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Quilting bodies: the Gee's Bend Quilters, Sanford Biggers, and Jonathan VanDyke

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Quilting bodies: the Gee's Bend Quilters, Sanford Biggers, and Jonathan VanDyke

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QUILTING BODIES:
THE GEE’S BEND QUILTERS, SANFORD BIGGERS, AND JONATHAN VANDYKE
by
Austen Villacis

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ROSKI SCHOOL OF ART AND DESIGN
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(CURATORIAL PRACTICES AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE)

May 2023

Copyright 2023 Austen Villacis

ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many thanks to my committee comprised of Professor Andrew Campbell (Chair),
Professor Suzanne Hudson, and Professor Amelia Jones for their lasting patience, thoughtful
guidance, and extraordinary generosity through the process of ideating, writing, and researching
for this thesis.

iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................................... ii

List of Figures ............................................................................................................................... iv

Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... vi

Introduction ......................................................................................................................................1

Chapter One: “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend” ....................................................................................14

Chapter Two: “Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch” ..............................................................................27

Chapter Three: “The Patient Eye” .................................................................................................40

Conclusion .....................................................................................................................................50

Bibliography ..................................................................................................................................55

Figures............................................................................................................................................61

iv
LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Robert Rauschenberg, Bed, 1955. Oil and pencil on pillow, quilt, and sheet on
wood supports, 75 1/4 x 31 1/2 x 8 in. Image courtesy the Museum of Modern Art. ...................61

Figure 2: Installation views of "The Object Transformed," June 29, 1966–September 5,
1966. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photograph by George Cserna. .........................61

Figure 3: Installation views of "The Object Transformed," June 29, 1966–September 5,
1966. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photograph by George Cserna. .........................61

Figure 4: Installation views of “Abstract Design in American Quilts,” July 1-September
12, 1971. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Photo courtesy the
International Quilt Museum, Lincoln, Nebraska. .........................................................................62

Figure 5: Installation view “Abstract Design in American Quilts at 50: Raising the
Profile,” April 2 – August 7, 2021. Photo courtesy the International Quilt Museum,
Lincoln, Nebraska. ........................................................................................................................62

Figure 6: Installation view “The Quilts of Gee's Bend,” Whitney Museum of American
Art, New York, New York, November 21, 2002–March 9, 2003. Photography by Jerry
Thompson. ....................................................................................................................................63

Figure 7: Arthur Rothstein, Girl at Gee’s Bend (Artelia Bendolph), April 1937.
Photograph. Gee’s Bend, Alabama. Image courtesy the Library of Congress. ............................63

Figure 8: Nellie Pettway, Pig in a Pen, 1955. Cotton, 78 x 78 inches. Photo by Stephen
Pitkin/Pitkin Studio, courtesy of Souls Grown Deep Foundation. Collection of Clark
Atlanta University Art Museum, gift of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation. ..............................63

Figure 9: Minnie Sue Coleman, Pig in a Pen, c. 1970. 82 x 61 inches. Photo by Stephen
Pitkin/Pitkin Studio, courtesy of Souls Grown Deep Foundation. Collection of
Montgomery Museum of Fine Art Museum purchase and gift of the Souls Grown Deep
Foundation. ...................................................................................................................................64

Figure 10: Loretta, Pettway, Bricklayer, c. 1970. Denim, 84 x 66 in. Photo by Steve
Pitkin/Pitkin Studio, courtesy of Souls Grown Deep Foundation. Collection of the
Museum of Fine Arts Houston. .....................................................................................................64

Figure 11: Mary L. Bennett, Bricklayer, c. 1970s. Corduroy, 83 x 73 inches. Photo by
Stephen Pitkin/Pitkin Studio, courtesy of Souls Grown Deep Foundation. .................................65

Figure 12: Linda Diane Bennett, Housetop with cross, c 1970. Cotton, synthetic blends,
wool 78 x 75 inches. Photo by Stephen Pitkin/Pitkin Studio, courtesy of Souls Grown
Deep Foundation. ..........................................................................................................................65

v
Figure 13: Annie E. Pettway, Housetop’ – nine-block variation, c. 1930. Courtesy Souls
Grown Deep Foundation and Alison Jacques Gallery, London. ..................................................66

Figure 14: Sanford Biggers, Constellation Quilts, 2009. Installation view at Mother
Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Philadelphia, as part of Hidden City Project
organized by Peregrine Arts. Reproduced in Codeswitch. ...........................................................66

Figure 15: Installation view of “Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch,” July 28, 2021, to January
23, 2022. California African American Museum, Los Angeles. Image courtesy the
California African American Museum. ........................................................................................67

Figure 16 Installation view of “Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch,” July 28, 2021, to January
23, 2022. California African American Museum, Los Angeles. Image courtesy the
California African American Museum. ........................................................................................67

Figure 17: Installation view of “Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch,” July 28, 2021, to January
23, 2022. California African American Museum, Los Angeles. Image courtesy the
California African American Museum. ........................................................................................68

Figure 18: Installation view of “Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch,” July 28, 2021, to January
23, 2022. California African American Museum, Los Angeles. Image courtesy the
California African American Museum. ........................................................................................68

Figure 19: I Installation view of “Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch,” July 28, 2021, to
January 23, 2022. California African American Museum, Los Angeles. Image courtesy
the California African American Museum. ..................................................................................69

Figure 20: Sanford Biggers, UGRR: US 2.2, 2009. Antique quilt, oil stick, pastel,
charcoal, silkscreen on muslin, 90 x 80 in. Images courtesy the Rivers Institute. .......................69

Figure 21: Sanford Biggers, Luna Medicina, 2016. Antique quilt, gold leaf, acrylic, spray
paint, 39 x 17 ¼ in. Image courtesy the Rivers Institute. .............................................................69

Figure 22: Stowage of the British slave ship "Brookes" under the Regulated Slave Trade
Act of 1788. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress Rare Book and Special
Collections Division. .....................................................................................................................70

Figure 23: Sanford Biggers. Quilt 14 (Flying Lotus), 2012. Antique quilt, embroidery,
acrylic, spray paint. 97 x 90 in. .....................................................................................................70

Figure 24: Film stills from Moonrising (2014), HD video. 6:46 min. ..........................................71

Figure 25: Mandala of the B-Bodhisattva II (2000), single channel video, 12:21 min. ...............72

Figure 26: Documentation of VanDyke’s “The Patient Eye” performance, 2018. Image
courtesy the Columbus Museum of Art. .......................................................................................72

vi
Figure 27: Documentation of VanDyke’s “The Patient Eye” performance detailing
archival storage. Image courtesy of the Columbus Museum of Art. ............................................73

Figure 28: Jonathan Vandyke, N v J, 2015/2016. Brad and David performance canvas,
studio session 13, whipping sequence, in gold, with over-dyed and painted canvas, 64 ½
x 57 in. Private collection, Rome. .................................................................................................73

Figure 29: Installation view of “The Patient Eye,” The Columbus Museum of Art. Image
courtesy the Columbus Museum of Art. .......................................................................................74

Figure 30: Installation view of “The Patient Eye,” The Columbus Museum of Art. Image
courtesy the Columbus Museum of Art. .......................................................................................74

vi
Figure 28: Jonathan Vandyke, N v J, 2015/2016. Brad and David performance canvas,
studio session 13, whipping sequence, in gold, with over-dyed and painted canvas, 64 ½
x 57 in. Private collection, Rome.

Figure 29: Installation view of “The Patient Eye,” The Columbus Museum of Art. Image
courtesy the Columbus Museum of Art.

Figure 30: Installation view of “The Patient Eye,” The Columbus Museum of Art. Image
courtesy the Columbus Museum of Art.

vii
ABSTRACT

“The Quilts of Gee’s Bend” (Whitney Museum of American Art, 2003), “Sanford
Biggers: Codeswitch” (California African American Museum, 2020), and “The Patient Eye”
(Columbus Museum of Art, 2018) are episodic migrations of the quilt into American Art
institutions via the form of the museum exhibition. “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend” set a precedent
as the first exhibition of historical quilts to be associated with a distinct group of makers in a
modern American art museum, but in displaying the quilts as art, elided historical context in
favor of cultural appropriation masked as formalism. In the time since, artists have undertaken
appropriative strategies to present the quilt as an object and a subject with infinite, if unknown,
entanglements with bodies, history, daily life, and ritual. Biggers uses quilts as tablets for artistic
interventions, in reference to the contested notion that quilts were used along the Underground
Railroad to guide enslaved people to safety, while VanDyke performs the act of slow looking,
emphasizing the quilt’s “thingness.” These artists, if problematically, explore how quilts as
objects in institutions and objects appropriated by artists exist within a series of binaries. In
doing so, they add to a growing number of artists bringing quilts and quilting histories into the
21
st
century.

1
Introduction
Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed (1955), given to the Museum of Modern Art in 1989 by the
artist’s dealer Leo Castelli, was made using a stolen quilt (Figure 1). Rauschenberg is said to
have woken up one morning without anything to paint on, and as he looked around, saw a quilt.
He pinned it to a canvas stretcher and tried to abstract it, which did not work. He then added a
pillow and part of a sheet, turning the canvas into a bed.
1
As it turns out, that quilt originally
belonged to fellow Black Mountain student Dorothea Rockburne. She recounted the story in
2017 for the New York Times on the occasion of “Robert Rauschenberg: Among Friends” at
MoMA, a large survey of Rauschenberg’s works, remembering how she unloaded the dryer in a
communal laundry area at Black Mountain only to realize that her patchwork quilt was gone.
“The next time I saw it was at the Leo Castelli Gallery,” she said, referring to Bed. “My first
thought was: Son of a bitch! We were close friends.”
2
It is not clear whether Rockburne, known
today as a New York-based abstract painter, made the quilt herself or if she even knew the
quilter’s name. Either way, that Rockburne’s story was not excavated and emphasized until
many years after the fact illustrates how certain forms of gendered creative production are
considered valid and others are not.
3
Quilting is a distinctly feminine discipline having offered
many women since the late 18
th
century in America a rare opportunity to creatively produce
functional objects. What, then, does it mean for a male artist, like Rauschenberg, to have
appropriated this object in an art context?
Quilts, by that point in 1955, had not yet been fully recognized as art within American art
museums and displayed alongside the works of male modernists (and contemporaries) like

1
Robert Rauschenberg, “An Interview with Robert Rauschenberg,” interview by Barbara Rose in Rauschenberg,
Vintage Contemporary Artist series (New York: Random House, 1987), 58.
2
Deborah Solomon, “For Robert Rauschenberg, No Artist Is an Island,” New York Times, May 11, 2017.
3
Museum audio description, Bed, New York, Museum of Modern Art.

2
Barnett Newman, Robert Rauschenberg and Kenneth Noland in many American art museums,
despite their formal resonances with color field and abstract painting. As Patricia Mainardi
writes, quilts were “downgraded and omitted from art history” despite a rich history of design
that yielded countless designs that went by different names in different states across time.
4
Far
from being merely objects created by women in their spare time, through quilting women
“succeeded in building a design tradition so strong that its influence has extended over 400
years.”
5
Rather, quilts, as objects worthy of contemplation and study, found a home in design, as
well as naïve, folk, and outsider art discourses, often prized for their “deskilled” or untrained
qualities. They had long been framed as artifacts from a sort of American prehistory, rather than
as contemporary art objects. The Index of American Design, for instance, a Federal Art Project
that doubled as a work-relief program during the Depression, attempted to chronicle an
American national aesthetic by commissioning artists to document whirligigs, weathervanes,
woodcarvings, and quilts, from all over the US in watercolor. The project was guided primarily
by Holger Cahill, a curator who was the national director of the Federal Art Project of the Works
Progress Administration during the New Deal, and is currently housed at the National Gallery of
Art in Washington, D.C., comprising 18,257 watercolor renderings.
6
Cahill writes in the
introduction to the eponymous text that folk art did not really make its way into national
consciousness until the mid 1920s and 30s, when a perfect storm of institutions like the Museum
of Modern Art, the Newark Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Colonial
Williamsburg, several collectors, and a certain “self-consciousness” about what is actually

4
Patricia Mainardi, “Quilts: A Great American Art,” Ms. 2 (Winter 1973): 62.
5
Ibid.
6
Elizabeth Stillinger, “From Attics, Sheds, and Secondhand Shops: Collecting Folk Art in America, 1880-1940” in
Drawing on America’s Past (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2002), 56-57.

3
American “aside from the stream of fashions which we imported and appropriated as our own.”
7

Quilts still struggle for legibility in American art museums as a distinct category of objects,
though that does not mean they are not present at all. Quilts have, in recent years and over the
past half century, increasingly made their way into American art museums, through several key
exhibitions and through the work of the Gee’s Bend quilters, Sanford Biggers, and Jonathan
VanDyke. As I will argue, while the tradition of male artists, like Rauschenberg, appropriating
quilts as objects continues alongside some recognition of actual female makers, the exhibitions
representing these artists all critically question and explore how to sustain the quilt as a
distinctive art object with ties to histories, bodies, and lives.
Long before acquiring Bed in 1989, MoMA first exhibited Bed in 1966 in an exhibition
called “The Object Transformed” curated by Mildred Constantine. Featuring the work of many
emerging figures in modern art, and daringly including two women, one of them not white, Les
Levine and Yayoi Kusama, the through-line of all selected objects is that they are comprised, in
some way, of objects from everyday life including books, bottles, clothing, or, in Rauschenberg’s
case, a stolen quilt. “The Object Transformed” aimed to illuminate the “second set of
associations” that regular objects can take on outside of their normal contexts.
8
Most objects
were installed within vitrines or sealed cases, contrasting the banality of their materials against
the isolated object-ness assumed by an art object (Figures 2 and 3). It remains unclear who
instigated these installation decisions, though they were likely made or at least accounted for by
Arthur Drexler, Director of the Department of Design, who is credited with installation. If the
exhibition were not a clear enough proposal for museumgoers to experience each object on their
own terms, the catalog, designed by Massimo Vignelli, features a white, braille-like cover of

7
Erwin Christensen, The Index of American Design (New York, Macmillan: 1950), x.
8
Mildred Constantine and Arthur Drexler, The Object Transformed (New York: MoMA, 1966), xi.

