When I started making quilts
in 1979 I conceived of the idea of becoming a professional
and I thought I know I'll have a business card printed up
that says Joe Cunningham professional quilt maker and nobody can prove that
you're not a professional quilt maker. That's the great
thing about it and the next thing you know
people in town they start hiring me to give talks. Then there are
these quilt guilds forming. At the time I could get to know
I could work at one of the big conferences and meet the
other dozen professional quilt makers in the country.
Now it's a four and a half billion dollar annual industry and there's thousands of
professional quilt makers in many different capacities.
It's a huge industry. My part of the industry is that
I'm a teacher, a lecturer and a quilt maker and
occasionally I sell quilts sometimes to museums and
to people. My ideas come from my
whole life, from everything I've ever seen, everything
I've ever read but also old quilts. The way I made this quilt is
pretty typical of a lot of my quilts, which is I had no idea.
I didn't know what I was going to do so I took my
rotary cutter and a piece of this shirting
and then I started cutting some other stuff up and
adding it to that and wondering what would
happen if I did that again cutting up the pink and sewing
it together so that the lines meet in different ways.
I just patched this vague line across here and
then I realized it was a landscape, oh it's a landscape
that's what so I put my vanishing point on, I put
some clouds on. Then I quilted it with clouds. Hand quilting was the first part of the process that I
learned how to do and it's still my favorite. When I sit
in my studio and I quilt something by hand, I often
will not even have music on. I'll sit and enjoy the silence
for four or five or six hours a day. It makes me
feel wealthy. It makes me feel like the
luckiest guy in the world. My very favorite time to
hand quilt is when I go and visit my friends in
Gee's Bend because they quilt in the old time way
in big frames and they sit around together. When
I learned how to quilt in the late 70s I sought that out.
I went around to church groups and I don't know
what it was but there was something about sitting
around a quilt frame with a bunch of old ladies that I found extremely pleasurable and informative. You learned from your
grandma? Annie Pettway. Annie Pettway. Best
teachers the grandma? But this sitting around
the frame like this and quilting on each other's quilts is the most old-fashioned thing right
cause all the modern quilters they feel like nobody
wants to take the time to quilt on somebody
else's quilt you know what I mean and that's
what I like best about coming here is that is
just this, just sitting around the frame and
quilting. Mm-hmm. You ready too Joe.
I'm enjoying. I don't know about. It don't
take patience. Quilting on your hand
look better to me than quilting with the machine.
See a machine you can do that anytime but you
have to take time and do it real well
with your hand. Men in quilts are guests.
It's totally a woman's world. It's very kind of women to
allow us to do this. [singing] To me it's like medicine.
It's all you know I suffer with arthritis but you
won't know it if I don't tell because see I can
just be quilting and I don't have a pain
in the world. I will sit there and
sometimes I will sing to myself or sing out
a little loud. [singing] Gee's Bend is a location
in central Alabama. It's a bend in the
Alabama River. It has no bridge across
it so it's very isolated. It's about 45 or so miles
west of Selma. Originally it was a
plantation with slaves. After the Civil War
the slaves stayed on as sharecroppers and it was a very poor very isolated community
where people raised their own food and made
their own quilts. This was your learning
quilt. Right, this is the first little thin jacket
I made. And what do you call the pattern?
Robbing Peter to Pay Paul and just had a feel of
cotton and everything. I started making quilts
when I was 14 years old. I was with my mother
and she taught me how to make them and
it was fun to me. I did it all the time.
I'm 82 years old and yet I'm still doing quilts.
