News & Events

Souls Grown Deep has announced that it has been entrusted by artists Mary Lee Bendolph (b. 1933) and Essie Bendolph Pettway (b. 1956) to steward over 100 quilts made by them, with the express goal of their distribution to major collections. Together, their artworks are widely considered among the most inventive and fundamental examples of quiltmaking in Gee’s Bend, the home of “some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced” (The New York Times).

A line strung with dead birds runs across an overcast sky of blue-grey enamel. The image appears familiar: crows used as scarecrows, the dead displayed to warn off the living. But these birds turn out to be scraps of black cloth suspended from real wire against the canvas, each with curiously human overtones. A glove, a hat, the actual traces of people – beyond the allusions to Jim Crow laws and southern lynchings the tragic poetry is irreducible. These flightless birds have neither life nor freedom.

Narratives of the great migration and the Harlem renaissance have dominated conversations around African American art in the 20th century, but a new exhibition, Souls Grown Deep Like the Rivers, which opens at the Royal Academy in London this week, invites us to consider the cultural contribution of artists from the American south. Communities that remained there in the aftermath of the civil war continued to be exposed to extremes of racial violence, segregation and the hardship of economic exclusion.

Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers: Black Artists from the American South will showcase unique African American artistic traditions and methods of visual storytelling. The distinctive creativity of the artists in this exhibition has brought about artworks whose subjects and materials often reverberate with the South’s painful history – the inhuman practice of enslavement, the cruel segregationist policies of the Jim Crow era, institutionalised racism as well as the Civil Rights Movement.

The line of demarcation between “folk” and “fine” art in America is centuries old and extends far beyond the founding of our nation. The former, which includes practices like needlework, woodwork, basket weaving, and ceramics has long been considered the lesser of painting, sculpture, and other works that align with art world standards. There’s no coincidence these works are often gendered, associated with the home and “feminine” qualities, racialized, classed, thus deemed “unrefined” and considered “skilled labor,” more akin to artisan than artist.

According to Lauren Bravo’s book, How to Break Up with Fast Fashion, we only wear 10-20 percent of the clothes in our closets on a daily basis. Patrick Robinson—a designer who has transformed global brands such as Giorgio Armani, Perry Ellis, and the Gap—has made it his mission to change how we approach consumerism and our closets. Worth sat down with Robinson to discuss the deep-seated issues of exploitation and excess in the fashion industry and how his regenerative brand, Paskho, is changing fashion’s landscape.

Gee’s Bend is a tiny, isolated rural hamlet in Alabama, USA. Located in a literal bend in the Alabama River, the community is almost completely surrounded by water geographically and culturally disconnected from so much of the rest of the world. Many of its African-American community, who number less than 1,000, can trace their descendants back to slaves from the cotton plantation established at Gee’s Bend in 1816.