4
intricate perforated dots and lines that imply irregular patterns and shapes and invite the press of
a finger or the feel of a hand. I would argue that this mirrors the language with which the
exhibition proposes viewers consider the exhibition: via an individualized experience of the
materiality of a banal object.
In the context of MoMA’s institutional history, “The Object Transformed” was one of a
number in MoMA’s ongoing campaign to link Surrealism and emerging American artists,
including “Art of Assemblage” in 1961, indicating not only its immense and ongoing influence
since the 1920s, but also its specific reception in the 1960s in postwar US. As Sandra Zalman
argues, by the 1960s formalists Clement Greenberg and the younger Michael Fried’s exclusion
of Surrealism from the modernist canon was met with a growing resurgence in interest in
Surrealism’s “hybrid quality” in large part due to Pop art.
9
In 1968, MoMA’s then-new Curator
of Painting and Sculpture William Rubin would organize “Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage”
which positioned Surrealism as a critical influence on then-contemporary artists Jackson Pollock,
Mark Rothko, Niki de Saint Phalle, Christo, Jasper Johns, Kienholz, and Rauschenberg.
Alfred Barr had been pushed out of the position after including “outsider art” or art by
untrained artists, in multiple exhibitions.
10
Among others, he curated “Fantastic Art, Dada,
Surrealism”, which exhibited folk art alongside works Marc Chagall, Giorgio de Chirico, Marcel
Duchamp, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso. The catalog, which breaks down
the exhibition into eight categories, includes a section on ‘Comparative Material’, was divided
into six subsections: ‘Art of Children’, ‘Art of the Insane’, ‘Folk Art’, ‘Commercial and

9
Sandra Zalman, “The Canonization of Surrealism in the United States,” Journal of Art Historiography 19, no. 12,
(2018): 9.
10
Dieter De Vlieghere, “Alfred H. Barr, MoMA, and the Entrance and Exit of Outsider Art (1936-1943),” Journal of
curatorial studies 10, no. 1 (2021): 22.

5
Journalistic Art’, ‘Miscellaneous Objects and Pictures of Surrealist Character’ and ‘Scientific
Objects’.
11
Following Barr’s exit, MoMA did not name another director until 1949.
12

When Rauschenberg created Bed in 1955, it was directly entangled in these ongoing
discourses and institutional motivations concerned with America’s national postwar identity,
cultural nationalism, and the institutional visibility of “untrained” creative production. Like a
patchwork quilt, the quilt’s identity is formed from multiple distinctive elements, unitary but
united. Prior to arriving at MoMA for “The Object Transformed,” Bed already had something of
a reputation, at least in part due to what transpired at “documenta II: Art after 1945” in 1959.
Technically speaking, though, the scandal was that Bed had not made a debut at all. Rather, when
Bed arrived from the International Council with other American artworks, it “puzzled the
German organizers in Kassel who decided to leave it in the crate.”
13
Simultaneously there and
not there, Bed maps the way quilts were presented in American art institutions over the course of
the next few decades, including through exhibitions like “Abstract Design in American Quilts” at
the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1971, the first at an American art institution to
exclusively feature quilts (Figure 4).
“Abstract Design in American Quilts” was curated by collectors Jonathan Holstein, who
worked as an art photographer, and Gail van der Hoof, who had a background in advertising and
fashion marketing.
14
Holstein writes in Abstract Design in American Quilts: A Biography of an
Exhibition that a mutual friend at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, after seeing the
couple’s collection (Holstein and van der Hoof later married in 1973), encouraged them to

11
Ibid, 10.
12
“A.H. Barr Retires at Modern Museum,” New York Times, October 28, 1943, 30; and “Promoted to Director of
Modern Art Museum,” New York Times, October 19, 1949.
13
Catherine Dossin, “To Drip or to Pop: The European Triumph of American Art,” Arts Bulletin 3, no. 1 (2014): 92.
14
Grace Glueck “They’re Shoofly and Crazy, Man,” New York Times, June 27, 1971.

6
propose an exhibition at the Whitney, “and the rest is history.”
15
The couple’s sourcing is
curatorial in nature and has a long precedent in the history of outsider and folk art.
16
As many
institutions were not collecting quilts and other objects made by “outsiders”, it was largely
private ownership and collecting that determined which works were preserved and maintained
and which were not in the early 20
th
century.
17
“Abstract Design in American Quilts” featured 62
quilts from Pennsylvania, Vermont, New Jersey, and New Hampshire, with formal parallels to
modern and contemporary abstract painters in the Whitney’s collection like Paul Klee, Wassily
Kandinsky, Mark Rothko, and even Barnett Newman, to whom the catalog for the exhibition is
dedicated.
18

The catalog states that “the exhibition is not a comprehensive review of quilt-making in
America” but rather, it is “a demonstration of inherent regard for a tangible form of visual
satisfaction.”
19
Addressing the quilt apart from biography and use-value, “considerations of
technique, geographical distinction and historical significance have been excluded in favor of
visual content.”
20
Though it is not clear that was actually their choice to make, as Holstein and
van der Hoof concede in the checklist for the exhibition: “in few cases is it possible to positively
establish the provenance of these quilts.”
21
The exhibition was so popular that it was extended
for an additional month—and here another paradox, the popularity of quilts in museum contexts
set against the obscurity of their provenance.
22
Quilt provenance is a complicated matter in itself,

15
Jonathan Holstein, Abstract Design in American Quilt: a Biography of an Exhibition (Louisville, KY: Kentucky
Quilt Project, 1991), 44.
16
Elizabeth Stillinger, A kind of archeology: collecting American folk art, 1876-1976 (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 2011).
17
Ibid.
18
Jonathan Holstein, Abstract Design in American Quilts, (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1971), 5.
19
Ibid, 6.
20
Ibid, 6.
21
Ibid, 13.
22
This is alluded to in several magazine articles about the exhibition. It is true that the catalog states that it ran from
July 1 through September 12 and the Whitney Archive says it closed October 5.

7
as they were produced both individually and communally and were often objects of use that
emerged from wildly diverse socioeconomic, racial, and gendered contexts.
The changing legibility of the quilt as an art form, or at least its popularity, is mirrored in
Hilton Kramer’s 1971 review of “Abstract Design in American Quilts”, oft-cited across many
historical accounts of the exhibition. Kramer writes that the Whitney’s exhibition lends generous
support to the growing suspicion that “the most authentic visual articulation of the American
imaginary in the last century is to be found in the so-called “minor” arts—especially the visual
crafts that had their origins in the workaday functions of regional life.”
23
Kramer writes that his
suspicions are especially strong because “the Whitney has rarely condescended to acknowledge
the “decorative arts,” as they are called, as a significant contribution to American artistic
achievement.”
24
Indeed, the exhibition remains significant enough for the International Quilt
Museum at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to periodically re-stage it with the original quilt
grouping. It was re-staged most recently in 2021, on the 50
th
anniversary of the original show,
with additional context provided the debates generated by the original show (Figure 5).
Given the popular and critical success of “Abstract Design in American Quilts,” it is
unsurprising that when the Whitney again saw the opportunity to exhibit over sixty quilts
formally resonant with modern and contemporary painting, they took it. “The Quilts of Gee’s
Bend,” organized by the Houston Museum of Fine Art in 2002, centers a quilting history that
evolved in Gee’s Bend, Alabama, produced and carried on by enslaved people, their
descendants, and others—all of whom are women. The initial group of quilts was sourced by
William Arnett of Tinwood Media; the Museum of Fine Arts Houston’s Alvia Wardlaw, along
with others, then drew primarily from this collection in curating the exhibition. The quilts were

23
Hilton Kramer, “Art: Quilts Find a place at the Whitney,” New York Times, July 3, 1971.
24
Ibid.

8
installed in groups based on composition or material with little to accompany them except a
documentary made by Arnett that featured talking head interviews, footage of the Gee’s Bend
community, and FSA photographs. In total, the exhibition traveled to eleven other art museums
over a period of 4 years.
25

Christopher French wrote that the exhibition at the Houston MFA “upset expectations,”
with many quilters reinventing their chosen materials “as effectively as Robert Morris and
Richard Serra incorporated the lead, felt, steel, and fabric they found in their initial expeditions
into Soho warehouses in the 1960s.”
26
Like Hilton Kramer for The New Yorker in 1971
reviewing “Abstract Design in American Quilts,” critic Michael Kimmelman similarly writes
that the quilts at the Whitney embody “some of the most miraculous works of modern art
America has produced.”
27
Kimmelman called the quilts of Gee’s Bend exhibition “the most
ebullient” of the season,” noting that attuned viewers might see “here a Barnett Newman, there a
Frank Stella, here a Josef Albers, there an Agnes Martin.
”28
“The Quilts of Gee’s Bend” was
created within the footprint of “Abstract Design in American Quilts” and as some of these
reviews indicate, the quilts’ success was often predicated on legible formal relationship to
modern American art.
In the time since “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend,” male contemporary artists including
Sanford Biggers and Jonathan VanDyke have appropriated historical quilts in their art practices,

25
The dates are as follows: Whitney Museum of American Art, Nov. 21, 2002-Feb. 23, 2003; Mobile Museum of
Art, June 16-Aug. 31, 2003; Milwaukee Art Museum, Sept. 27, 2003-Jan. 4, 2004; The Corcoran Gallery of Art,
Feb. 14-May 17, 2004; Cleveland Museum of Art, Jun 27-Sept 12, 2004; Chrysler Museum of Art, Oct 15, 2004-Jan
2, 2005; Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Feb 13-May 8, 2005; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, June 1-Aug 21,
2005; The Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art at Auburn University, Sept 11-Dec 4, 2005; High Museum of
Art, Atlanta, Mar 25-June 18, 2006; The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, M.H. de Young Memorial Museum,
July 15-Dec 31, 2006.
26
Christopher French, “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend,” Glasstire, September 2, 2002.
27
Michael Kimmelman, “Jazzy Geometry, Cool Quilters,” New York Times, November 29, 2002.
28
Ibid.

9
adding new dimensions to the ongoing issue of quilts’ authorship, recognition, and legibility.
Like Rauschenberg, though, these men ultimately and problematically benefit, in different ways,
from using historical objects that are not their own. To these ends, in 1994, Susan Bernick
published “A Quilt Is an Art Object When It Stands Up like a Man,” where she takes men to task
for doing just that.
29
Bernick frames inequitable or questionable profits made my collectors,
including Holstein of “Abstract Design in American Quilts,” asserting that it is male collectors
who profit the most from quilts making their way into American art institutions.
30
For Bernick,
this appropriation is a form of cultural theft. On Rauschenberg’s Bed, Bernick writes that
“radical feminists point to Bed not because they think it made quilts into works of art, but
because it symbolizes how quilts as art are often destroyed as quilts and, hence, as art.”
31
As I
will argue, given the questionable relationship between William Arnett and the quilter of Gee’s
Bend, and the contemporary appropriative art practices of Biggers and VanDyke, Bernick’s
conclusion may still resound today if more complicated. Bernick concludes by calling for a “full
story” of quilt history that was yet then, and is still now, to be expressed. As I will argue, though,
quilters both of different sexes and sexual orientations deserve a spot in this ongoing history.
In no way do I frame this thesis as full account of quilt histories. I acknowledge, though I
do not discuss, the towering influence of figures like Faith Ringgold, Rosie Lee Tompkins, and
others as major contributors to how contemporary quilting and quilting histories are understood
and framed as art today. I also acknowledge the difference between people identifying as
contemporary artists using quilt-making and crafting traditions versus quilters in community far
from “contemporary art”. While these distinctions are important, I focus on how the artists and

29
Susan E. Bernick, “A Quilt Is an Art Object When It Stands Up like a Man,” in Quilt Culture: Tracing the
Pattern, ed. Cheryl B. Torsney and Judy Elsley (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1994), 137.
30
Ibid.
31
Ibid.

10
the exhibitions, including programming and performance, together frame and present quilts and
their histories, and their ultimate implications.
Sanford Biggers and Jonathan VanDyke, as contemporary artists, come up against many
curatorial problems that museums also come up against in exhibitions: lack of provenance
information, object handling and condition concerns regarding their display, and how to address
the quilt’s American histories. In the case of Sanford Biggers and Jonathan VanDyke, the quilts
they appropriate currently lack critical provenance information. While material and design-based
analyses might yield some potential answers to areas or time periods from which the quilts might
have emerged, as I explain later, their omnipresence in American history, individual and
communal production, along with their use-function make their provenance difficult to ascertain.
When Biggers and VanDyke use historical quilts in their work, their terms are necessarily
limited: they cannot directly address or embody the quilts’ makers, only their necessarily
imagined past.
As I will argue, Biggers and VanDyke are able to center multiple speculative lived
histories of historical quilts and expose the museological power structures at play in their lack of
recognition as art by appropriating them as objects. Though the idea that an artist or institution
can reach an objective place where race, gender, and sex can be transcended has long been put to
bed, which begs the question: because neither Biggers nor VanDyke are women, and most quilts
are made by women, are their practices problematic, regardless of their critical interventions?
The answer is complicated, as it is not clear where the quilts Biggers uses are from nor who
made them, even though appropriating a “pre-1900s quilt” (the term Biggers uses) made by a one
specific group instead of another would have differing implications. VanDyke appropriates
historical quilts through embodied performance, curation, and art-making, his presence making

11
his appropriation legible in a way that Biggers’ exhibition does not. VanDyke engages the quilts
through an archive, working with the Museum to curate an exhibition that explicitly included
many other objects in addition to quilts of unknown provenance framed by his painting practice
which itself is informed by quilting histories (though distinct from them). Biggers and
VanDyke’s appropriative modes, even if they might be called problematic, are also different,
varied, and visible in a way that warrants additional exploration.
In the first section, I focus on “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend,” and draw upon Farm Security
Administration photographs commissioned by Roy Stryker and framed as a New Deal success
story as a historical blueprint for what detractors of “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend” argued was the
exhibition’s reductive and exoticizing curatorial strategy. I propose an alternative history of
Gee’s Bend not represented in the exhibition that centers religious visions that might have
informed the formal choices made by quilters. Such histories actually have a more defined
lineage in the exhibitions of folk art, also frequently referred to as “primitive,” “naïve,” which
privileges the deeply religious contexts from which they often emerged.
32
“The Quilts of Gee’s
Bend” in both scope and scale, introduced vast numbers of museum-goers to a distinctly
authored group of quilts again framed as a discrete chapter of American art, and through the
exhibition and its fallout, raised fundamental questions about the role of the museum and the
institution in the framing of quilts as art and their makers as artists. Biggers and VanDyke not
only refer to Gee’s Bend in their own writings and interviews but take up many of the same
issues in their own work, appropriating and visualizing quilts in a way that disturbs the
institutional, exhibitionary, and gender-based binaries in which quilts are embedded.
33

32
Lynne Cooke and Douglas Crimp, Outliers and American Vanguard Art (Washington and Chicago: National
Gallery of Art, The University of Chicago Press), 88.
33
Siddhartha Mitter, “Cracking Codes with Sanford Biggers,” New York Times, August 14, 2020; and Daisy Nam,
“Daisy Nam in conversation with Jonathan VanDyke,” The Rib, November 5, 2018.

