, I believe that it is crucially important to recognize and honor the genius of Southern art, including its important and unique contribution to the nation’s artistic and cultural heritage.”  “The remarkable artists of Gee’s Bend are among those at the vanguard in this sense,” Richardson says. Indeed, despite being made far from traditionally championed urban sites of American design (the town is populated just by a few hundred people, most of whom are descendants of slaves), the quilts are shamelessly modern and hold up with a surprisingly contemporary aesthetic.  But they weren’t always heralded, discounted like much of the artwork created by African Americans in the south historically. As the New York Times reported in 2007, the quilts made by the women of Gee’s Bend were largely ignored until, in the late 1990s, William Arnett, “a white champion of self-taught black artists, began a rescue mission, buying dozens of the quilts and ultimately creating one of the biggest surprise hits in the art world’s recent memory.” Arnett went on to form the Souls Deep Foundation, which is giving the collection named after him to the Met.  The Foundation’s donation also includes 10 works by Thorton Dial, including Out of the Darkness, the Lord Gave Us Light and African Athlete. Dial grew up in a rural Alabama sharecropping family, worked in manufacturing jobs, and has no formal training as an artist. His work uses elements of found objects, painting and sculpture usually attributed to the likes of artists like Jasper Johns. However, as the magazine Arts Atl wrote in 2012, “found-object assemblage flourished before Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg made the practice famous,” noting that “Rauschenberg grew up looking at African-American yard art, castoffs and discards arranged into provocative displays.” That would be the same kind of work Dial would have grown up around, and was making himself, long before Rauschenberg’s work was hung in the museums or galleries of New York.  While the donation to the Met is a gem, it is not without controversy. Arnett was sued in 2007 by some of the quilters whose work he purchased, and while the lawsuit was resolved a year later, the relationship brought up – like so many things in American history – challenging questions about race, opportunism, and control. As the Times quoted Andrew Dietz, the author of a book about Arnett’s relationship with artists whose work is in the Souls Grown Deep donation: “‘When you mix the old South, race, educational and class differences, the subjective value of art, the egos of the art elite and the good old greenback, you’ve got yourself a powder keg ready to blow.”  The Souls Grown Deep’s powder keg was diffused, even if the bigger issues of race continue to roil American art and expression. The donation will be curated for a show at the Met in the fall of 2016.
The endowment of 57 works from the South include these hugely influential works from women living in a tiny hamlet in Alabama