“I came to realize that my mother, her mother, my auntst, and all the others from Gee’s Bend had sewn the foundation, and all I had to do now was thread my own needle and a piece of quilt.“

– Loretta Pettway Bennett (b. 1960), Daughter of Qunnie Pettway (1943 – 2010), Granddaughter of Candis Mosely Pettway (1924 – 1997).

The women of Gee’s Bend—a small, remote, Black community in Alabama—have created hundreds of quilt masterpieces dating from the early twentieth century to the present. Resembling an inland island, Gee’s Bend is surrounded on three sides by the Alabama River. The some seven hundred or so inhabitants of this small, rural community are mostly descendants of slaves, and for generations they worked the fields belonging to the local Pettway plantation.

Alison Jacques Gallery presents the first solo exhibition in Europe devoted to three generations of women artists living in Gee’s Bend, officially known as Boykin, a remote black community situated on a U-turn in the Alabama River. The show is organised in partnership with the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, a non-profit organisation dedicated to the preservation and promotion of the contributions of African American artists from the Southern states.

The exhibition runs from the 2nd December to 6th February 2021