To kick off the year, our school wide art collaboration focused on the quilts of Gee’s Bend and the amazing artists who created them. The story of the Gee’s Bend quilters begins in the 19th century, when the enslaved women of this isolated rural spot started making quilts from whatever was at hand to keep their families warm. They passed their skills down through generations, stitching their stories into their quilts. Throughout this time, and up until the present, the settlement’s unique patchwork-quilting tradition has endured. 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 over 30 leading art museums.
Students were first tasked to create a design on a popsicle stick that incorporated their name or initials, included a Core Virtue word (or two), and highlighted something that interested them using text, graphics, shape, line, and pattern. As they were completed, each stick joined the “quilts,” one of which is installed and displayed in Fanger (5–8) and the other in Klee (K–4). Next, students focused on a paper quilt-block design that was assembled onto the bulletin board here in Bancroft. Grade levels were assigned a color story, and each student crafted a square design including pattern, symmetry and asymmetry, and organic and geometric shapes. Each square joined the large-scale quilt mural in Bancroft to unite us all as we start the new school year!
Gee’s Bend content adapted from the Souls Grown Deep website.
