For the past twenty years, Gee’s Bend quilts have captured the public’s imagination with their kaleidoscopic colors and their bold geometric patterns. The groundbreaking art practice was cultivated by direct descendants of slaves in rural Alabama, who faced oppression, geographic isolation, and intense material constraints.
Since this year, their art of improvisation also embodies a very modern question: what happens when a distinctive cultural tradition collides with corporate America?
Enter Goal. The multinational retailer launched a limited-edition collection based on the quilters’ designs for Black History Month this year. Consumer interest proved strong as many stores across the country sold out of the plaid sweaters, water bottles and faux quilted blankets.
“We’re in a quilt revival right now, like in real time,” says Sharbreon Plummer, an artist and scientist. “They’re so popular, and Target knew that. It created the biggest buzz when it came out. There is indeed a resurgence of interest among Gen Z and Millennials in conscious consumption and the homemade – with cottagecore style, bread baking, DIY bracelets – but both are at odds with the reality of fast fashion.
The Target designs were “inspired” by five Gee’s Bend quilters who reaped limited financial benefits from the collection’s success. They received a flat rate for their contributions instead of paying in proportion to Target’s sales. A Target spokesperson would not share sales figures for the collection, but confirmed that it is indeed sold out in many stores.
Unlike the compensation structure of the 1960s Freedom Quilting Bee—an artist-led collective that fairly distributed pay to Gee’s Bend quilters, who were employed and able to file Social Security benefits—one-off partnerships with companies like Target benefit only a small part of the income. number of people, in this case five women from two families.
The maxim ‘representation is important’ is not new, but it is gaining ground. But if visibility for some does not translate into meaningful change for a marginalized community as a whole, how can that be reconciled?
“Every phase of the finances was problematic,” said Patricia Turner, a retired professor of World Arts and Culture and African American Studies at UCLA who traced the commercialization of Gee’s Bend quilts to white collector Bill Arnett in the 1990s. “It really bothers me that Target’s in-house designer is manipulating the look of things to make it more palatable to their audience,” she says of the changed color palettes and patterns.
“Each quilter had multiple opportunities throughout the process to provide input on the items in our collection,” Target spokesperson Brian Harper-Tibaldo wrote in an emailed statement.
Although miniature photographs of the makers appeared on some marketing materials and the text “Gee’s Bend” was printed on clothing labels, the company’s involvement with the quilters was limited. Once Black History Month ended, the quilters’ names and images were removed from the retailer’s site.
While Target has pledged to spend more than $2 billion with Black-owned businesses by 2025, there are no plans to partner with the Gee’s Bend community again.
The current situation mirrors that of the 1990s, when some quilters enjoyed newfound visibility, others were disinterested, and still others felt abused. (In 2007, several quilters filed a series of lawsuits against the Arnett family, but all cases were settled out of court and little is known about the lawsuits due to non-disclosure agreements.)
The profit-oriented approach that emerged, which disrupted the Quilting Bee’s price-sharing structure, created “real division and disharmony within the community,” Turner explains, as he dealt with collectors, art institutions and commercial enterprises. “I find it sad that those ties are being disrupted by the commercialization of their art form.”
By reproducing an aesthetic but stripping it of its social structure and familial context, Target missed the essence of what makes this particular craft tradition so rich and distinctive.
Quilts are made to mark important milestones and are gifted to celebrate a new baby or a wedding, or to honor someone’s loss. Repurposing fabrics – from torn blankets, tattered rags, stained clothes – is a central ethos of the community’s quilting practice, which resists commodification. But the Target collection was mass-produced from new fabrics in factories in China and elsewhere abroad.
The older generations of Gee’s Bend quilters are known for their unique designs with clashing colors and irregular, wavy lines – visual effects that arise from their material limitations. Most worked at night in homes without electricity and lacked basic tools such as scissors, let alone access to fabric stores. Stella Mae Pettway, who has sold her quilts on Etsy for $100 to $8,000, has now characterized having scissors and access to more fabrics as a paradox of “advantage and disadvantage.”
Many third- and fourth-generation artists returned to quilting as adults for a creative and therapeutic outlet, as well as to hold on to their roots. After her mother passed away in 2010, quilter JoeAnn Pettway-West revisited the practice and found peace in completing her mother’s unfinished quilts. ‘As I make this stitch, I can just see her hand sewing. It’s like we’re there together,” she says. “It’s a little bit of her, a little bit of me.”
Delia Pettway Thibodeaux is a third-generation Gee’s Bend quilter whose grandmother was a sharecropper and whose bold, rhythmic quilts are now in the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. For the Target collection, she received a fixed amount instead of a rate proportional to sales.
“I was quite concerned at first” about how quilts would be customized to fit the collection, says Pettway Thibodeaux. “But when I saw the collection, I felt different.”
Because job opportunities are so limited in Gee’s Bend, many fourth-generation quilters have left the area to take jobs as teachers, daycare workers, home care workers and to serve in the military.
“We, as the next generation, were more dreamers,” says Pettway-West.
National recognition has certainly brought some positive change. But increased visibility – from museum exhibitions, academic research, a US Postal Service stamp collection – has not necessarily translated into economic gain. According to the nonprofit Nest, the median annual income in Boykin, Alabama, is still well below the poverty level at about $12,000.
“This is a community that to this day still really needs recognition, still needs economic revitalization,” said Lauren Cross, Gail-Oxford Associate Curator of American Decorative Arts at the Huntington Museum of Art. “And so any economic opportunities that, you know, lead back to them, I support.”
Target’s line in particular, however, is disconnected from the group’s origins and handmade practice, she says. It is a problem that distills precisely the challenge that arises when something that is handmade and connected to a deep tradition becomes national and corporate.
“On the one hand, you want to preserve the stories and that sense of authenticity,” says Cross.
“And on the other hand,” she asks, “how do you reach a wider audience?”