Lost Coordinates

Bi-monthly essays by our in-house writer, Caterina Capelli, covering the most inspiring stories we discover along the way.

In Gee’s Bend, a remote village in Alabama, also known as Boykin, women have been making quilts for two centuries. This community of just 700 people – primarily African American descendants of the enslaved population who worked in local plantations before the Civil War – started what the New York Times called “some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced.”

Initially crafted to serve as bed coverings using scraps from everyday fabric such as tablecloths, curtains, or worn-out clothing, the Gee’s Bend Quilts ended up being exhibited in prestigious museums (like the Whitney, the Met, and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art) and sold for thousands of dollars to private collectors around the world.

Nonetheless, in Gee’s Bend, quilting has remained a family affair. “Quilting is all I’ve ever known, all I’ve ever seen growing up,” says Loretta Pettway Bennett, local artist and one of the most acclaimed living representatives of the Gee’s Bend quilting tradition. Lessons are passed down from generation to generation, ensuring everyone can partake in this craft. Instructed by her mother, Qunnie Pettway, and her aunt, Lucy T. Pettway, Bennett started quilting at six, “trying to stitch together little pieces.” She assembled her first proper quilt at 12. “Like in the past, most women use clothing. Old, worn out clothing that was either too little or just worn so bad that you could use only certain parts. You take those pieces, and you cut them up (or you rip them), and you put them together.”

Pettway Bennett was born in 1960. Within the following decade, the Quilts of Gee’s Bend became increasingly popular in the US. Their bold, colorful designs, reminiscent of Modern art, started attracting visitors. In 1966, amid the Civil Rights Movement, families in Alberta and Gee’s Bend were being evicted from their homes and losing their jobs after registering to vote. In response, local women founded the Freedom Quilting Bee, “a workers’ cooperative that provided much-needed economic opportunity and political empowerment,” making quilts and selling them to sustain the community financially.

Craftsmanship has always been tied to a profoundly human sphere, embodying stories, relationships, as well as social and cultural ties. How will it survive in a world where algorithms guide our buying choices and lifestyles, and bots prove increasingly more efficient – and to some, even more creative – than humans? The craft and the digital, computational, and algorithmic worlds are less distant than we think. According to Pettway Bennett, quilts “contain so many messages:” From personal memories – “tales of birth or deaths or happiness, sadness” – to secret codes.

In the 19th century, the quilts were used to guide escaping slaves along the Underground Railroad, the secret route to freedom. The patterns contained encoded information, hidden in plain view, “They were intended to help a person along the path. Like a map.” Some recurrent designs – like the “Log Cabin” and the “Bear Paw” – could be seen hanging outside the houses, marking safe spots or “stations” where the freedom seekers could find shelter and food. Researchers have unveiled that an actual Underground Railroad Quilt Code existed: quilters could communicate complex messages with stitches, patterns, designs, and colors.

Audrey Bennett – Diversity and Social Transformation Professor at the University of Michigan's Stamps School of Art & Design – researches innate computational thinking within Indigenous traditions like quilting, weaving, and beadwork, and calls these methods Heritage Algorithms. Bennett, who co-wrote “On Cultural Cyborgs” with Ron Eglash, says that most quilt patterns are far from merely decorative. For Bennett, recognizing the “heritage algorithm” amplifies the generational relationships via the artifact. “Here, materiality constitutes the promise of a future.”

The interest in the Black American quilting tradition resurged after the 2002 Whitney Museum exhibition The Quilts of Gee’s Bend, which consecrated the quilts in the history of modern American art. More recently, the quilters have received renovated attention from contemporary artists working within the digital realm.

In 2023, Cairo-based artist Anna Lucia – who “writes algorithms to create artworks” – designed a generative algorithm and trained it on an extensive number of Gee’s Bend Quilts to make a series of 500 NFTs called “Generations.” “The quilts' unique yet familiar patterns, seemingly random but inherently structured, are the perfect potential for a generative system,” the artist says. Anna Lucia often draws connections between craft and code in her work, as “neither is fully embraced as fine art, and both share a foundational reliance on systems and algorithms.” The quilts’ patterns are not as simple as they might look, and describing them with logic and code wasn’t easy: “The Gee's Bend quilts defy standard quilting reasoning, often taking surprising turns. Capturing this essence – this balance between order and spontaneity – became the cornerstone of my algorithm”.

Another exhibition, The New Bend, explored the “heritage algorithm found within Gee’s Bend quilts” through the works of 12 multidisciplinary artists. The show included works like Qualeasha Wood’s Ctrl+Alt+Del, a waved jacquard tile of more than two meters, depicting emojis and open tabs overlapping a giant selfie of the artist. Wood’s use of jacquard weave reconciles the digital and the analog, where a pixel equates to a stitch. Legacy Russell, the curator of The New Bend and author of Glitch Feminism, describes the Quilts as repositories of data and “letters to the future,” embedding the codes upon which artists can build new meanings and invite new legacies. “Awareness of Gee’s Bend, a network and community – especially a community of women who are doing collective, economic, cooperative, political work – can be so instructive to artists here and now,” she says in this interview.

When I spoke with Jane Schulak and David Stark, authors of  "At The Artisan’s Table,” they agreed that authenticity is the most powerful aspect of craftsmanship. In the chapter “Social Threads,” they placed some Laguna~B Goto glasses over a massive quilted tablecloth composed of denim cutouts stitched together, made by Loretta Pettway Bennett.

 

“I think artists will always exist, and they will always be the shamans who are able to take new technologies and create something new and exciting and personal with them,” Stark says. “Craftsmanship is the connective tissue to our past, what keeps connected to our history.” In a way, Jane Schulak adds, “coding and crafting are two different kinds of languages,” both of which express profound needs and powerful stories.

Seeing craftsmanship through the lens of heritage algorithms might help us embrace a generative approach to the future. Perhaps the secret to keeping it alive is simply to remain authentic to the original path, not reducing culture to code but expanding coding to embrace culture.

The works of five Gee's Bend quiltmakers will be visible until April 1, 2024, at the Louisiana Museum in Copenhagen as part of an exhibition with a significant name: The Irreplaceable Human – Conditions of Creativity in the Age of AI.