Twelve dramatically designed, richly colored, improvisational quilts created by Mary Lee Bendolph and her family members - her mother Aolar Mosely, her daughter Essie B. Pettway, and her daughter-in-law Louisiana P. Bendolph - will be presented alongside complex and evocative found object sculptures by noted African American self-taught artist Thornton Dial and visionary "yard art" artist Lonnie Holley.
There is a sharing of philosophies, themes, and attitudes between the work of Lonnie Holley and Thornton Dial with the women. Holley and Dial worked in different media than the women, but there is a give-and-take-both personal and artistic-between the quilt makers and Dial and Holley; the idea of using recycled materials for example, a tradition found in African American artists from the South.
This has created a sense of joint participation in a vernacular African American aesthetic continuum that disregards artistic categories previously used to characterize (and separate) the work of these artists. Upon meeting the men, Bendolph had never before met anyone who called himself an artist.
By 2005, the quilts by Mary Lee Bendolph and the other women of Gee's Bend had been "discovered" and exhibited many times in museums around the country. These women would travel by bus to the exhibitions and their world view was expanded by seeing their quilts in context of the other art on view at the museums.
In the exhibition are intaglio prints created by Mary Lee Bendolph and her daughter-in-law Louisiana P. Bendolph. Now, with greater confidence and the recognition their work was receiving, they enjoyed exploring this new artistic genre because they could now be recognized as artists without the previous qualifiers such as folk, craft, black, or rural.
These prints along with documentary films about all of the artists provide further context for their creative exchange. As the deep social and aesthetic networks of these artists intersect, they give rise to new pathways of artistic influence, resulting in a powerful mixture of communal and individual creative energies.
The Museum of International Folk Art
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