Mary Lee Bendolph
(b. 1935)For Mary Lee Bendolph, quiltmaking serves as an act of community building, aesthetic experimentation, and ancestral remembrance.
Biography
Mary Lee Bendolph builds on the quilting traditions of her ancestors in Gee’s Bend, Alabama, finding inspiration in family belongings and architectural structures.
At age five, she moved with her family into one of the “Roosevelt” houses in Gee’s Bend built by the Resettlement Administration. She learned to quilt from her mother while working in the fields and attending school. Quilting was both an aesthetic endeavor and a practical one, in that it used found and recycled textiles to warm the unheated houses of the community. She briefly worked at the Freedom Quilting Bee, a quilting cooperative begun by women as a way to generate income. In 1965, she joined the march to Camden, Alabama, after Martin Luther King Jr. visited Gee’s Bend and encouraged residents to register to vote. In 1999, she temporarily stopped quilting, only to resume just a few years later. While a prolific quilter, she was not known beyond Gee’s Bend until 2002, when The Quilts of Gee’s Bend, a traveling exhibition, toured at institutions such as the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Bendolph’s works draw on historical approaches to quilting in Gee’s Bend, as well as the vocabulary of modern abstract art. Her practice is a document to her family traditions and memorial to her home—a community descended from enslaved people who worked Joseph Gee’s cotton plantation. Her compositions refuse symmetry and uniformity and instead embrace variation, both in structure and shape. She offers a seemingly endless array of visual effects derived from a small vocabulary of forms and a mix of textiles such as wool, denim, cotton, corduroy, and polyester. She takes inspiration from the built environment that continues to shift and grow in Gee’s Bend, such as the ad hoc repairs that have been completed at the Roosevelt houses since their initial construction in the 1930s. While she continues to work primarily with textiles, she has also experimented with printmaking. In 2005, she spent two weeks making intaglio prints at Paulson Fontaine (then Paulson Press) in Berkley, California. In 2006, her work appeared on a postage stamp as part of the American Treasures series.
In 2015, Bendolph received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work is in the permanent collections of institutions including the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; National Gallery of Art; and Tate Modern. The Studio Museum first acquired her work in 2020.
Mary Lee Bendolph
(b. 1935)For Mary Lee Bendolph, quiltmaking serves as an act of community building, aesthetic experimentation, and ancestral remembrance.
Biography
Mary Lee Bendolph builds on the quilting traditions of her ancestors in Gee’s Bend, Alabama, finding inspiration in family belongings and architectural structures.
At age five, she moved with her family into one of the “Roosevelt” houses in Gee’s Bend built by the Resettlement Administration. She learned to quilt from her mother while working in the fields and attending school. Quilting was both an aesthetic endeavor and a practical one, in that it used found and recycled textiles to warm the unheated houses of the community. She briefly worked at the Freedom Quilting Bee, a quilting cooperative begun by women as a way to generate income. In 1965, she joined the march to Camden, Alabama, after Martin Luther King Jr. visited Gee’s Bend and encouraged residents to register to vote. In 1999, she temporarily stopped quilting, only to resume just a few years later. While a prolific quilter, she was not known beyond Gee’s Bend until 2002, when The Quilts of Gee’s Bend, a traveling exhibition, toured at institutions such as the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Bendolph’s works draw on historical approaches to quilting in Gee’s Bend, as well as the vocabulary of modern abstract art. Her practice is a document to her family traditions and memorial to her home—a community descended from enslaved people who worked Joseph Gee’s cotton plantation. Her compositions refuse symmetry and uniformity and instead embrace variation, both in structure and shape. She offers a seemingly endless array of visual effects derived from a small vocabulary of forms and a mix of textiles such as wool, denim, cotton, corduroy, and polyester. She takes inspiration from the built environment that continues to shift and grow in Gee’s Bend, such as the ad hoc repairs that have been completed at the Roosevelt houses since their initial construction in the 1930s. While she continues to work primarily with textiles, she has also experimented with printmaking. In 2005, she spent two weeks making intaglio prints at Paulson Fontaine (then Paulson Press) in Berkley, California. In 2006, her work appeared on a postage stamp as part of the American Treasures series.
In 2015, Bendolph received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work is in the permanent collections of institutions including the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; National Gallery of Art; and Tate Modern. The Studio Museum first acquired her work in 2020.