12
In the second section, I focus on “Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch,” an exhibition recently
installed at the California African American Museum in 2021. The exhibition draws from the
Codex project in which Biggers uses “found” pre-1900s quilts and reimagines them as part of the
history of quilts rumored to have directed travelers along the Underground Railroad, a contested
history traceable to only one oral history.
34
I explore how Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation”
illuminates the multiple pasts and futures created by Biggers’ appropriation of the quilt, archives,
and vernacular history. While I use the exhibition as my primary lens through which to examine
the project, I focus on the Brookes slaves ship that Biggers deploys and note how the artist’s
interventions on the found quilts changed over time. I argue that by responding to each quilt
uniquely and by visualizing the quilt increasingly as a document of his own artistic interventions,
Biggers ultimately moves the quilt’s histories forward in time, if at his own critical and financial
benefit, which belies the ways that many women have still yet to receive their due critical
acclaim and attention.
VanDyke also appropriates historical quilts in “The Patient Eye” at the Columbus
Museum of Art in Georgia. The project comprised both an exhibition and a 48-hour performance
that engaged deeply with the Columbus Museum’s archives, where the artist sought out objects
primarily (though not exclusively) that lacked provenance information, had never been exhibited
before, or had obvious signs of wear and use, among other things. The exhibition component
features some such objects, quilt and non-quilt, alongside some of VanDyke’s paintings made
“with two dancer-collaborators, exploring body movement and gesture to mark the canvas.”
35

Those materials are assembled by VanDyke into double sided quilt-like compositions, unifying

34
Jaqueline Tobin, Hidden in Plain View : the Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad (New York:
Doubleday: 1999).
35
Jonathan VanDyke and Jonathan Waltz, The Patient Eye (Columbus, GA: Columbus Museum of Art , 2018), 10.

13
physical movement and the formal composition of a quilt. For the performance component,
which took place in the foyer of the Museum, VanDyke selected sixteen quilts from the
Columbus Museum of Art’s archives and in ritualized fashion (and with assistance), unsheathed,
unfolded, and laid out each quilt on a large, flat, bed-like white pedestal—ultimately hoisting
each one up so they could be approached in the round. VanDyke then stood, looking at,
examining, and otherwise focusing on the quilts from varying distances within the foyer for three
hours each, turning his own looking as well as the quilt itself into the subject of his performance.
By focusing primarily on exhibitions, I aim to illuminate the dominant ways in which
quilts are beginning, and will continue, to be interpolated with modern and contemporary
American art institutions. I focus on quilting histories specifically, quilts defined as 3-layer
stitched bedcoverings. Much of the scholarship on “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend” is based on the
Whitney iteration of the exhibition, a tendency I inevitably reproduce in this thesis. Because
quilting traditions vary by region and locale, more research is warranted in terms of how the
exhibition was understood in each of its dozen venues. “Codeswitch”, as a travelling exhibition,
received more critical and popular attention than “The Patient Eye” which is reflected in this
thesis as well. Because my argument pertains to historical quilts, I focus on quilt production
primarily before the moment in the 1970s when machine-made quilts overtook commercially
made quilts in quilt production, and quilts were increasingly made for commercially.
36
I end by
discussing the broader resurgence in interest in quilting histories by contemporary artists,
curators, and others.

36
Janneken Smucker, "Destination Amish quilt country: the consumption of quilts in Lancaster County,
Pennsylvania," Mennonite Quarterly Review 80, no. 2 (2006): 185.

14
Chapter One: “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend”

“The Quilts of Gee’s Bend” was organized by the Houston Museum of Fine Art and co-
curated by their Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art Alvia Wardlaw, John Beardsley (a
senior lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Design), Jane Livingston (an independent
curator and author), and expert on Black Southern folk art William Arnett. The Gee’s Bend
quilters, whose quilts comprise the exhibition, are a generation of quilters largely descended
from enslaved people purchased by Joseph Gee, a plantation owner, and brought to the area of
Alabama that would come to be known as Gee’s Bend in 1816. Three decades later, the
plantation and the enslaved people were sold to the Pettway family, the name many of them took
following Emancipation.
37
Many continued farming thereafter, and via some New Deal programs
were offered the chance to buy land tracts with low-interest government loans for which there
exists ample Farm Security Administration documentation.
38
20 Pettway descendants still
holding the Pettway name contributed quilts to “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend” in 2002.
The quilts themselves are boldly designed and distinctive objects notable for their non-
linear, asymmetrical, and even warped compositions. Art historian Sally Anne Duncan writes
that the Whitney version of the show frames the quilts as art in three distinct ways: through “an
emphasis on the quilts’ formally sophisticated design, a focus on the community’s socio-cultural
history, and an exploration of the unique identities and contributions of individual quiltmakers as
creative artists.”
39
A documentary film produced by Tinwood Media, associated with co-curator
William Arnett, accompanies the exhibition, and features Farm Security Administration

37
Nancy Scheper-Hughes, "Anatomy of a quilt: the Gee's Bend freedom quilting bee," Southern Cultures 10, no. 3
(2004): 88.
38
Tom Pich and Barry Bergey, “Quilters of Gee’s Bend Loretta Pettway, Lucy Mingo, and Mary Lee Bendolph,” in
Folk Masters: A Portrait of America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018), 212.
39
Sally Anne Duncan, “From Cloth to Canvas: Reinventing Gee’s Bend Quilts in the Name of Art,” Museum
anthropology 28, no. 1 (2005): 19–34.

15
Photographs from the 1930s, along with contemporary footage of the women quilting, shucking
beans, discussing the materials from which the quilts are made, and sharing anecdotes about their
use.
40
Duncan writes that in the Whitney’s presentation of the exhibition the quilts were widely
spaced with little to no historical context, and the exhibition contained no actual images of the
quilters, except the ones presented in the documentary (Figure 6).
41
Rather, the exhibition itself
was arranged via various formal through-lines of the quilts: the “housetop quilts, the “my way”
quilts, and the corduroy quilts of the 1970s” emphasizing “differences between quilts and the
changes that occurred over time as the product of culture and history.”
42

The exhibition elicited various critiques which call into question issues of ethics, ranging
from the financial deals between William Arnett and the quilters to issues of representation,
specifically concerning whether or not representing quilts as “art” was the best way educate new
audiences about quilting and quilting histories—particularly the quilting histories that emerged
from Gee’s Bend. As the critic Christine Tate asks in her review of the exhibition for Textile:
Does hanging these quilts on bare white walls fetishize them beyond recovery?
Can/should the agency of the quilters themselves be reflected in such a milieu?
Perhaps the very persistence of these questions is their answer, but a bit of ethical
uncertainty is a small price to pay for having seen “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend.”
43

I will explore these questions first through the Farm Security administration photographs
presented as historical context in the exhibition and follow by focusing on an underplayed
historical element of the quilts of Gee’s Bend: profoundly visual testimonies of religious
conversion experiences. As I will argue, these religious contexts inform an alternative narrative

40
Matt Arnett, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Tinwood Media (Firm), and Vanessa Vadim, The quilts of Gee's
Bend / a Tinwood Media Production, documentary, 2002, 28min, https://www.si.edu/object/siris_sil_727152.
41
Sally Anne Duncan, “From Cloth to Canvas: Reinventing Gee’s Bend Quilts in the Name of Art,” Museum
anthropology 28, no. 1 (2005): 22.
42
Michael J Prokopow, “Material Truths: The Quilts of Gee’s Bend at the Whitney Museum of Art: An Exhibition
Review,” Winterthur portfolio 38, no. 1 (2003): 57–66.
43
Christine Tate, “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend,” Textile: the journal of cloth and culture 1, no. 3 (2002): 300.

16
proposing that in addition their value as usable objects, they were made with and of a shared
visual vocabulary already present in their own daily lives.

The Exhibition
Art historian Bridget Cooks noted that “the quilts looked awkward as their edges curved
back and forth against gallery walls” after seeing the exhibition in 2003.
44
Cooks locates part of
their awkwardness in how the “race, class, and gender barriers of the museum remained strong
enough to highlight the dislocation of the women and their work in the museum” and goes on to
write that the exhibition maintains the lens of anthropological discovery used to frame 1930s-era
exhibitions of Black art such as “Exhibition of Sculpture by William Edmondson,” in 1937 at the
Museum of Modern Art and “Contemporary Negro Art,” organized by the Baltimore Museum of
Art in 1939.
45
A far cry from Kimmelman’s rave review, pointed criticism of “The Quilts of
Gee’s Bend” did occasionally stumble out of academia and into public view, including an
exchange between Thelma Golden, then Director of Exhibitions and Programs at the Studio
Museum in Harlem, and the Gee’s bend quilters about “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend” on the pages
of Artforum. Golden’s disapproval of the exhibition, as the head of the primary art museum in
New York City dedicated specifically to black artists, was met with serious condemnation by the
quilters. Golden writes the following of the exhibition, which she saw at the Whitney:
I almost didn’t go see it, in which case I would now be doing a Jayson Blair, but
because I knew I’d want to rant about it, I went. As I suspected, it was a “love the
message/hate the messenger,” or more aptly, “love the quilts/hate the exhibition,”
kind of thing. Of course I loved the quilts. We all know the quilts are brilliant and
beautiful. (I just wish the quilters were making a little more money for all their
brilliance!) I like the old black ladies. My mother is an old black lady. I hope to
become an old black lady. I just hated the exhibition, which, with its shockingly

44
Bridget R. Cooks, Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum (Amherst: University
of Massachusetts Press, 2011), 137-138.
45
Ibid.

17
politically correct tone, under the transparent cover of high/low intervention and
demolished media categories, was the most culturally repugnant, retrograde
moment I have experienced, perhaps in my entire professional life. It reminded
me of reading Huck Finn in seventh grade at my all-white private school. I didn’t
hate Huck Finn, I just hated having to talk about it with everyone else as they had
their racial revelatory moment. Then again, I suppose in one way I did love the
exhibition—it was an exercise so obvious, so over-the-top, that perhaps it will
serve as a warning and never be repeated.
46

The quilters of Gee’s Bend responded to Golden directly in Artforum’s “Letters” section,
after the exhibition had closed at the Whitney four months later, with a text nearly four times as
long as Golden’s. The quilters directly addressed Golden’s critique sentence by sentence, asking
poignant questions like why Golden chose not to refer to them as artists, even asking her
directly: “Should we put our quilts back in the closet now, Ms. Golden?”
47
The quilters also
affirm that they are doing “just fine” financially, and there is a case that the they were telling
their truth; whether an analysis by Golden would result in the same conclusion is another
question. But whatever financial benefits were received by the quilters were, over time,
overshadowed by the murky business dealings of William Arnett, the historian and collector that
co-curated the exhibition.
Arnett first visited the quilters of Gee’s Bend in 1997, after encountering a quilt made by
Gee’s Bend quilter Annie Mae Young, the same one that is on the cover of the catalog, as
illustrated in a book by photographer Roland Freeman.
48
Shortly after, he visited Gee’s Bend
began buying many of the Gee’s Bend quilts at very low costs relative to the number of hours it
takes to hand-stitch a quilt. As it would turn out, prior to organizing the exhibition, Arnett had

46
Thelma Golden, “Top 10,”Artforum December 2003, 126.
This is part of a “top 10” piece, meaning Thelma would write 150-250 words for each entry, as opposed to a 500 or
so word review for the “Reviews” section.
47
Rennie Young Miller, “Letters,” Artforum, March 2004.
48
Roland Freeman, Communion of the Spirit: African-American Quilters, Preservers, and their Stories (Nashville:
Rutledge Hill Press, 1996).

