The quilters of Gee’s Bend, Alabama practice a mark of craftsmanship passed down from generation to generation. Their art is shaped by ancestry and intuition, not markets and institutions.
It is for this reason that the latest project from the community is sure to attract some double takes. For ArsnlArtists’ Rights Society (ARS) NFT platform, three Gee’s Bend quilters have collaborated with generative artist Anna Lucia on a series of works that blend the digital and the physical, the ancient and the neoteric.
“Generations” is the name of their joint effort, which includes 500 NFTs created from an algorithm Lucia developed in response to the work of quilters, as well as the actual quilts that inspired the code. In other words, the products of artists from very different backgrounds respond to each other’s creations and find a surprising amount of overlap in the process.
A generative NFT by Anna Lucia based on a quilt by Loretta Pettway. Courtesy of Arsnl.
That Lucia is interested in Gee’s Bend quilts makes sense. The 31-year-old self-taught artist, born in the Netherlands and now based in Cairo, Egypt, has made a habit of making thematic connections between computer code and textile art. His latest project, for example, is inspired by the unknown creators of the Bauhaus movement to influence.
“When I first saw images of Gee’s Bend quilts, I was immediately captivated by…their vibrant colors, bold patterns and expressive compositions,” Lucia told Artnet News in an email. . “I saw a connection to generative art in a completely different setting. Each quilt is unique, but all share a certain familiarity.
“At first glance,” she continues, “quilts may seem like simple geometric compositions. But I found great complexity in the models when describing them in logic and code.
For their part, the participating quilters – Loretta Pettway Bennett, Essie Bendolph Pettway and Mary Margaret Pettway – brought an entirely different perspective to the project. All three are direct descendants of slaves brought to the area in the early 1800s by plantation owner Joseph Gee. (The quilts of Lucy T. Pettway, who died in 2004, also informed Lucia’s code.)
According to Katarina Feder, director of business development at ARS and co-founder of ARSNL, women are now in their 60s and knew about NFTs, but had little interest in them. But it wasn’t long in a Zoom meeting earlier this year that the four artists have found common ground.
A Mary Margeret Pettway quilt inspired by an Anna Lucia NFT. Courtesy of Arsnl.
“What I found remarkable, being a fly on the wall during [those discussions], was how similar they can become when speaking the language of the creators,” Feder said. “There is a real symbiosis.
Indeed, flick your eyes between a Gee’s Bend quilt and its digital counterpart and you’ll see both exude a mastery of color and pattern, despite the processes that went into making them.
Each of Lucia’s NFTs is a output of the same algorithm. The copies for sale have been chosen by the quilters themselves.
“It was fascinating to see the final choices,” Lucia said. “Sometimes they were just like what I would have chosen; other times they were completely different. The metadata for each NFT contains information about who chose that particular design and what artist work it was based on.
A generative NFT of Anna Lucia based on a quilt by Lucy T. Pettway. Courtesy of Arsnl.
Scheduled to launch on May 17, NFTs will be priced at 0.15 ETH each (currently around $300). Thirty percent of profits will go to quilters, with an additional five percent of each sale going to the Freedom Quilting Bee Cooperative of Alabama. Lucia and Arsnl will each take 25%, while the remaining proceeds will be split between Refraction And Seed Clubtwo DAOs who helped organize the project.
Also on sale are six Gee’s Bend quilts, priced between $8,000 and $20,000. (Quilters will receive up to 75% of these sales.
Greg Liburd, one of the co-founders of Refraction, defined the scope of the project well in his curatorial statement“‘Generations’,” he writes, “is an expression of the ‘heritage algorithms’ so alive in Gee’s Bend’s hand-sewn masterpieces, artistically remixed through digital code.”
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