Blocks and strips, tied with yarn

The rural community of Gee’s Bend, officially known as Boykin, is located in Wilcox County in a bend of the Alabama River. Since the early 1800s African American women of the Gee’s Bend community have used scraps of cloth, old work clothes, and fabric remnants to create quilts for their families, sharing patterns and passing knowledge from one generation to another.

In 1966, following a visit by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr and with assistance from Father Francix X. Walter, a white Episcopalian minister, quilters throughout the Black Belt region of Alabama, including Gee’s Bend and Rehobeth, formed a community cooperative called The Freedom Quilting Bee. The cooperative provided opportunities for the women to be paid for their work, transforming domestic craft into an economic enterprise that generated income for families and raised the socioeconomic status of the community.

Helen McCloud was born in Clifton, Alabama in 1938 and moved to Gee’s Bend in 1964 when she married Almos McCloud. She learned quilt-making from her mother, Della Mae Bridges, and often worked with scraps of cloth given to her by her sister Annie Pearl who worked at a sewing factory in Mobile. As with many of the quilt makers of Gee’s Bend, McCloud sewed quilts out of necessity, making bed coverings out of whatever materials were available.

'Blocks and strips, tied with yarn' is characteristic of the artist’s work, revealing her use of bold fabric prints arranged in the so-called “Lazy Gals” pattern – a geometric arrangement of different-sized bars. A feature of McCloud’s quilting technique, and that of her mother, is the use of yarn to tie the layers of the quilts together. The threads of yarn form an irregular grid across the surface of this quilt and create another pattern that interacts with the colours and shapes of the found fabrics.