18
“contracted with the women for any and all underlying intellectual property rights to all the
quilts made before 1984,” which also happened to be the historical focus of the exhibition.
49

Arnett then transferred ownership of the quilts and the underlying rights to the Tinwood Alliance
to his Atlanta-based non-profit dedicated to promoting Southern outsider art.
50
The Tinwood
Alliance itself is comprised of several divisions, including Tinwood Music, Tinwood Ventures,
Tinwood Books and Tinwood Media, all of which produce merchandise and other purchasable
and or/licensable products.
51
In 2002, the Tinwood Alliance as an organization in addition to
Arnett would collaborate with the Museum of Fine Arts Houston to organize “The Quilts of
Gee’s Bend.” In 2003, a year after the exhibition opened, Tinwood Ventures partnered with
Kathy Ireland Worldwide to produce home designs and apparel sold in big box stores such as
KMart and Costco, using the quilter’s designs.
52
A series of lawsuits followed, alleging a string
of failed promises made by Arnett to Gee’s Bend, including disputed payments and a community
center that never materialized.
53
Following “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend”, quilts from Gee’s Bend
would sell for amounts in excess of $20,000, and Arnett would be sued by Annie Mae Young
and Loretta Pettway for allegedly defrauding them of thousands of dollars. Arnett was also sued
by Lucinda Pettway Franklin, also a Gee’s Bend quilter, for allegedly “taking two 100-year-old
quilts sewn by her great-grandmother, a former slave” and refusing to return them.
54

While Arnett’s rapacious behavior is obviously wrong, it does reflect a broader trend in
the contemporary art market which can be traced back to the Scull sale in 1972, in which Robert

49
Victoria F. Phillips, “Commodification, Intellectual Property and the Quilters of Gee’s Bend,” The American
University journal of gender, social policy & the law 15, no. 2 (2007): 359-377.
50
Ibid.
51
Ibid.
52
Linda Hales, “From Museum to Housewares: Marketing Gee's Bend Quilts,” Washington Post, February 28, 2004.
53
Ibid.
54
Glenn McNatt, "Controversy Blankets Gee's Bend Community," Chicago Tribune, July 29, 2007.

19
C. Scull jumpstarted the contemporary art market when they auctioned off by auctioning off 50
works at a rate often exceeding what he paid for them by a factor of 40 or 50.
55

The Quilts of Gee’s Bend are not alone in carrying financial issues and disputes; quilts
have always carried very specific financial contexts. As the quilting historian Janneken Smucker
notes in Amish Quilts: Crafting an American Icon, the Whitney’s 1971 “Abstract Design in
American Quilts” exhibition arrived on the crest of the “quilt revival” of the late 60s in America.
This “revival,” she argues, originates with a group of Amish women in Lancaster, Pennsylvania,
who began selling quilts to supplement farm income.
56
The networks grew, and by the late 60s,
“pickers” were making pilgrimages to Lancaster to buy quilts that were then sold to art dealers
primarily in New York. By the early seventies, Life magazine was publishing “Craze for Quilts”,
which emphasized the "modern" appeal of quilts, as well as their traditional context, and Home
and Garden declared the quilt’s “comeback.”
57

Contemporaneous with the “craze” timeline is another migration of quilts into the New
York art world: The Freedom Quilting Bee. As Nancy Callahan writes in The Freedom Quilting
Bee: Folk Art and the Civil Rights Movement, the Freedom Quilting Bee, a cooperative of black
quilters based in the Black Belt of Alabama, was formed in 1966 with the direct intention of
selling quilts to generate income for their families and for the Civil Rights movement writ
large.
58
Walter X. Frances, a white Episcopal priest from Mobile, Alabama, is credited with
initiating several formal relationships between Freedom Quilters based in Alabama to collectors
and galleries in New York.
59
The Freedom Quilting Bee would go on to secure lucrative

55
Baruch Kirschenbaum, “The Scull Auction and the Scull Film,” Art journal 39, no 1 (1979): 50.
56
Janneken Smucker, “Destination Amish quilt country: the consumption of quilts in Lancaster County,
Pennsylvania," Mennonite Quarterly Review 80, no 2 (2006): 185.
57
Ibid.
58
Nancy Callahan, The Freedom Quilting Bee: Folk Art and the Civil Rights Movement (Birmingham: University of
Alabama Press, 1987), 39.
59
Ibid.

20
contracts with Sears and other department stores to produce sheets and pillowcases. Thelma
Golden, who spent her career advocating for black artists, might have been referring to these and
other histories of quilting in her criticism of the exhibition.
Moreover, she might be sensitive to how specific images presented to the public in the
exhibition which play into racist tropes of Gee’s Bend as isolated from the “real world” and
“tucked away” in the deep, pristine wilderness of southern Alabama and only recognized through
the lens of the multiple tragedies visited upon it by surrounding white communities, might
ultimately emphasize the role white liberalism played in rehabilitating the area through federal
relief programs, rather than the history of enslavement, white supremacy, and sexism. Gee’s
Bend had, in fact, actually played a critical role in the Civil Rights Movement; Martin Luther
King visited Gee’s Bend in 1965 and encouraged the quilters to march with him in Selma,
Alabama, for civil rights, an action which resulted in violent arrests of many quilters.
60
This
action also resulted in surrounding white locales terminating a ferry service that allowed Gee’s
Bend residents direct access to Camden, a critical vein for traveling north (this service was not
restored until 2006).
61
Despite these rich interconnections with the history of black civil rights,
the primary group of images in the show that depict the actual women at the Whitney iteration of
the show come from the Farm Security Administration in the 1930s with little context. These
images, rather than emphasizing that the quilters of Gee’s Bend were alive then (and now), lock
Gee’s Bend firmly in the past.

60
Clyde Haberman, “Martin Luther King’s Call for Voting Rights Inspired Isolated Hamlet,” New York Times,
March 8, 2015.
61
Ibid.

21
Farm Security Administration Photography and Religious Testimonies
On February 18, 1937, Roy Stryker, head of the-then Resettlement Administration (later
renamed Farm Security Administration or FSA), a New Deal agency, wrote to Arthur Rothstein,
an RA photographer, with an assignment. Stryker had recently learned of a tenant community
that he wanted Rothstein to document. It was “the most primitive set-up he has ever heard of,” he
wrote, “their houses are of mud and stakes which they hew themselves.”
62
Part of the role of the
Resettlement Administration as a New Deal Agency, was, after all, to provide cash loans to farm
owners and tenant farmers to rehabilitate their farm or home. Stryker, who would eventually lead
a team of photographers including Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, and Walker Evans, creating
some of the most historically and politically influential images in American history, also saw
potential for this new site, too, writing, “we could do a swell story; one that LIFE would grab.”
63

The tenant community to which Stryker is referring to is Gee’s Bend, Alabama, where Arthur
Rothstein would visit to photograph later that year (Figure 7). While these still images figure
centrally in William Arnett’s documentary that accompanied the exhibition, Rothstein’s images
were not only photographed for the purposed of narrativizing Gee’s Bend as a place frozen in
time after a series of upheavals that left the town in dire financial straits, but were published in a
fundamentally racist profile of the area published by The New York Times.
Titled “The Big World At Last Reaches Gee’s Bend” in 1937 and featuring eleven of
Rothstein’s images, reporter John Temple Graves II frames Gee’s Bend as an against-all-odds
success story.
64
Graves II writes that "no one can visit Gee's Bend without an appreciation of
racial virtues preserved there, which tend to disappear in more civilized quarters where the

62
Stryker to Rothstein, 18 February 1937, Roy E. Stryker Papers, University of Louisville.
63
Ibid.
64
John Temple Graves II, “The Big World at Last Reaches Gee’s Bend,” The New York Times, August 22, 1937.

22
ambition of the Negro is to become only a carbon copy of the white man."
65
Gee’s Bend, Graves
writes, is a refuge to be desired and replicated; Benders “accept what comes their way and make
the very best of it, work hard and happily with it.”
66
He writes that “they do not seem capable of
understanding superiority or inferiority. They are themselves; they are objective. They are
serene.”
67

In actuality, when the stock market crashed in 1929, the value of cotton plummeted and
many of the black sharecroppers and tenant farmers in Gee’s Bend went bankrupt.
68
In 1930,
creditors came to repossess property for unpaid debts, even taking cows, chickens, and other
livestock that the residents of Gee’s Bend needed to survive. In this way, Gee’s Bend, Alabama,
must be considered with Tulsa, Oklahoma, Allensworth, California, and others, as black
communities expressly and intentionally destroyed by surrounding white communities in early
twentieth century America. The town, which later became a subject of the New Deal project, was
purchased by the Federal Government, and sold back to the residents of Gee’s Bend as tracts,
each with its own “Roosevelt” style house.
69
Roy Stryker sent another photographer back to
Gee’s Bend in 1939 for the “after” images.
Graves seems unwilling or unable to see the residents of Gee’s Bend as anything but
imbecilic and complacent stand-ins for the “noble poor”. The FSA images present an image of
Gee’s Bend on terms that evoke the vestiges of totalizing first contact narratives long part of
colonial history.
70
In response, I pose the following question: wouldn’t it be more valuable to

65
Ibid.
66
Ibid.
67
Ibid.
68
John Beardsley, “River Island” in Gee’s Bend: The Women and Their Quilts, by John Beardsley et al (Atlanta:
Tinwood Books in association with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2002), 28-29.
69
Ibid.
70
Bartolome de las Casas, “A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies Or, a Faithful Narrative of

23
attend to the complexity, history, and visual culture of the Gee’s Bend community through the
lens of their well-documented and profoundly visual religious experiences?
Co-curator Alvia Wardlaw writes in “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend” catalog introduction that
“the importance of music in this community cannot be emphasized enough.”
71
This is a
sentiment that John Beardsley also elaborates on in his essay contribution to the catalog,
emphasizing many Benders’ shared membership of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME)
Church, a predominantly African American Methodist denomination of Christianity based in the
United States. The AME Church originated in 1816, the same year Joseph Gee first brought
enslaved people to Gee’s Bend, as a protest of the racial discrimination experienced by people of
African descent at white Methodist congregations.
72
The most complex portrait of AME
religious life in Gee’s Bend came in 1962 when Olivia Stone, professor of twenty years in the
Graduate School of Social Welfare at the University of California Los Angeles, published an in-
depth account of “River Island” (a pseudonym she used to anonymize Gee’s Bend) based on
field research she conducted as a resident researcher in 1943.
73
Stone writes that of all living
heads and household members in Gee’s Bend, 93% were church members and achieved full
religious conversion (part of the guarantee of a place in heaven after worldly death) through a
divine vision shared publicly.
74
Converts recounted these profoundly visual experiences to the
church congregation “for judgement as to its validity.”
75
Stone gathered 105 accounts of

the Horrid and Unexampled Massacres, Butcheries, and all manner of Cruelties, that Hell and Malice could invent,
committed by the Popish Spanish Party on the Inhabitants of West-India, together with the Devastations of Several
Kingdoms in America by Fire and Sword, for the space of Forty and Two Years, from the time of its first Discovery
by them,” Project Gutenberg, July 10, 2011.
71
Alvia Wardlaw, introduction to Gee’s Bend: The Women and Their Quilts, by John Beardsley et al (Atlanta:
Tinwood Books in association with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2002), 14—15.
72
Richard Newman, Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers.
(New York: New York University Press, 2008), 160.
73
Olive M. Stone, “Cultural Uses of Religious Visions: A Case Study,” Ethnology 1, no. 3 (1962): 329–48.
74
Ibid, 329.
75
Ibid, 329-30.

24
conversion experiences and visions, from which several clear visual themes and references
emerge including imagery that involves surmounting obstacles, such as hills or stairs, that lead to
a house of white and gold (“God’s house”). Jane Livingston also speculates that part of the
quilt’s design might have originated in “African patterns imported with slavery.”
76
Despite their
tangential exploration in the catalog, the links between Benders’ religious and the AME church,
and a large body of the quilts are not addressed or otherwise representing within the exhibition
space.
Stone recounts that the visions include symbols of death and dying; many converts “see
themselves die, embalmed, shrouded, and put into coffins and graves.”
77
Sometimes, they see
others, including loved ones or even animal surrogates which could include horses, dogs, or pigs,
die and be reborn (Figures 8 and 9).
78
Often, visions include a “hill and a river to cross, a ladder
or stairs to ascend; there is often a difficult path to follow through the valley or bog and up a hill”
(Figure 10 and 11).
79
The hill “has to be climbed, despite its difficulty, because something awaits
the traveler at its summit.”
80
Stone writes that in the visions, the struggle typically ends in
attainment, and women especially, Stone notes, attained sight of or entry into a “a big shining
city.”
81
The house, usually atop a hill, which is to be their home in the hereafter is always white
and very clean, sometimes “bedecked with flowers” (Figures 12 and 13).
82
“Gold,” Stone writes,
“appears frequently in the imagery for desirability, superiority, or great worth. The chairs in the
white house are golden, as are waist bands and shoes, rings, books, and chains.”
83
Stone adds

76
Jane Livingston, “Reflection on the Art of Gee’s Bend,” in Gee’s Bend: The Women and Their Quilts, by John
Beardsley et al (Atlanta: Tinwood Books in association with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2002), 55.
77
Olive M. Stone, “Cultural Uses of Religious Visions: A Case Study,” Ethnology 1, no. 3 (1962), 334.
78
Ibid.
79
Ibid, 337.
80
Ibid, 338.
81
Ibid, 339.
82
Ibid, 341.
83
Ibid, 341-41.

25
that sometimes “the object struggled for is white in the vision though not in nature; for example,
a white watermelon.”
84

What is lost when at least some of the quilts are not framed on the shared visual terms of
the testimonies and the individual bodily conversion experiences are the ways in which quilters
might have made certain design choices based on an already extant lexicon of formal language,
or broadly been embedded within a strict religious structure that dictated many parts of their
lives. Without this emphasis, the exhibition’s organization overwhelmingly implies that the
women were descended from slaves and simply recycling old quilting patterns, a common idea
held among quiltmakers. As Janneken Smucker notes, formal exchanges of quilt designs started
as early as 1835 and continue to this day, but as Stone’s account illustrates, this is not necessarily
the only explanation for their formal structure and overall design.
85
Gee’s Bend, as both a
community and a group of individual quilters, participated in a shared religious tradition that
included the re-performance of shared references, each cloaked in one’s own experience. As
Beardsley concedes in the catalog, “religion manifests a degree of intensity particularly
characteristic of insular societies,”
86
a sentiment that Stone’s report echoes this sentiment across
time.
The FSA images are some of the earliest images of Gee’s Bend in existence, which
means they might have a place somewhere in the exhibition, but warrant extremely careful,
detailed, and thoughtful framing and presentation to the various constituencies within the publics
of the many art institutions it filled. The exhibition, on the whole, engaged colonial fantasies of

84
Ibid 342.
85
Janneken Smucker, Amish quilts: crafting an American icon (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003),
54.
86
John Beardsley, “River Island” in Gee’s Bend: The Women and Their Quilts, by John Beardsley et al (Atlanta:
Tinwood Books in association with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2002), 24.

