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Patches
Quilts at the MFA, and Eugene Tan’s performing garments at the Berwick
BY RANDI HOPKINS

The small Alabama farming community of Gee’s Bend is cut off from the rest of the world on three sides by the Alabama River, with no ferry service since the 1960s and only one access road that wasn’t paved till 1967. Yet as the art world learned when work by Rosie Lee Thompkins popped up in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, this primarily African-American community (almost all 700 residents are descendants of slaves who worked on the Pettway Plantation) has been producing extraordinary quilters since the 1920s, generation after generation of women who turn meager resources and the material at hand, or rather, at second-hand, into oversized "abstractions with attitude" (to quote artnet.com writer N.F. Karlins). These quilts have been acclaimed at the Whitney Museum in New York, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Although the quilters can hardly have had more than passing exposure to geometric abstraction, assemblage, collage, and other 20th-century art movements, their work parallels these developments and sometimes does them one better. The Gee’s Bend artists eschew the symmetry and the squared corners of more traditional quiltmaking; they’re known instead for their idiosyncratic color combinations, and for twisting their patterns and riffing off their materials to create work with a social and political undercurrent — using red, white, and blue fabric left over from a voting drive, for example, or the worn blues and faded browns of old work clothes. More than 60 of these bed-sized works, dating from the 1930s to 2000, are coming to the Museum of Fine Arts in "The Quilts of Gee’s Bend." The show opens June 1, but the MFA is throwing a free Memorial Day Open House with gospel music and artmaking activities plus a chance to meet some of the quilters and get a preview of the show.

Fabric also gets political at the Berwick Research Institute: activist artist Eugene Tan, who directed the guerrilla-theater AIDS-outreach project "A Street Theater Named Desire" in the Fenway, has turned the BRI’s Dudley Square studio into the "On Your Sleeve" Boutique, where he’s been developing, sewing, and selling unusual but fully wearable garments. The question of how meaning and narrative can be embedded in the items we wear has been a recurrent, uh, thread in Tan’s performance work. On May 28 at 8 p.m. at the Berwick, he presents his latest performance project, "Theory: Echoland," with texts from the notebooks of avant-garde playwright Richard Foreman. The event is followed by an "Open Boutique" and party, and guests are instructed to "dress meaningfully." Don’t miss this opportunity to acquire your own Eugene Tan original.

"The Quilts of Gee’s Bend" is at the Museum of Fine Arts, 465 Huntington Avenue in Boston, June 1 through August 21, with a Memorial Day Open House on May 30 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and a round-table discussion with the quilters on June 1 at 7 p.m. Tickets for the discussion are $15 for members, $18 for non-members; call (617) 267-9300. Eugene Tan presents "Theory: Echoland" at the Berwick Research Institute, 14 Palmer Street in Roxbury’s Dudley Square, on May 28 at 8 p.m. Admission is free; call (617) 442-4200.


Issue Date: May 20 - 26, 2005
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