Lucy Mingo  2008

The Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present Quilts from Gee’s Bend, our fourth exhibition of quilts and prints by the women of Gee’s Bend, Alabama. This year seven quilters, ranging in age from the younger quilters, in their 40s, to Lucy Mingo, who is in her 80s, will be on hand for the opening reception.

The women of Gee’s Bend, a small, isolated community in southern Alabama, have been creating beautiful, abstract quilts, assembled without patterns, for over six generations. In recent years, their boldly colored and largely improvisational quilts have been attracting the attention of the contemporary art world. Inspiring comparisons to important modern painters such as Barnett Newman and Josef Albers, the Quilts of Gee’s Bend are known for their inventiveness, spontaneity and clever color play.

Also on view at the gallery will be a selection of new prints from the fall 2007 and 2008 releases of The Prints of Gee’s Bend. Produced in San Francisco with the assistance of master printers, several of the women from Gee’s Bend have created prints using a combination of softground and spitbite aquatint etching processes. These newest prints echo the subtleties and textures of the quilted fabric.

Since their 2002 exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American the quilts have been widely exhibited at major institutions, including the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, MA and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, TX. Beginning July 3, 2009 an expansive exhibition of the quilts and prints of Gee’s Bend will also be on view at the Schneider Museum of Art in Ashland, OR.