26
physical isolation, re-iterated and re-used imagery that had functioned largely as propaganda for
the Roosevelt Administration, in place of contexts that sited the quilt within non-Western,
religious, or politically active contexts. The complicated legacy of “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend”
informs and must be brought to bear on contemporary artists today, including Sanford Biggers
and Jonathan VanDyke, who are driven to appropriate historical quilts. Unlike the quilters of
Gee’s Bend, Biggers himself is not a quilt, but overlays found quilts with his own visual
language using bodily gestures, marks, and interventions that evoke and allude to the vernacular
history that quilts were used along the Underground Railroad. Biggers asserts that while this
history is yet unverified, it is critical to emphasize quilts as objects that can carry forward lived
black histories. Like Rauschenberg, Biggers takes authorial ownership of the quilt, albeit under
more concrete (if still flawed) reasoning.

27
Chapter Two: “Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch”
In 1999, Jaqueline Tobin, a lecturer in Women’s Studies at the University of Denver and
Raymond G. Dobard, Professor of Art at Howard University and well-known quilter, published
Hidden in Plain View: A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad. The book was
based on the oral history of an elderly black quilter, Ozella McDaniel Williams, who Tobin met
in 1994 in the Old Marketplace of Charleston, South Carolina.
87
The book recounts stories about
certain patterns and colors associated with quilts hung from clotheslines or on porches and as
guideposts, helping enslaved people make their way to freedom in the North. Williams says the
stories were passed down to her orally through generations of her family members, which
included enslaved people. The book initially received rave reviews from The New York Times
Book Review and National Geographic, and in collaboration with the Kennedy Center, was
reportedly used to develop elementary school curricula.
88
However, it was not long before
historians of the Underground Railroad cast a suspicious gaze on the new scholarship, ultimately
tracing it back to just a single oral history: Williams’. Giles Wright, a member of the Historical
Council of New Jersey, and a leading historian of the Underground Railroad, published a two-
page statement about how Hidden in Plain Sight operated amid other problems of myth and lore,
including nefarious attempts to inflate the value of properties by suggesting they are associated
with the Underground Railroad.
89

87
Jacqueline Tobin and Raymond G. Dobard, Hidden in Plain View: the Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground
Railroad (New York: Doubleday), 1999.
88
Andrea Higbie, "The Secret Language of Quilts," New York Times Book Review, May 09, 1999, 27-7; and Marie
Claire Bryant, “Underground Railroad Quilt Codes: What We Know, What We Believe, and What Inspires Us,”
Smithsonian Folklife Magazine, May 3, 2019.
89
Giles R. Wright, “CRITIQUE: Hidden in Plain View: The Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad,”
printed statement distributed by Giles Wright at the June 4, 2001 Underground Railroad Day at the Camden County
Historical Society, accessed September 13, 2021, http://historiccamdencounty.com/ccnews11_doc_01a.shtml; and
Brian Murray, “Giles R. Wright Jr., renowned scholar of African American history, dies at 73,” Star-Ledger,
February 5, 2009.

28
A few years later in 2004, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center was
formed in Cincinnati, Ohio, as a public museum dedicated to exploring the histories of the
Underground Railroad through exhibitions and programs. While no documentation yet exists to
support the idea that quilts were used along the Underground Railroad, Biggers’ project, in
anything, insists on the importance of preserving vernacular and oral histories of slavery
alongside histories based on documentation and other evidence because the Underground
Railroad remains a deeply mysterious and fragmented part of American history. New evidence
frequently overturns existing assumptions. For example, and perhaps most recently, would be the
historian Eric Foner who argued that the Underground Railroad, while indeed shrouded in some
secrecy, was also something many were quite open about.
90
Some abolitionist groups printed and
distributed materials proclaiming their participation in the Underground Railroad, hosted open
discussions, and even had bake sales to fundraise. Foner ultimately argues that the resistance and
activism of participants in the Underground Railroad should be considered a critical instigator of
the Civil War.
Biggers himself was raised in Baldwin Hills, Los Angeles; born in 1970 to his father, a
neurosurgeon, and his mother, a public schoolteacher.
91
The youngest of three children, his
parents, collectors of black art, were very supportive of their son’s artistic talent, which he
exhibited from a young age.
92
Biggers got his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of
Chicago in 1999. He began appropriating quilts in 2009, when he was contacted by the Thaddeus
Squire’s Peregrine Arts Productions organization. Squire, a curator, was organizing “Hidden City

90
Eric Foner, Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (New York: W. W. Norton &
Company, 2015).
91
Vinson Cunningham, “Quiet Storm,” New Yorker, January 2018, 23.
Interestingly, the print version published of this article is titled “Quiet Storm” while the online version is titled “The
Playful, Political Art of Sanford Biggers” with a subline: “an under-sung artist upends received ideas about race and
history.”
92
Ibid.

29
Philadelphia,” a month-long cultural project mounted from May 31–June 30, 2009, in
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
93
The event was dedicated to exploring Philadelphia’s untold urban
histories and aimed to change the way residents saw their city. They commissioned Biggers to
make a work for the Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, a
former stop along the Underground Railroad situated on the oldest parcel of land in the United
States continuously owned by Black Americans.
94
Interestingly, Mother Bethel Church was also
at the center of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court Case that resulted in the initial formation of the
African Methodist Episcopalian denomination in the United States by pastor Richard Allen and
others.
95

Biggers first learned of the contested history of quilts and the Underground Railroad in
the process of researching for this commission and chose to string three appropriated pre-1900s
quilts on a clothesline in the church, backlit by stained glass windows that shared formal
resonances with the quilts. He made some additions to the quilts, including a mandala comprised
of sixteen reproductions of the infamous Brooks slave ship, visible in the bottom-left corner of
the middle quilt (Figure 14). As Miriam Seidel wrote of the installation for Art in America,
Biggers also created a “celestial map” handout documenting the city’s Underground Railroad
sites, with Mother Bethel as the North Star.
96
After the Mother Bethel commission, Biggers
began the Codex Project in earnest, a still-ongoing series that “includes mixed-media paintings
and sculptures done directly on or made from pre-1900 antique quilts.”
97
While Biggers chooses
not to acknowledge the likely female makers of these quilts in this case, he has in the past

93
Miriam Seidel, “Discovering Hidden City Philadelphia,” Art in America, July 23, 2009.
94
Ibid.
95
Richard Newman, Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers.
(New York: New York University Press, 2008), 160.
96
Miriam Seidel, “Discovering Hidden City Philadelphia,” Art in America, July 23, 2009.
97
Andrea Andersson, Sergio Antonio Bessa and Sanford. Biggers, Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch (Bronx, New York;
New Haven, Connecticut: Bronx Museum of the Arts, 2020), X.

30
credited female artists he collaborated with. Soon after graduating with his MFA he exhibited a
small world… (2002) in the Whitney Biennial with artist Jennifer Zackin, a collaborative work
which juxtaposes Zackin’s Jewish American upbringing and Biggers’ Black upbringing,
focusing on typical childhood hallmarks including holidays and birthdays. She is credited as an
equal here; in Biggers’ Mother Bethel commission, but in “Codeswitch,” Biggers’ unseen
collaborator goes unacknowledged.
Biggers’ Codex project highlights American quilts’ speculative pasts and futures lost as
American art institutions have become increasingly interested in mining quilts for a cohesive and
legible formalism. I will begin by discussing Biggers’ exhibition from the perspective of a
quilting historian who visited Biggers’ exhibition, ultimately linking Biggers’ work with Saidiya
Hartman’s “critical fabulation,” and will end with a close reading of a non-quilt-based work,
Moonrising (2013), included in the show that illustrates Biggers’ interest in linking quilts to
bodies.

The Exhibition
“Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch” is a monographic traveling exhibition of the Codex
series co-organized by the Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought, New Orleans, and
the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, and overseen by Andrea Andersson (Founding
Director and Chief Curator, Rivers Institute) and Sergio Bessa (former Director of Curatorial and
Education Programs, Bronx Museum). Both the exhibition title and project title imply that the
quilts themselves are texts or compendiums to be read as alternating between visual languages.
The exhibition traveled to three institutions, though I will focus on the iteration at the California

31
African American Museum, on view from July 28, 2021, to January 23, 2022.
98
Encompassing
about 60 objects, consistent with “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend” and “Abstract Design in American
Quilts,” the Codex series was the primary focus of the exhibition and included roughly half of
the 120 objects total in the project as of 2021 (Figures 15 – 19). Biggers’ first engagements with
quilts were limited compared to the interventions to come later as the project progressed. Take
UGRR: US 2.2 (2009) and Luna Medicina (2016) (Figures 20 and 21), which demonstrates one
of Biggers’ early interventions vis-à-vis applique, and a later quilt, which has been used a
material for a canvas.
99
These later quilts, which transform into different mediums, like sculpture
or painting, figure centrally in the layout of “Codeswitch,”, framing the quilt as a material to be
used and modified rather than as a distinctive object with a history and author that precedes its
use by Biggers—a history that, if known, could bring greater depth to Biggers’ practice and the
Codex project as a whole.
To accompany the exhibition, Jordan Amirkhani, Sergio Bessa, and Sanford Biggers’
Studio published an online index of terms with which to consider some of Biggers’
interventions.
100
The visual symbols and historical references throughout the Codex project
include cherry blossoms, sacred geometry, and artists including Sigmar Polke and the Gee’s
Bend quilters, among other things. While the list outlines many different symbols and references,
there is one that unifies many of the quilts in “Codeswitch”: the Brookes slave ship diagram from
1788, replicated twenty-four times and presented to the viewer in the form of a mandala (Figures

98
The show opened at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York and was on view from September 09, 2020, to
April 04, 2021. It then traveled to the California African American Museum in Los Angeles, CA, and was on view
to the public from July 28, 2021 to January 23, 2022. The final iteration of this exhibition is at the Speed Art
Museum in Louisville, KY and will be on view to the public from March 18, 2022 to June 26, 2022.
99
See also UGRR: US2.1(Quilt 1), 2009.
100
Jordan Amirkhani, Sergio Bessa, and the Sanford Biggers Studio, “Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch Codex,” Speed
Museum website, accessed September 13, 2021, https://www.speedmuseum.org/exhibitions/sanford-biggers-
codeswitch/sanford-biggers-codeswitch-codex/.

32
22 and 23). The Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade published the now-famous
diagram in 1788, which would go on to become “one of the most recognizable images in the
history of print culture” (Figure 22).
101
Brookes has been taken up by many artists, and some
even argue that the symbol is so well-known and frequently used that it has assumed a role of
symbolizing “universal injustice.”
102

Naturally, Brookes has been appropriated in different ways
by many Black contemporary artists. Howardena Pindell, for instance, emphasizes a dismantling
of its grip in how we think of slavery, and others, like Malcolm Gladwell, use it to “press
audiences – black and non-black, female and male – to imagine themselves in the predicament of
enslavement and as part of an involuntary diaspora.”
103
It resurfaces across the Codex series,
typically as a seal or signature, either embroidered, painted, or appliqued onto the surface of the
appropriated quilt. The index of terms published by Amirkhani, Bessa, and the Sanford Biggers
Studio makes no mention of Brookes under the “mandala” entry, which is instead described as a
“geometric configuration of symbols” that “focus the attention of practitioners as a spiritual
guidance tool for establishing a sacred space, and as an aid to meditation and trance
induction.”
104
This decision essentially bifurcates exhibition visitors in the exhibition space:
those “in the know” and those who are not. As art historian Kellie Jones writes in South of Pico,
Biggers “deflects and becomes a facilitator,” creating “an archetypal or paradigmatic place”
which “is a way of escaping categorization.”
105

101
Nicholas Radburn and David Eltis, “Visualizing the Middle Passage: The Brooks and the Reality of Ship
Crowding in the Transatlantic Slave Trade,” The Journal of interdisciplinary history 49, no. 4 (2019): 533–565.
102
Jacqueline Francis, “The Brooks Slave Ship Icon: A ‘Universal Symbol’?,” Slavery & abolition 30, no. 2 (2009):
327–338.
103
Ibid.
104
Jordan Amirkhani, Sergio Bessa, and the Sanford Biggers Studio, “Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch Codex,” Speed
Museum of Art (website), accessed September 13, 2021, https://www.speedmuseum.org/exhibitions/sanford-biggers-
codeswitch/sanford-biggers-codeswitch-codex/.
105
Kellie Jones, South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s (North Carolina:
Duke University Press, 2017), 439.

