Vox Populi
A curated webspace for Poetry, Politics, and Nature. Over 16,000 daily subscribers. Over 7,000 archived posts.
Video: While I Yet Live
A trip to Gee’s Bend, Alabama, where masterpieces hang from clotheslines
In Gee’s Bend, Alabama, quilting is a craft with roots in necessity, not artistic intention. Quilts there were first made by enslaved women stitching together fabric scraps to provide warmth for themselves and their loved ones. The tradition continued through the sharecropping era, and many of the women who experienced this ‘slavery by another name’ in their youth, picking cotton in intense heat and surrounded by overt racial discrimination, turned to quilting for a stable source of income, forming a cooperative to sell their wares. Over the ensuing decades, the quilts of Gee’s Bend would, much to the surprise of their creators, come to be celebrated as important folk art, exhibited widely around the US, including at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. Writing about the 2002 Whitney Museum exhibition for The New York Times, the art critic Michael Kimmelman called the Gee’s Bend quilts ‘some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced’, adding: ‘Imagine Matisse and Klee … arising not from rarefied Europe, but from the caramel soil of the rural South …’
Adam D’Arpino writing for Psyche
Director: Maris Curran
Producer: Jon Coplon
Studio: Nightshade Films
Running time: 15 minutes
Email subscribers may click on the title of this post to watch the video.
Vox Populi 
I allowed myself to reblog, I hope you don’t mind. Thank you, a beautiful video.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thank you, Vengo! I love it when readers repost Vox Populi offerings. And this short film is so celebratory — a feeling we don’t experience much these days.
Michael Simms https://www.michaelsimms.info https://www.michaelsimms.info/
Author of Nightjar https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1933974435/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i2 Author of American Ash https://www.amazon.com/American-Ash-Poems-Michael-Simms/dp/1933974397/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2PC9VWO127ZSF&dchild=1&keywords=american+ash+by+michael+simms&qid=1593969710&s=books&sprefix=American+ash,aps,133&sr=1-1 Founder of Autumn House Press https://www.autumnhouse.org/?method=displayPage&pagename=home Editor of Vox Populi https://voxpopulisphere.com/
>
LikeLiked by 2 people
I agree about what you say and thank you for being as you are.
LikeLiked by 1 person
What a lovely thing to say, Vengo! As you know, I love your art.
M. Michael Simms https://www.michaelsimms.info https://www.michaelsimms.info/
Author of Nightjar https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1933974435/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i2 Author of American Ash https://www.amazon.com/American-Ash-Poems-Michael-Simms/dp/1933974397/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2PC9VWO127ZSF&dchild=1&keywords=american+ash+by+michael+simms&qid=1593969710&s=books&sprefix=American+ash,aps,133&sr=1-1 Founder of Autumn House Press https://www.autumnhouse.org/?method=displayPage&pagename=home Editor of Vox Populi https://voxpopulisphere.com/
>
LikeLiked by 2 people