Gallery 150/151, first floor (Morgan Galleries)
Main Building
Gallery 150/151, first floor (Morgan Galleries)
Main Building
The women of Gee’s Bend, a small rural Black community in Alabama of about seven hundred residents, have been creating bold, visually distinctive quilts since at least the 1920s.
In early summer 2005, Mary Lee Bendolph and her daughter-in-law Louisiana P. Bendolph spent two weeks at Paulson Press in Berkeley, California, making fine-art prints. Mary Lee based her prints on quilts she had made, and after returning home she made quilts inspired by the prints. Her intaglio print Mama’s Song inspired this quilt with wedge-shaped "strings" rhythmically connecting strips, blocks, and half squares.
Gallery 150/151, first floor (Morgan Galleries)
| Title: | Blocks, Strips, Strings, and Half Squares |
| Date: | 2005 |
| Artist: | Mary Lee Bendolph (American, born 1935) |
| Medium: | Pieced cotton plain weave, twill, corduroy, nylon twill, and cellulose acetate knit |
| Dimensions: | 7 feet × 6 feet 9 inches (213.4 × 205.7 cm) |
| Classification: | Textiles |
| Credit Line: | Purchased with the Phoebe W. Haas fund for Costume and Textiles, and gift of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation from the William S. Arnett Collection, 2017 |
| Accession Number: | 2017-229-23 |
| Geography: | Made in Gee's Bend, Boykin, Wilcox, Alabama, United States, North and Central America |
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Gallery 150/151, first floor (Morgan Galleries)
Main Building