The Airing of the Quilts Festival Celebrates a Legacy of Color and Community in Gee’s Bend, Alabama

“It’s amazing how good a quilt can smell when it’s washed and dried in the sun,” says Mary Margaret Pettway, a fourth-generation quilter from Gee’s Bend, Alabama. Pettway’s memories of hanging up blankets—holding the sun-faded fabric to her nose or stepping back to admire her stitches and colors in the light—aren’t singular to her or even the line of women that taught her to sew. Throughout the tiny rural town of Gee’s Bend, the airing of the quilts is a treasured tradition that comes just once in the spring, usually during a school break, and a second time in the fall before the start of classes.

Quilters like Pettway, Sharon Williams, and Debbie Major have to talk about their mothers and grandmothers while talking about airing quilts. They all remember a seasonal cleaning routine that started with scrubbing the house (and just about everything inside) and ended with taking out quilts from storage to soak them with hot water and lye soap. The real magic started when hands began to drape laundry lines with the colorful tapestries, front yards flashing with billowing patterns of stars, wedding rings, housetop, and postage stamps. 

“Once you got quilts on the line, you could never have that day to yourself,” Pettway says. Neighbors floated past to admire one another’s designs. “Everyone saw what everyone else was making, and new quilts were made for added measure. People were flexing.” As a girl in Gee’s Bend, Williams fondly recalls going house to house to catch a glimpse of her neighbors’ drying laundry, feeling overwhelmed with inspiration.

The Airing of the Quilts Festival honors this beloved pastime and encourages people to visit Gee’s Bend to engage with makers and learn about the town’s rich artistic history. Hosted last month by Souls Grown Deep, the third-annual festival kicked off the town’s expanded Heritage Trail and newly opened showcase, Just Look Where He Brought Me From: The Family Quilts of Mary Lee Bendolph, at the River Gallery in the Gee’s Bend Welcome Center. For months, quilters prepared work to show buyers, gain exposure, and proudly stand beside. 

The festival also aims to put power back in the hands of quiltmakers, who historically faced decades of under-recognition, anonymity, and unfair art practices. That means ensuring the artists are paid fairly and their work is protected. “We measure success based not just on increasing visibility for these artists, but also based on the extent to which we can improve their lives and the lives of those in their communities,” says Maxwell Anderson, the president of Souls Grown Deep, a foundation created by collector William Arnett in 2010 to advocate for the recognition and empowerment of Black artists from the American South.

Besides honoring time-honored customs and artisans, the festival also brings in fresh faces. When Rachel Hayes, a textile artist from Oklahoma, got the call to work on two projects—a collaborative installation and a set of custom sunshade canopies to provide cover for guests and makers—she jumped at the chance. “I was so excited,” she says, remembering when she first flipped through pages of The Quilts of Gee’s Bend in 2002. “I’ve loved the quilts of Gee’s Bend for a long time.”

Photo: Rachel Hayes

Hayes’s custom sunshade provides cover for festival guests.

For years, Hayes’s textiles have taken the form of floating mosaics: giant veils of fabric stirring up otherworldly whimsy in the grassy plains, valleys, deserts, and lakes where she hangs them. Like the quilts of Gee’s Bend, geometric compositions of her pieced fibers explore interactions between color, pattern, and rhythm. And like many women in the quilting community, she credits her practice to her mother, who would sit by her to teach, help, and share words of encouragement. “Whenever I was overwhelmed with these big projects, she would step in,” Hayes says. “She would get me out of bed to say I had to keep going.”

 

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For Pettway, Williams, and Major, meeting a new collaborator who deeply understood and appreciated their work was the most rewarding aspect of this year’s festival, especially in an insulated artist community. As Hayes sewed her housetop-patterened sunshades, she reserved scraps of the thick, heavy-duty plastic to send off to women in Gee’s Bend. In Alabama, the pieces took on a new shape in the homes of twenty-two quilters: Pettway and Williams were surprised to find their machines, which usually take on softer fabrics, could handle the new industrial-grade material. “I looked at the small pieces, and I saw Rachel’s big canopies, and I didn’t know how it would work,” Pettway says. “But it turned out lovely, like stained glass.”

Before the first guests arrived, Hayes and the Gee’s Bend quilters strung up the rectangular piecework quilts on lines between trees outside the welcome center, stepping back to admire their workas golden-hour light caught the rows of fabric. Traditional quilts have three layers—the backing, insulated batting, and patterned quilt top—but this temporary installation showcased a singular sewn layer. “You get metaphorical layers: shadow, the sewn piece, and then the sun and elements,” Hayes says.

The moment Hayes stood before the completed installation—and brushed elbows with the women who instilled inspiration in her for over a decade—was surreal. “I’ve studied everyone’s work and admired it,” she says. “Then to just press palms and break bread and be outside together, it was so beautiful.”