33
The influence and effect of the Brookes slave ship cannot be overstated. Depicting how to
pack human cargo, the diagram emphasizes how Black bodies were treated as objects and
commodities to be consumed, evoking histories of rape, death, and even intentional drowning
that took place on ships like the Brookes, famously depicted in J.M.W. Turner’s 1840 painting,
Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On). Depending
on the knowledge base of a particular audience member, Biggers’ addition might be interpreted
as a mere formal rhyming device or as a response to the quilt’s original design, as in Quilt 14
(Flying Lotus) in which the mandala could be interpreted as a symbol in conversation with the
original quilt’s flower-like hexagons, rather than a social or political reference.
The ambivalence of the institution, the exhibition, and even Biggers himself, about the
particularities of the quilts onto which he makes his gestures makes Biggers’ interventions, rather
than the quilts themselves, the primary focus of the exhibition. These interventions take on
increasing physical intensity, going from applique applied to the surface of the quilt (UGRR: US
2.2, 2009), to drawing, painting, or spray-painting onto the quilt (Luna Medicina, 2016), to
cutting the quilt open and displaying it as a sort of sculpture or installation (Whence Wince,
2020). Sometimes, as in Quo Vadis (2019), a piece of quilt is actually “framed” under glass
within a picture frame as a photograph or print would be.
If the quilts Biggers appropriates are to be “read” which the vocabulary of the exhibition
collateral, the titles, and the artists own words imply, is it fair that they should only be
understood in relation to the terms of Biggers’ code in the exhibition, publication, and related
programming? What of the original makers, likely women who would have spent many hours
working on a single quilt? What of the history of quilting design and techniques, some of which
only survive because of their transmission between generations of female quilters?

34
Old Habits
As the quilting historian Janneken Smucker aptly notes, “Codeswitch” took place on the
fiftieth anniversary of “Abstract Design and American Quilts,” and shares a similar affinity for
refusing to acknowledge quilters, where the quilts came from, or anything about them at all.
Smucker, seeing the exhibition in its Bronx iteration, felt confident that numerous quilts in
Biggers’ work are from very specific places and might even historically be quite rare. Walking
through the exhibition, Smucker remarks that “again and again, I discovered that I knew these
quilts.”
106
Smucker argues that “contextualizing the old quilts to the extent possible, even when
we have only limited information, would acknowledge the quiltmakers’ role in the centuries old
process of making and remaking that has become a hallmark of quilt history.”
107
Biggers himself
has acknowledged that he grew up among several quilters, but admits to being an “interloper”
among “hardcore quilters.”
108
While neither Biggers nor his institutional hosts seem to take issue
with this aspect of his work, it is difficult to overemphasize that quilts are not merely a raw
material to be formed into an art object like any other.
This is especially problematic given how commercially successful these objects have
been for Biggers. In concert with other recent commissions, the quilts have catapulted Biggers’
market value in the primary and secondary markets. At Art Basel in 2021, SUBSCRIPT (2021)
sold for $85,000. QUILT #19 (ROCKSTAR) (2013) sold for $47,880 in 2019.
109
Neroluce (2018),
sold for $75,600 in September 2021.
110
It is not difficult to imagine that in a bullish

106
Janneken Smucker, “Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch,” The Journal of Modern Craft 14, no. 2 (2021): 193–198.
107
Ibid.
108
Diedrick Brackens, “Code-Switching in Art and Craft: Sanford Biggers in Conversation with Diedrick Brackens,”
Interview, October 27, 2020.
109
Kaylie Felsberg, “Market Brief: Sanford Biggers’s Captivating Work Breaks Auction Record amid Rising
Demand,” Artsy (market brief), October 11, 2021, accessed September 13, 2021, https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-
editorial-market-sanford-biggerss-captivating-work-breaks-auction-record-amid-rising-demand.
110
Ibid.

35
contemporary art market one of Biggers’ appropriated quilts might be the most expensive quilt
ever sold at auction.
111

When asked about where the quilts come from, Biggers has stated that he acquires the
quilts primarily from people who voluntarily drop them off at his studio or otherwise give them
to him as they become familiar with his work.
112
Biggers says that he was initially interested in
quilts “as repository of memory — the memory of the body.”
113
In an interview with Yasi
Kapour, Biggers states:
When we go to a museum, like the Louvre or the Met, are we seeing the original piece?
We’re usually seeing a copy, and that copy was usually inspired by yet another totally
unique sculpture. The pose might have been lifted from one sculpture, and then applied
and is then called “Athena.” And then 200 years later, it’s remixed by somebody else and
called “Slave Girl.” This happens all the time. You see the same practice in music. That’s
why I often liken this to the sampling and chopping and screwing of recorded material.
114

In this interview, Biggers expresses that “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend” turned quilts into
objects which were revered, respected, and recognized as art among the white walls of the
American art museum, which is the way “Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch” frames the work in
many ways. The exhibition, however, also frames Biggers’ work as in direct conversation with
the Underground Railroad, even though it seems that as the Codex project continued, Biggers
seemed less and less explicitly limited to that history. To these ends, I turn to Saidiya Hartman, a
historian and theorist who similarly contends with the limitations of the archive as it relates to
slavery, ideas that Biggers takes up expressly in his work with historical quilts and through his
appropriation of Brookes-as-mandala. In “Venus in Two Acts” Hartman contends with Venus, a

111
Susan Hodera, “Threads of Chappaqua’s Past,” New York Times, January 13, 2002. Though further research is
warranted to determine the most expensive quilt to hit an auction block, Hodera cites Reconciliation Quilt by
Lucinda Ward Honstain as selling for $264,000 in 1991 at Sotheby’s, and writes that it still held the record in 2002.
112
Sanford Biggers, (exhibition walkthrough, Textile Society of America’s 2021 annual conference, December
2021).
113
Yasi Kapour, “Sanford Biggers with Yasi Alipour,” Brooklyn Rail, March 2021.
114
Ibid.

36
woman she encountered in her research, and whose only material trace in the archive is the
record of her death:
We stumble upon her in exorbitant circumstances that yield no picture of the everyday life, no
pathway to her thoughts, no glimpse of the vulnerability of her face or of what looking at such a face
might demand. We only know what can be extrapolated from an analysis of the ledger or borrowed
from the world of her captors and masters and applied to her.
115

Hartman continues to write that as a result, the only stories written about enslaved women “are
not about them, but rather about the violence and excess that seized hold of their lives.”
116
As a
result, the archive, in this case, is “a death sentence, a tomb, a display of the violated body.”
117

In the face of an archive which tells only one story, Hartman proposes “critical fabulation” as a
way of imagining otherwise. Critical fabulation involves creating stories that tow the line
between archival truth and fiction. Hartman writes:
By playing with and rearranging the basic elements of the story, by re-presenting the
sequence of events in divergent stories and from contested points of view, I have
attempted to jeopardize the status of the event, to displace the received or authorized
account, and to imagine what might have happened or might have been said or might
been done.
118

In appropriating the quilts, Biggers makes “critical fabulations” of the Underground Railroad and
invites viewers to imagine the quilts as windows to histories, known, unknown, and fabricated.
Among the dozens of quilts arranged and displayed as paintings and sculptures at
CAAM, a video plays on a small monitor in the first room of “Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch”:
Moonrising (2013) (Figure 24). Biggers, outside of his studio art practice, also plays in a band
called Moon Medicin, which created the soundtrack that accompanies the video. The video
depicts Biggers and others wearing quilts as they run, rushed, through a forest. Moonrising

115
Saidiya Hartman,"Venus in Two Acts," Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008), 2.
116
Ibid, 2.
117
Ibid, 2.
118
Ibid, 11.

37
presumably depicts a narrative of the Underground Railroad, though the only reference to the
myth is the didactic text at the exhibition’s entrance. The soundtrack jumps from white noise to
looped and interwoven spoken word fragments to slower and meandering segments of sound,
complemented by the camera’s gaze, which darts around the space. The video ends with what the
lyrics describe as “the great escape” which depicts Biggers running through the forest cloaked by
a quilt, eventually meeting at a small overlook with a second figure, also shrouded in a quilt, as
they gaze off together into the distance. As a sort of framing device for the rest of the show,
Moonrising acts as a visualization of the history Biggers imagines.
Mandala of the B-Bodhisattva (2001), the other video included in the exhibition and
projected down from the ceiling and onto a plinth on the floor, expresses the form of the mandala
through the circular motions of breakdancing, again emphasizing the link between the physical
movement of a body and design (Figure 25). Mandala of the B-Bodhisattva, like Moonrising,
engages with quilts as products of history with multisensory links to embodied movement.
Foregrounding these performative, appropriative, and non-appropriative conceptual elements of
Biggers’ practice might have helped better contextualize how Biggers’ appropriation directly
involves an actual human maker on different levels.
“Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch” posits appropriated quilts as both dynamic art objects
intended for viewing within a white cube with limited historical contexts, bearing some of the
vestiges of the quilt’s initial entry into American art museums, but also posits the quilts as
objects in proximities to bodies, including his own black body. As Biggers’ appropriated quilts
make their way into museums, galleries, and the collections of private owners, they are built to
be re-interpreted, change meaning, and make new knowledge within the institution itself, as
histories of quilting and the Underground Railroad are written and re-written in the future.

38
Biggers effectively inscribes his own physical encounter with the quilt in the institution’s
memory, without recognizing the quilt’s original makers. Where Bernick argues that Holstein’s
successful proposal at the Whitney was only a continuation of Rauschenberg’s appropriation of a
quilt in Bed (1955) I would argue that Biggers, too, is part of the history of gendered
appropriation. While Biggers’ initial projects, which were tied more concretely to the
Underground Railroad, rested and were aimed at a specific history, his appropriations since lack
legible justification. It simply is not clear why Biggers chooses these quilts or how that is
important to his practice; as an artist, he makes clear why he chooses these objects in a loosely
historical sense, but neither he nor the exhibition addresses or reference the gendered aspect of
Biggers’ project, which has been ongoing for nearly 13 years. While his interventions can be
visually compelling, they are not robust enough on their own if we do not also understand where
the quilts themselves come from. Even if this ambiguity is an intentional, as opposed to
unwitting or otherwise, Biggers must answer for materially altering objects made by pre-19
th

century women, potentially even by racially diverse makers. This information would only
amplify and complicate his artistic interventions rather than reduce or dilute them. Biggers’
practice belies that these objects were made by hand by women, likely from materials they were
surrounded by in their everyday lives and produced to increase their quality of life by providing
warmth, security, and a space for their own creative expression during years in which many
women were excluded from the art world’s leading institutions.
Biggers is not alone in his silence. As an institution focused on Black artistic production,
particularly contemporary Black artistic production, the California African American Museum
also has a vested interest in the gendered nature of his appropriation and the absence of curatorial
interventions that might more earnestly inform museumgoers about or illuminate it. Biggers’

39
practice thus begs the question: what would appropriating quilts in a different way, a way that
acknowledges their forgotten or unknowable histories while at the same acknowledging their
inherent separateness, both gendered and historical, from himself, look like? Jonathan VanDyke,
a queer artist based in New York, illustrates one way: by placing attention on and intentionally
and transparently seeking out quilts with ambiguous authorship to time and history. VanDyke,
animates quilts by displaying them and refracting them against his own quilt-like works, inspired
by principles of quilting histories without altering the objects themselves, and by placing them
within the greater context of other objects with an American art institution that also seldomly or
never see the white walls of a museum exhibition space.

40
Chapter Three: “The Patient Eye”
In 2019, Jonathan VanDyke set his focus upon historical quilts and other objects in his
project “The Patient Eye” for the Columbus Museum of Art in Georgia organized by Jonathan
Frederic Walz, Director of Curatorial Affairs and Curator of American Art. The Columbus
Museum is distinctive in its holding both a collection of American art and a collection of
historical objects and materials related to the Chattahoochee Valley region (an area consisting of
six counties in Georgia and one county in Alabama, anchored by the city of Columbus). Part of
Walz’s intention in organizing the project with VanDyke, which comprised both an exhibition
and performance, was to bridge the Museum’s two collections. Walz, along with the Museum’s
Curator of History, Rebecca Bush, lament that these materials are bifurcated within their
institution.
119

For the performance, which took place in the foyer of the museum, VanDyke selected
sixteen quilts from the Columbus Museum of Art’s archives which had largely never been
exhibited, lacked provenance, or were otherwise little-known. Seven of the quilts VanDyke
chose lack a listed author; VanDyke also chose Star of Bethlehem Quilt (ca. 1970) by Stella Mae
Pettway in a nod to Gee’s Bend. In ritualized fashion, VanDyke, with assistance from a rotating
group of museum docents, students, and volunteers, unsheathed them from their archival boxes,
unfolded them, laid them on a large, flat, bed-like white pedestal, and ultimately hoisted them up
so they could be approached in the round (Figure 26). VanDyke then stood, looking at them from
varying distances within the foyer for three hours each, totaling 48 hours spread across a week
during the museum’s opening hours, as business continued as usual around him. VanDyke also
incorporated the museum’s archival storage shelves into the performance, rendering the system

119
Jonathan Frederick Walz, interview by the author September 28, 2021.

41
of power that keeps the quilts within the deep, and largely invisible, recesses of the Museum’s
archive visible (Figure 27). The exhibition component of the project incorporates both quilts,
including one from the performance (Angeline Pitts, Lone Star Quilt, 1875-1910), non-quilt
museum objects, as well as some of his own work. Quilts, often made of reused materials from
around the home, sometimes used recycled packaging like canvas for the underside, for instance,
which most viewers would not be able to see in a typical, Whitney-style installation, when the
quilt is hung on a wall. Contrasting the visually colorful, abstract, or otherwise different
patterning or facade on the opposite side, VanDyke makes this “side” of the quilt visible as
Biggers does in some instances.
Within the exhibition space, VanDyke plastered the walls with photocopies of cut fabric
fragments and other documents of human contact (Figure 29). The painting VanDyke selected
for the exhibition component of the project is part of a series of like objects he makes “with two
dancer-collaborators, exploring bodily movement and gesture to mark the canvas.”
120
Those
materials are then assembled by VanDyke into double sided quilt-like compositions, installed to
be approached in the round (Figure 30). The painting VanDyke selected, In the Month of June
2016 (2017), includes a quilt-like pattern backed by images of feet in socks. Like the
photographs in the exhibition, their makers and subjects are unknown.
121
Where VanDyke links
material to bodily movement, the quilt pattern as a product of human contact through his
paintings, in the performance he explores the quilt as a product of human perception and
extended observation.

