Intersection: Art, Craft & Design

Craft involves hands and stories. Human hands with their agile fingers, deftly construe narratives woven through with feelings embodying the stories of people, places and materials. As part of my Fulbright research I travelled to Alabama to find out about the Gee’s Bend quilters. Gee’s Bend Quilts is a unique colour juxtaposed patchwork quilting tradition by descendants of enslaved African American community settled in Boykin, southwest of Selma, in the Black Belt of Alabama, USA.

Paradoxically, the abstract organization of the multi-coloured patches is as striking and aesthetically restful to the eye leading to a dynamic visually balanced design. What is fascinating is that, it is a visual treat suggesting a spontaneous, intuitive choice. Bold and energetic in spirit, it echoes a distant rhythm of African drum beats; a synchronization of base, tone and slap played in pure asymmetry. Focusing more on the contrast of light and dark strips themselves, the fabric is pieced together with an inert sense of irregular pictorial rhythm. Although not following any structured design principle, the improvised patterns and solids are used in wildly varying combinations and the whole just seem to work in a magical captivating mode. At times, the ascending and descending order of the colour palette, deliberately break the symmetry that resonate a cry of non-conformity. Within the compositional framework of a rectangle or a square, the effortlessly uneven colour patches of the quilts voice the vigour of freedom recalling the supressed history within the order of day to day existence. With an approach of upscaling the scraps, the beauty of these quilts is in its imperfection asserting a humane touch in this technology driven times.

Post-civil war in the Unites States, this African-American community settled in the isolated rural setting along a bend in the Alabama river. This marked the beginning of their unique patchwork quilting tradition in the 19th century that has endured till date. Hailed by the New York Times as “some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced,” Gee’s Bend quilts constitute a crucial chapter in the history of American art and today are in the permanent collections of leading art museums. The African-American quilters have gained international acclaim for their artistry, with exhibitions of Gee's Bend quilts held in museums and galleries across the United States and beyond.

The very crafting of these quilts arose from a physical need for warmth. Unaware, the quilters reinvented an art form gaining recognition for their free-form and seemingly improvisational design. It proclaims that it’s high time to break the hierarchy of the arts and come to bridge the gap. Art, Craft & Design are to be pronounced as overlapping domains existing in intersection to share an equivalent platform in the present times leading to a collaborative future.