News & Events

The confluence of COVID and the murder of George Floyd by the police upended everything last summer. “I started seeing food lines in America like I had never seen them before, and hearing how many kids were going hungry,” recalls fashion industry veteran Patrick Robinson, who, after creative directorships at Perry Ellis and Paco Rabanne and four years as Gap’s lead designer, founded the activewear line Paskho in 2013 with a core ethical mission. “I built an e-commerce business around a responsible conversation about the environment, but after George Floyd something broke in me, being a Black man,” he tells me over Zoom from his home in Hudson, New York. “Something just exploded in my life and my career. Seeing all these people who were unemployed, I felt just talking about the environment was like talking out of both sides of my mouth.” Sustainability and social equity, he explains, are two sides of the same coin.

The Soul Grown Deep Foundation and Community Partnership is leading an economic development initiative to benefit the famous quilting community in Gee’s Bend, Ala. The Atlanta-based nonprofit organization, which has facilitated the acquisition of more than 500 works of African-American artists of the South for the collections of some 25 museums across the country is investing $600,000 in Paskho, a socially responsible, Black-owned lifestyle apparel company to establish a localized production pod in Gee’s Bend, an impoverished, isolated region with an average annual income stagnating at $12,000.

In 2019, the Copyright Office released a blog entry titled “Copyright Office Staff Finds Inspiration in African American Works.” It featured staff members inspired by poets, people they see every day, and the work of the Gee’s Bend quilters. Staff member Lauren Fasceski had seen a book come through the Copyright Office about the quilters, and she was fascinated by their work, especially a quilt made by Loretta Pettway from jeans and work pants. “It was an interesting story about her quilts,” Lauren told me. “I made my own pattern based on this quilt, because I really liked the pattern and the fact that it was made of old work clothes.”

When you step foot into the Cargill Gallery on the first floor of the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia), you will see an assortment of assemblages, quilts and works of found wood, metal, paint and more. Curated by Starasea Nidiala Camara, Mia’s newest exhibition, “In the Presence of Our Ancestors: Southern Perspectives in African American Art,” will be open and free to view until December 2021.

As part of its $100 million Racial Equity and Justice Initiative, Apple is supporting six global organizations to help advance their missions in promoting and achieving equality and civil rights in the US and around the world: Black Lives Matter Support Fund via the Tides Foundation; European Network Against Racism; International Institute on Race, Equality and Human Rights; Leadership Conference Education Fund; NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc.; and Souls Grown Deep.

The National Gallery of Art in Washington DC (NGA) has acquired 40 works by 21 African American artists from the non-profit organisation Souls Grown Deep Foundation, a move described as a “milestone” by the foundation president Maxwell Anderson. Souls Grown Deep Foundation is dedicated to documenting and promoting the work of African American artists from the US South. Anderson says that the purchase of numerous works by Black painters, quilters and sculptors is significant “because the NGA is not an encyclopaedic museum given to making acquisitions of multiple works at one time, tending more often to acquire single significant objects made at the apogee of a noted artist's career”.

The National Gallery of Art in Washington has announced the acquisition of 40 works from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, a nonprofit organization that for the last decade has dedicated itself to promoting the contributions of African-American artists from the South. The purchase adds the work of 21 Black painters, quilters and sculptors to the museum’s art collection.

The National Gallery of Art is pleased to announce a major acquisition of 40 works from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation by 21 African American artists from the southern United States. The acquisition is made possible through the generosity of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation in addition to funds from the Patrons’ Permanent Fund. Some highlights of this important acquisition are nine quilts by the artists of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, including Mary Lee Bendolph and Irene Williams; three paintings, three drawings, and one sculpture by Thornton Dial; works on paper by Nellie Mae Rowe, Henry Speller, Georgia Speller, and “Prophet” Royal Robertson; four sculpted heads by James “Son Ford” Thomas, which were featured in the National Gallery’s Outliers and American Vanguard Art exhibition (January 28–May 13, 2018); and three sculptures by Lonnie Holley.

At Alison Jacques Gallery there is an opportunity to see some 13 quilts made by three generations of women from Gee’s Bend, Alabama. This is the first European solo outing for the Gee’s Bend quilts, a selection of which were included in the recent exhibition ‘We Will Walk: Art and Resistance in the American South’ at Turner Contemporary, Margate. There have been several shows in the United States, the most important being ‘The Quilts of Gee’s Bend’, organised by the collector and entrepreneur William Arnett (1939–2020) for the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and travelling to a dozen other venues to great acclaim in 2002. They are for sale and have been sourced via the Souls Grown Deep Foundation set up by Arnett, as part of the foundation’s Collection Transfer Program that grants a five per cent resale royalty to the quilt-makers.