120
Loock Galerie, press release for VanDyke’s solo exhibition Some Were Caught Up, and Some Were Not, 25 Feb
2017 – 22 Apr 2017, in Berlin, Germany.
121
Jonathan Vandyke, “The Patient Eye,” in The Patient Eye (Columbus, GA: The Columbus Museum, 2018), 5-6.

42
VanDyke’s approach differs from the institutional approaches of the exhibitions
discussed so far. He incorporates audience, as well as the staff and other laborers, paid and
unpaid, at the museum, to expose its inner workings as a structure of power, showing that the
mere presence of quilts in a collection means little if they remain unactivated in exhibitions,
programs, or other modes of display and engagement. VanDyke emphasizes historical quilts and
his own work as separate, and thus carries the quilt’s histories into the 21
st
century without
ameliorating the past. It is clear, through the process of displaying the quilts and the presence of
the archival shelves that the quilts are not his own. Rather than large-scale traveling exhibitions,
VanDyke’s approach is highly specific to one institution, and not necessarily intended to be
replicated across other institutions in the same way as “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend” or
“Codeswitch”. VanDyke, as part of the project, made three research trips to the Museum and
“was given full access to its collection storage vault.”
122

VanDyke’s performance makes audience members complicit in his act of slow looking;
inasmuch as audience members can be seen in video documentation of the performance joining
VanDyke, sometimes placing themselves even closer than VanDyke to the hanging quilt, who
can wander to the back, nearly off the foyer platform and out of frame.
123
This sort of “slow
looking” is an act that Arden Reed argues is always available in theory but changes meaning
based on social context.
124
Slow looking, as distinct from slow art, is a form of looking that
Arden argues emerged as Christianity became preeminently a religion of gazing in Medieval
times. While Christianity started first as a religion that “shunned venerating images by

122
Ibid, 10.
123
Jonathan VanDyke, “Jonathan VanDyke The Patient Eye performance Day 3,” April 7, 2018,
4:39, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0buwje2ejIQ&t=17965s.
124
Arden Reed, Slow Art: The Experience of Looking, Sacred Images to James Turrell (Oakland: University of
California Press, 2017): 63.

43
associating the practice with pagan idolatry,” (in accordance with the second commandment),
Pope Gregory the Great (540-604) “separated idolatry from the capacity of images to teach.”
125

“Material images,” Arden argues, could then “trigger devotion in return.”
126
Slow art, by
contrast, emerged as a “movement of resistance that contested dominant social conditions” about
250 years ago “as the quickening rhythms of daily life became habitual, if not addictive” and as
“secular speed culture opened pockets for stillness.”
127
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel argued in
1807 that “the statues are now only corpses from which the living soul has flown, just as the
hymns are words from which belief has fled.”
128
Art ultimately “became the sphere of the artist,
who assumed control of the image as proof of his or her art.”
129
Following the secularization of
art and the appearance of national museums like The British Museum, The Prado, and the
Louvre in the late 18
th
century, museums became spaces for the “sacred gaze” which was
directed at images that were not always sacred in nature, like landscape and still life.
Adherents to Reed’s category of slow contemporary art include Hiroshi Sugimoto, well
known for long exposure photographs of movies in theatres, which ultimately render the result
image a ghostly glowing white, Eve Sussman, who painted the perspective of the subjects of
Diego Velazquez’s Las Meninas (1965) looking back at the viewer,
130
and Marina Abramović’s
The Artist is Present (2010), in which she sat face-to-face with visitors to her exhibition as other
visitors watched.
131

125
Ibid, 64.
126
Ibid, 66.
127
Ibid, 73-74.
128
Ibid, 75.
129
Ibid.
130
Arden Reed, Slow Art: The Experience of Looking, Sacred Images to James Turrell (Oakland: University of
California Press, 2017): 190-192.
131
Arden Reed, Slow Art: The Experience of Looking, Sacred Images to James Turrell (Oakland: University of
California Press, 2017): 190-192.

44
Though as Lutz Koepnick asks: “Does contemporary slowness, all told, make us thus
complicit with the reifying tendency of the modern culture industry and post-modern society of
the spectacle?”
132
Bringing this idea to bear on Abramović’s The Artist is Present specifically,
Amelia Jones says of the performance that:
nothing could have been less spontaneous or natural (if by ‘presence’ we imply the
possibility of unexpected relational sparks flying) than the spectacle of an artist sitting in
a giant circus-ring like structure in the center of the institution at the center of the self-
proclaimed urban center of the international art world.
133

That VanDyke’s reification of the quilt might serve multiple possible meanings is always
possible (as in any performance), which helps add ambiguity to VanDyke’s work, also a function
of slowness.
134
VanDyke’s “slow looking” looks both forward and backward at the same time; if
the museum can be said to house objects in a binary, in either the exhibition space or in the
archive, VanDyke queers the visibility of the quilt by presenting it as both simultaneously in a
performance that is not marked by climax or build-up to any conclusive event (except the
equally-paced and regular changing of the quilt).

The materials lists for some of his paintings include a “performance canvas” that are
documents of human contact (Figure 28). VanDyke interned at The State Museum of
Pennsylvania, and having grown up near Amish Country near Pennsylvania himself, writes that
quilts were ubiquitous in his childhood, strewn across the interiors of the homes of relatives, a

132
Lutz Koepnick, On Slowness: Toward an Aesthetic of the Contemporary (New York: Columbia University Press,
2014), 76.
133
Amelia Jones, “‘Presence’ in absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation,” Art
Journal (New York; Winter 1997-98), reprinted with new introduction as “Temporal Anxiety/ ‘Presence’ in
Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation,” in Archaeologies of Presence: Acting, Performing, Being,
ed. Nick Kaye, Gabriella Giannachi, and Michael Shanks (New York and London: Routledge, 2012), 197-221.
134
Jessie Eggers, “Between Participation and Non-Participation: The Generative Potential of Slow Performance and
Slow Scholarship.” Performance Paradigm a journal of performance & contemporary culture 14 (2018): 112.

45
closeness resembled in the care VanDyke took in his work on the project.
135
As Walz said during
an interview, he originally conceived of the project as centering artistic labor.
136
This is part of
why VanDyke included students, museum volunteers and others that might never usually have
the chance to touch a museum object, much less help install it. Museum objects themselves exist
within vast power dynamics which VanDyke centers and decenters vis-à-vis the embodiment of
museum labor and the infrastructure of museums which often hold, in terms of sheer numbers of
objects, vastly more than what can be displayed. VanDyke recognizes the inherent link between
quilts and individual bodies, but also recognizes that quilts are but one sort of object that
contends with issues of provenance, authorship, and signs of use that degrade its status within
many institutions. Some of the objects VanDyke recognizes as fellow travelers of quilts in the
Museum’s collections are Twinned Wedding Bowl (19
th
century), Dollhouse Kitchen Frame
(ca.1925), and Lady’s Hands (n.d.), which all lack named makers.
In 2001, University of Chicago Professor of English Bill Brown published what would
become a highly influential essay outlining what would come to be known as “thing theory”.
Brown posits that when objects lose their original functionality or purpose, like a broken-down
car or a dilapidated home, rather than objects they become “things”:
We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us: when the
drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the window gets filthy, when their flow within the
circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested,
however momentarily. The story of objects asserting themselves as things, then, is the
story of a changed relationship to the human subject and thus the story of how the thing
really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation. As they circulate
through our lives, we look through objects (to see what they disclose about history,
society, nature, or culture - above all, what they disclose about us), but we only catch a
glimpse of things.
137

135
Ibid, 13.
136
Jonathan Frederick Walz, interview by the author September, 28, 2021.
137
Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 22.

46
Historical quilts as museum objects assume Brown’s slippery “thingness”, and when
activated by VanDyke’s performance, also take on a changed subject-object relation. VanDyke’s
performance and his paintings subversively frame quilts not as objects, but as “things”— things
which have not only ceased to be used in their original contexts but have ceased to be used at all
even by the institutions that house them. Brown, in his application of thing theory to the work of
Claes Oldenburg, including Oldenburg’s “stores” filled with giant out of scale objects argues that
Oldenburg “draws attention to the discrepancy between objectivity and materiality, perception
and sensation, objective presence (a fan, a Fudgsicle, a sink) and material presence (the canvas,
the plaster of paris, the vinyl), as though to theatricalise the point that all objects (not things) are,
first off, iconic signs.”
138
In selecting quilts with obvious signs of use or wear, VanDyke
contrasts the quilt’s indexes of lived human entanglement with their largely unknown or
incomplete provenance, creating the slipperiness of Brown’s notion of “things” and emphasizing
the disjointed nature of the quilt’s subject-object relationship.
Refracted against “Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch” and “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend”,
VanDyke’s project ties quilts and other objects to human subjectivities and bodies, challenging
viewers to conceive of the quilts not merely as objects, but as things, with individual histories
and particular positions with American art institutions. On a fundamental level, VanDyke’s
distinctive slowness as a performance methodology diminishes notions of his own authorship by
both centering (and decentering) himself.
VanDyke’s appropriation makes clear distinctions between his appropriative
performative work, his curatorial techniques, and even himself and the institution. VanDyke’s
object-based works engender an interpretation of the collected ideas and themes a quilt might

138
Ibid, 15-17.

47
represent, including community, bodily movement, and physical touch. VanDyke consciously
engaged a Museum with a bifurcated collection between Art and material culture, acting as a sort
of suture between the two, and even between the traditional role of artist and curator and
audience and participant. VanDyke, rather than simply acquiring historical quilts, strategically
sourced quilts from institutions with a vested interest in their ongoing preservation. It is difficult
to conceive of a place with more potential barriers to appropriating such an object, gesturing
toward a conscious decision by VanDyke to proceed in a way that acknowledged both the
historicity of quilts, and reconciled with the known and unknown bodies and histories of their
makers.
When considered alongside Biggers’ practice, these two artists and their corresponding
exhibitions engage very differently with quilts as objects produced by both female makers that
are not themselves, and as objects of history at two American art institutions. Intentionality, as a
theory and practice, is critically important to articulate when engaging with objects that are,
among other things, overwhelmingly associated with women of the 19th and 20th centuries,
made by hand, and largely ignored by many American art institutions. VanDyke, by better
visualizing the parameters of his appropriation, lends the quilt more agency, as both an object
and an idea, in the ambiguous narrative he constructs on its behalf. Where Biggers concedes to
the quilt’s histories as an unrecognized object only worthy of attention through the chaperoning
of a male artist, VanDyke turns many of quilt’s binaries, as either art or a product of untrained
artists, a decorative or functional object, and the typical modes of museum exhibition, including
visualizing the labor behind them, and inhabiting a role as both an artist and a curator, and as a
male artist using quilting histories and quilts, on their head. Though VanDyke’s work begs the
question: are his interventions, however critical, still inherently wrong and problematic?

48
In 1982, Barbara Kruger wrote ‘Taking Pictures’ in which she describes that the act of
(image) appropriation “can pose a deviation from the repetition of stereotype, contradicting the
survey of our initial readings.”
139
She argues that implicit critique of the work, through its
appropriation, might be subsumed by the power of its original “thus further elevating cliché.”
140

What is ultimately needed, Kreuger asserts, is an alteration “not only called ‘from primary to
secondary,’ but from implicit to explicit, from interference to declaration.”
141
Kruger speaks
elsewhere of her desire to appropriate images of posed bodies from advertising and marketing
visuals and imbue them with an “insistent chorus of commentary.”
142
Are Vandyke’s and
Biggers’ appropriative practices insistent enough to justify their appropriation? Are they
declaratory enough?
VanDyke’s practice, I would argue, does more to amplify and add ambiguity to the
histories of quilts collectively and individually, and in the process, he also indicts the institution
for a certain level of neglect. Biggers, considering that from a conservation and preservation
perspective irreparably alters the quilts, must address how their specific histories and makers
play into his appropriative act; quilts are not as equivocal as blank canvases. They are charged
objects operating at the intersections of gender, race, and power, and engaging with those
intersections is critical to doing more than reiterating the quilt’s second-class status within
American art institutions and assuming a particular authorship over those whose work you use. It
is not clear, though, that quilters or quilting institutions take issue with this type of artistic
practice; Biggers has enjoyed much critical success, and as even Janneken Smucker concedes, “I

139
Barbara Kreuger, printed statement, in “Taking Pictures: Photo Texts by Barbara Kreuger,” Screen 23, no. 2
(August 1982): 90.
140
Ibid.
141
Ibid.
142
Barbara Kreuger and Anders Stephanson, interview, Flash art magazine no. 36 (October 1987): 55.

49
love how Biggers has remade these objects.”
143
In this case, the methodologies with which both
approach their projects are markedly different. What I see as one of the biggest differences is the
benefit reaped by Biggers through the course of his project, particularly financially, but also in
terms of visibility. Even though VanDyke who is, at the same time, physically visible, he
emphasizes his lack of ownership or authority over the work.
If there were to be an intent and purpose behind making quilts, both VanDyke and
Biggers ultimately honor their own version of that on the one had as a black artist and on the
other as a queer artist. As a result, Biggers and VanDyke do embody Susan Bernick’s notion that
quilts only become art when they “stand up like a man” but unlike Rauschenberg, VanDyke does
something like honor the object as a museum object. In the catalog for the exhibition, VanDyke
writes his own prescription for his performance:
A body stationed in front of a quilt can serve as a reminder of the labor of its
makers, and its use as an object of protection and comfort, that adapted to and
covered those who slept, dreamt, rested, copulated, and perhaps gave birth or died
adjacent to it.
144

While part of VanDyke’s description might just as easily apply to Rauschenberg’s Bed, which
sites the quilt on a “bed,” one of its lived contexts, VanDyke adds something more: a slowness
that radically expands, complicates, and implies known and unknown aspects of both the specific
quilts he references that double as concepts that circulate in larger through-lines of quilting
histories. VanDyke renders each quilt worthy of a requisite amount of individual attention and
care, and the institutions and their laborers are equal participants alongside him, also afforded a
requisite amount of attention and care.

