Whiles I Yet Live: Matriarchy and Generational Exchange in Gee’s Bend
August 1 – December 28, 2025
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About the Exhibition
On a small inland horseshoe bend on the shores of the Alabama river, persists the town of Boykin, Alabama, more commonly known as Gee’s Bend. Settled in 1816, the forced labor of those enslaved on this land supported the plantation’s production throughout the 19th century. Following the Civil War and emancipation proclamation, the implemented system of Jim Crow legislation soon followed, in which tenant farming and sharecropping were introduced.
These exploitative agricultural structures contributed to the lack of intermigratory movement of families in the area, as seen in the mid-twentieth century with thousands of African American families fleeing north in the Great Migration. The uprisings that sought equitable voting rights, and the participation of Gee’s Bend residents in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s through the founding of the Freedom Quilting Bee brought forth not only the unwavering support of figures like the late Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, but further scrutiny and retaliation from local governments. Nevertheless, it is the grandmothers, mothers, and youth of the Bend who have remained at the center of the driving force for social, political, and sustainable autonomy. Amidst geographic and systemic isolation, throughout the centuries, the matriarchal powerhouses of Gee’s Bend have preserved their distinct quilting and artistic practices.
Defined by its early use of improvisation, resourceful, and utilitarian qualities—evident of the perseverance of this close-knit community—Gee’s Bend quilters have impacted the modern and contemporary American artistic canon to date, establishing a legacy that has continued to nurture some of the most important artists of our time. A testament to the survival of ancestral knowledge systems, the exhibition, Whiles I Yet Live: Matriarchy and Generational Exchange in Gee’s Bend presents a selection of over twenty quilts, spanning nearly a century of artistic practice within the community. This exhibition borrows its title from the 1955 song “Give Me My Flowers” by The Consolers, which inspired the later Christian Gospel performed by Reverend James Cleveland. The hymn was re-recorded by Boykin-based quilters Mary Ann Pettway, China Pettway, Lorene Pettway, and Nancy Pettway in 2016.
In dialogue with its cocooned locality and the continued movement for longevity, early quilts presented alongside contemporary variations from some of the Bend’s most emerging artists imagine a sustainable futurity stitched across generations, where needle and thread are passed down hand-to-hand. Featuring works by Minder Coleman, Mary Lee Bendolph, Doris Mosely, Marlene Bennett Jones, Loretta Pettway Bennett, Mary Ann Pettway, and introducing quilters DeShaun and Alexander Smith, Whiles I Yet Live: Matriarchy and Generational Exchange in Gee’s Bend plants a seed of a future to be sewn. A nod to the longevity of these practices, their continuity and proposed horizons, the centering of the Gee’s Bend quiltmakers at the National Quilt Museum, solidifies these artists as an integral branch of today’s quilters.
NQM Curator Rachael Baar and Guest Curator Starasea Camara practice the art of quilting under the purview of Fannie Etheridge and Pattie Irby at the Freedom Quilting Bee in Alberta, AL. February 21, 2025
Pictured L-R: Fannie Etheridge, Pattie Irby, Starasea Camara, Rachael Baar
Guest Curator Starasea Camara and NQM Curator Rachael Baar visit Gee’s Bend Quilter Loretta Pettway Bennett outside her studio in Boykin, AL. February 22, 2025
Pictured L-R: Starasea Camara, Loretta Pettway Bennett, Rachael Baar
Guest Curator
Starasea Nidiala Camara
Starasea Camara is a curator and scholar whose practice spans Black cultural and artistic production throughout the Americas, with a focus on Central America, the Caribbean, and the Southern United States. She is currently the Curatorial and Public Engagement Assistant at the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) in New York City. Camara has held positions with the Emerging Curators Institute in Minneapolis, at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and at The Museum of Modern Art. She was an inaugural Souls Grown Deep Foundation intern at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, where she curated the exhibition In the Presence of Our Ancestors: Southern Perspectives in African American Art (2020) and served as a research associate for the Foundation’s development of the Gee’s Bend Heritage Trail in Boykin, Alabama. She studied at the University of Minnesota, where she pursued a BA in African Diasporic History & Visual Culture. Hailing from San Diego, California, she currently resides in Queens, New York.
Photo Credit: Marcin J. Muchalski,
Diamond Shot Studio.
The Museum of Modern Art 2023
Medallion by Marlene Bennett Jones
Photo Credit: Stephen Pitkin/ Pitkin Studio,
Courtesy Souls Grown Deep