In the late 1960s, several museum shows presented quilts—traditionally considered craft rather than fine art—as unacknowledged precursors (on account of their colorful patterns and grid structures) to the geometric abstract painting that dominated American art at that time.⠀
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Several decades later, a 2002 touring exhibition "The Quilts of Gee's Bend," featured works created by a close-knit community of African American women living in rural Alabama, including Mary Lee Bendolph and Annie Mae Young.⠀
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This section of #AmericanOutliers places works by the Gee's Bend quilters in conversation with fabric works by Rosie Lee Tompkins and by several New York-based abstract painters, including Howardena Pindell and Alan Shields, who, in the early 1970s, found inspiration for their innovative practices in contemporary textiles. See more of these dialogues in the exhibition, on view through March 17, 2019. ⠀ ⠀
photo © Museum Associates/LACMA