143
Janneken Smucker, “Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch,” The Journal of Modern Craft 14, no. 2 (2021): 194.
144
Jonathan Vandyke, “The Patient Eye,” in The Patient Eye (Columbus, GA: The Columbus Museum, 2018), 10.

50
Conclusion
“The Quilts of Gee’s Bend”, in the tradition of “Abstract Design of American Quilts”,
presented quilts to the American public based primarily on their formal composition. “The Quilts
of Gee’s Bend” exhibition, in many ways, follows a long tradition of outsiders using Gee’s Bend
to forward their own personal, political, or career goals considering the revelations about
Arnett’s business dealings associated with the exhibition. Detailed religious accounts offer
another emphasis by which to view both the quilts and the pre-1980s quilt production that
emerged from Gee’s Bend. Emphasizing visual experiences from which the quilts might have
emerged more intimately connects both the lived histories to the quilters, who are represented
primarily by problematic FSA photography and a documentary directed and funded in part by
William Arnett in the exhibition. This exhibition acts as a sort of flashpoint of the intersection
between American art and quilts, and as an event emphasizes the binaries that structure its
framing. Sanford Biggers and Jonathan VanDyke both expose and critique some of these binaries
making broader arguments for and against methods of presenting and describing American
quilting histories. While my thesis does not focus explicitly on histories of the exhibition of folk
art, more research is warranted as to their role in the exhibition and framing of quilts.
“Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch” presents appropriated quilts that challenge ideas about
the Underground Railroad, opening new ways to consider black bodies outside the realm of
excess death and violence by layering new code onto the quilts through his own evolving codex
of terms. Unlike the quilts of Gee’s Bend, though, Biggers is not a quilter but a conceptual artist.
In not acknowledging the histories already contained in each quilt, Biggers misses an opportunity
to add yet another layer of “code” but also to credit those whose work he is using, and instead
centers his own interventions, which stand out against the quilt’s “thingness”. As Sergio Bessa

51
writes in essay for the catalog, the quilts ultimately become “invisible” by “providing grids” onto
which new elements can be added.
145
Jonathan VanDyke, on the other hand, acknowledges
historical quilting and his own work as distinct from each other in “The Patient Eye.” VanDyke
leans into the quilt’s complicated and unknown histories, and by using his own body, literally
“pays attention” and centers them as subjects in his work. Viewers of the performance inevitably
become witnesses to a sustained human-object relationship, focusing on the act of looking at
quilts as both aesthetic objects and, self-reflexively, as case-studies in institutional neglect.
The institutions associated with each exhibition have various investments in the history of
quilting. “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend” does not challenge viewers to consider quilting on its own
terms and histories, but essentially appropriate it on the overwhelmingly male and
overwhelmingly white terms of modern and contemporary painting housed within the American
art museums it toured. The Whitney, as well as the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, must elide the
quilts’ histories in order to emphasize these terms. What is lost in these frameworks is any
recognition of quilting as its own aesthetic and tradition, with its own histories, influences, and
makers. When museums present quilts outside or beyond quilt histories, quilts cannot alone
express the manifold and complex social, political, and economic matrices they represent.
Biggers and VanDyke are not alone, but rather, are part of a larger resurgence in interest
in quilting and quilting histories. This includes exhibitions like “Fabric of a Nation: American
Quilt Stories” at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston in 2022, “The New Bend” curated by Legacy
Russell for Hauser & Wirth in 2022, and “Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective” Berkeley Art
Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) in 2020.

145
Antonio Sergio Bessa, “The Craft and the Codes: Traveling through History with Sanford
Biggers,” in Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch (New Haven and London: The Bronx Museum of the Arts in association
with Yale University Press, 2020), 3.

52
“The New Bend”, curated by Legacy Russell for Hauser and Wirth, acknowledges the
tremendous ongoing influence of the Gee’s Bend quilters by framing the exhibition as function
of their legacy and technical approach through the lens of male and female contemporary makers
including Eddie R. Aparicio, Diedrick Brackens, and Sojourner Truth Parsons, among others.
146

The exhibition acknowledges Gee’s Bend quilters such as “Sarah Benning (b. 1933), Missouri
Pettway (1902-1981), Lizzie Major (1922-2011), Sally Bennett Jones (1944-1988), Mary Lee
Bendolph (b.1935), and so many more, as central to expanded histories of abstraction and
modernism.”
147

Rosie Lee Tompkins, a Bay area-based quilter, recently had her largest retrospective yet
in 2020 at the Berkeley Art Museum. The Museum of Fine Arts Boston also recently staged
“Fabric of a nation: American Quilt Stories”, which aims to center “female and male, known and
unidentified, urban and rural makers; immigrants; and Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, and
LGBTQIA+ Americans” and their contributions to quilting histories.”
148
Other artists, in
including Bay-Area artist Andrew Wilson, also links images of Brookes with quilting histories,
contact printing the image as a cyanotype on fabric and creating a quilts with the results. Wilson
installs the quilts in both clothesline-like formations, but also as if bodies are hidden beneath
them, contrasting the comfort and warmth a quilt is supposed to bring with histories of slavery.
As this brief list attests, there are a diverse array of artists currently making work that references
or fabulates the past and future histories of quilts, testament to the enduring capacity of quilts to
hold and express multiple, simultaneous and contrasting lived histories.

146
Hauser and Wirth, “The New Bend” press release, February 3, 2002.
147
Ibid.
148
Museum of Fine Arts Boston, press release for “Fabric of a nation: American Quilt Stories,” September 8, 2021.

53
We need new modes of theorizing and curating quilts that account for diverse modes of
production and the mechanisms of their historicization. As in “Outliers” the connection between
the folk art objects and the embodied spiritual experience of its maker were not merely
predominant but largely dominant motivating forces among early American makers, particularly
rural ones.
149
The meditative dimension of VanDyke’s “slow looking” practice, Biggers’
overlayed non-Western religious imagery, and the underplayed influence of the AME church in
“The Quilts of Gee’s Bend” all indicate a door temptingly left ajar for exploration as to another
potential theoretical dimension of these exhibitions.
Another dimension of Gee’s Bend can be extrapolated from the historian Michael
Prokopow’s research, which indicates that Gee’s Bend quilts were sold at auction in New York
as early as 1966. Prokopow notes that black jazz musician Mabel Mercer attended one of the
earliest auctions. Jazz, with its guiding concept of “improvisation” could not only illuminate the
aesthetic sensibilities of quilts, but the modes of production themselves using material
themselves that came from their everyday surroundings, including fabric bags from food, clothes
from loves ones that passed away; no scrap of fabric was allowed to go to waste.
In In the Break, Fred Moten writes that the poet and jazz pianist Cecil Taylor’s “Floating
Gardens”, in its improvised voice and instrument choice, embodies
“infinite divisibilities and irreducible singularities; sites of communications never
to be received; rites of affliction, tragedies, bodily divisions; spatial/social
arrangements that constitute a kind of philosophical writing enacted and reenacted
in the annular rememberment and dismemberment of community; nation and race;
the imposition and maintenance of hierarchical relations within these units; the
vexed and impossible.”
150

149
Lynne Cooke and Douglas Crimp, Outliers and American Vanguard Art (Washington and Chicago: National
Gallery of Art, The University of Chicago Press).
150
Fred Moten, In the Break the Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2003), 45-46.

54
Brought to bear on these three exhibitions, Moten’s improvisation emphasizes a lens, like
Propokow, that looks beyond visual analysis. There are many lenses through which to examine
quilts that, like quilting histories even historical phenomena like the Underground Railroad, have
yet to be fully discovered. By looking at “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend”, “Sanford Biggers:
Codeswitch”, and “The Patient Eye” I aim to illustrate that what is at stake in the exhibition of
quilts is actual bodies that must be, and in some cases are, considered by the increasingly diverse
group of artists and institutions that frame and create their histories in the 21st century.

55
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61
FIGURES

Figure 1. Robert Rauschenberg, Bed, 1955. Oil and pencil on pillow, quilt, and sheet on wood
supports, 75 1/4 x 31 1/2 x 8 in. Image courtesy the Museum of Modern Art.

Figures 2 and 3. Installation views of "The Object Transformed," June 29, 1966–September 5,
1966. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photograph by George Cserna.

62

Figure 4. Installation views of “Abstract Design in American Quilts,” July 1-September 12,
1971. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Photo courtesy the International Quilt
Museum, Lincoln, Nebraska.

Figure 5. Installation view “Abstract Design in American Quilts at 50: Raising the Profile,” April
2 – August 7, 2021. Photo courtesy the International Quilt Museum, Lincoln, Nebraska.

63

Figure 6. Installation view “The Quilts of Gee's Bend,” Whitney Museum of American Art, New
York, New York, November 21, 2002–March 9, 2003. Photography by Jerry Thompson.

Figure 7. Arthur Rothstein, Girl at Gee’s Bend (Artelia Bendolph), April 1937. Photograph.
Gee’s Bend, Alabama. Image courtesy the Library of Congress.

Figure 8. Nellie Pettway, Pig in a Pen, 1955. Cotton, 78 x 78 inches. Photo by Stephen
Pitkin/Pitkin Studio, courtesy of Souls Grown Deep Foundation. Collection of Clark Atlanta
University Art Museum, gift of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation.

64

Figure 9. Minnie Sue Coleman, Pig in a Pen, c. 1970. 82 x 61 inches. Photo by Stephen
Pitkin/Pitkin Studio, courtesy of Souls Grown Deep Foundation. Collection of Montgomery
Museum of Fine Art Museum purchase and gift of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation.

Figure 10. Loretta, Pettway, Bricklayer, c. 1970. Denim, 84 x 66 in. Photo by Steve Pitkin/Pitkin
Studio, courtesy of Souls Grown Deep Foundation. Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts
Houston.

65

Figure 11. Mary L. Bennett, Bricklayer, c. 1970s. Corduroy, 83 x 73 inches. Photo by Stephen
Pitkin/Pitkin Studio, courtesy of Souls Grown Deep Foundation.

Figure 12. Linda Diane Bennett, Housetop with cross, c 1970. Cotton, synthetic blends, wool 78
x 75 inches. Photo by Stephen Pitkin/Pitkin Studio, courtesy of Souls Grown Deep Foundation.

66

Figure 13. Annie E. Pettway, Housetop – nine-block variation, c. 1930. Courtesy Souls Grown
Deep Foundation and Alison Jacques Gallery, London.

Figure 14. Sanford Biggers, Constellation Quilts, 2009. Installation view at Mother Bethel
African Methodist Episcopal Church, Philadelphia, as part of Hidden City Project organized by
Peregrine Arts. Reproduced in Codeswitch.

67

Figure 15. Installation view of “Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch,” July 28, 2021, to January 23,
2022. California African American Museum, Los Angeles. Image courtesy the California
African American Museum.

Figure 16. Installation view of “Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch,” July 28, 2021, to January 23,
2022. California African American Museum, Los Angeles. Image courtesy the California
African American Museum.

68

Figure 17. Installation view of “Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch,” July 28, 2021, to January 23,
2022. California African American Museum, Los Angeles. Image courtesy the California
African American Museum.

Figure 18. Installation view of “Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch,” July 28, 2021, to January 23,
2022. California African American Museum, Los Angeles. Image courtesy the California
African American Museum.

69

Figure 19. Installation view of “Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch,” July 28, 2021, to January 23,
2022. California African American Museum, Los Angeles. Image courtesy the California
African American Museum.

(Left) Figure 20. Sanford Biggers, UGRR: US 2.2, 2009. Antique quilt, oil stick, pastel, charcoal,
silkscreen on muslin, 90 x 80 in. Images courtesy the Rivers Institute. (Right) Figure 21. Sanford
Biggers, Luna Medicina, 2016. Antique quilt, gold leaf, acrylic, spray paint, 39 x 17 ¼ in. Image
courtesy the Rivers Institute.

70

(Left) Figure 22. Stowage of the British slave ship "Brookes" under the Regulated Slave Trade
Act of 1788. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections
Division. (Right) Figure 23. Sanford Biggers, Quilt 14 (Flying Lotus), 2012. Antique quilt,
embroidery, acrylic, spray paint. 97 x 90 in.

71

Figure 24. Film stills from Moonrising (2014), HD video. 6:46 min.

72

Figure 25. Mandala of the B-Bodhisattva II (2000), single channel video, 12:21 min.

Figure 26. Documentation of VanDyke’s “The Patient Eye” performance, 2018. Image courtesy
the Columbus Museum of Art.

73

Figure 27. Documentation of VanDyke’s “The Patient Eye” performance detailing archival
storage. Image courtesy of the Columbus Museum of Art.

Figure 28. Jonathan Vandyke, N v J, 2015/2016. Brad and David performance canvas, studio
session 13, whipping sequence, in gold, with over-dyed and painted canvas, 64 ½ x 57 in. Private
collection, Rome.

74

Figure 29. Installation view of “The Patient Eye,” The Columbus Museum of Art. Image
courtesy the Columbus Museum of Art.

Figure 30. Installation view of “The Patient Eye,” The Columbus Museum of Art. Image
courtesy the Columbus Museum of Art.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Villacis, Austen (author)

Core Title Quilting bodies: the Gee's Bend Quilters, Sanford Biggers, and Jonathan VanDyke

School Roski School of Art and Design

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere

Degree Conferral Date 2023-05

Publication Date 05/11/2023

Defense Date 05/10/2023

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag abstraction,American art,Art History,art vs craft,Black studies,contemporary art,craft,Feminism,modernism,Museum of Modern Art,OAI-PMH Harvest,outsider art,queer theory,Surrealism,Whitney Museum of American Art

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Language English

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Advisor Campbell, Andrew (committee chair), Hudson, Suzanne (committee member), Jones, Amelia (committee member)

Creator Email austen.villacis@gmail.com,avillaci@usc.edu

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