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Since 2002, quilts made by women of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, have been exhibited, acquired, and hailed by art museums across the United States as “American masterpieces” that tell equally potent stories about slavery’s afterlives, feminine resilience, and beauty transmitted through African American craft traditions. Simultaneously, their rising visibility has sparked critiques of the quilts’ elision with abstract painting and cultural biases underpinning their transvaluation as “art.” Coursing through these conversations is an oppositionality sited at the intersection of craft, gender, and race that challenges inequities of Western cultural and aesthetic hierarchies.

This panel seeks papers that advance critical discussions catalyzed by the Gee’s Bend phenomenon in order to connect quilts’ textile politics with broader discourses of blackness and feminism. Some topics might discuss the economic and social responses undertaken by the Gee’s Bends Collective following their national acclaim; others might complicate the historical representation of African American quilts—their debated status as code-carriers along the Underground Railroad or material retentions from Africa—to Christina Sharpe’s urgent call to “attend to physical, social, and figurative death and also to the largeness that is Black life” (In the Wake, 2016). Perspectives on traditional quilts made by individuals of African descent from the nineteenth century to the present, as well as case studies in contemporary art and craft, that center on quilts within black lived experience are welcome. They may situate quilts as vehicles of memory or affect; extensions of the body and mind; components of sensory cultures; or objects of care, among other positionalities.