Some of this fabric Ely and Walker, printed
it for 125 years. Mm-hmm and so you got some of
that Ely and Walker in there. Well it came from the
quilting bee. From the quilting bee. Mm-hmm. In the 1960s people
associated with Sears & Roebuck and
Bloomingdale's from New York thought it
would be a great thing to have these quilt
makers make quilts for the New York market
and they then created the Freedom Quilting Bee. We were just making
quilts to keep our family warm and when the
Freedom Quilting Bee came about they begin
to make quilts to sell. It provided jobs for
women in Gee's Bend to make quilts to order. It was making pillows
and you know pillowcases but you know when they
was doing quilts they had to make sure they got the
stitches to exact point. When we were working
on quilts you know we always made the little
small stitches. You couldn't see them
but people want to see the stitches in the
quilt now. To get it to the quilt
and can't see the stitches they say we need to
see the stitches. This building we're in
this is the Gee's Bend Quilting Collective where
we have our quilts stored and sell from here and I'm the manager
of the collective. My job here is to know
sell the work here so now I try to do my
best and I try to have it looking a little decent
enough for people to want to come back
again so we do have busloads of people
you know do come from Birmingham, Alabama
and not just Birmingham we even have people
from Hawaii. We have some from
Australia I mean the United Kingdom
and they come they say they you know they love
to get something to take back with them
and everybody love our work. I was told
that it started back in 2002 and this is
how I was told this got started. Bill Arnett
saw this quilt and a book. Somebody had taken
this photograph of Annie Mae Young,
her great-granddaughter standing by a wood
pile with some with a quilt spread over
it and when he saw that quilt he said I need to
find the lady that made this quilt. The Arnett's went to
Gee's Bend and found these incredibly art like
objects that look like modern art and they
realized that they could collect them which they
did and had a show of them in Houston and
the rest is history and I was unable to
get to Houston to see that show but the
next year they were in the Corcoran Gallery
in Washington, D.C. and my wife and I
went to the Corcoran for the weekend. A bunch of the women
from Gee's Bend were there and they did
a Gospel brunch. It was one of the
most beautiful things that I'd ever heard. I loved the show. This
was my kind of thing. A lot of improvisation,
freedom from rigidity was what I loved most
about them. Maybe most quilts
are made of blocks and you would
assemble the quilt by putting the blocks
together in a grid. Many of the Gee's
Bend quilts are one large design. In that way our quilts
are very similar. I'm usually making
one large design. This is a quilt that
I made after I found this piece of fabric
from a textile training center in Ghana.
I thought that it looked like a drop cloth
from the wax factory. This is fantastic.
There's no design. It's just, it's just like
random which is something that I like. I tried to figure out
how I was gonna create a shape with
these indigos with piecing them or
how I was gonna do that and then I suddenly
realized oh you know what I'm gonna do
I'm gonna patch them on there just like
you would patch your blue jeans or
something so I just folded the edge under
and sewed those down in the most non quilty
way. There's nothing technical or interesting
about doing that but it allowed me
the freedom to keep the rectangles and
to make a shape and so therefore
I called it Patchwork Quilt you see because
for obvious reasons. The way I acquire
fabric is I get as much of it by chance as
possible. I'm really into chance operations
and so if somebody hands me something
then it puts parameters around what I'm
going to do next. One of my favorite quilts I've made is made of suiting.
I met a woman from South Dakota. Yes she
was 93 years old. She sent me a box
of her late husband's suits that she had
completely disassembled and ironed all the
seams flat and so these beautiful
suitings from the 30s, 40s, and 50s I cut up then and made a quilt out of them. I use old jeans, khakis all old stuff like that
I put it in my quilts. I don't know how
to throw it away. When the men goes
to the fields and work with the pants and
things is all they gonna wear
out in the front but the back is
always good enough for you to take the
back and make a quilt out of it. Since we've been famous most everybody now
want the old fashioned quilts like my mother
and my grandmother and my auntie made.
Fancy quilts don't sell now. Cause I had a couple
of fancy quilts wouldn't no one
look at those. It was too fancy. Because it doesn't
look like a Gee's Bend quilt so I believe that
it's sort of narrowed the idea of what a
what the women can do and people have gotten the idea
these women they make these kind
of quilts because they have limited abilities.
It's totally not true. These women have great abilities So this is an all-white
quilt. I love this quilt because you know all white
quilts, they in today's quilt world they are
supposed to be the fanciest of the fancy
what? the the fanciest of the fancy is the
all white quilt. You reserve it for your special special special little things and
what you did is I just love this
now this is this is like snake, snake
quilting you call it. I quilted that by
myself, all by yourself and I always called
this a fan variation Mm-hmm. but snake
I never heard that before. I'm just thrilled to
hear about it and you would just
quilt it in one direction as long as you feel
like and then change to something else,
change to something else. Mm-hmm. Now would
you mind if some guy out in San Francisco
made one something similar? You are welcome.
All right. That's all right Joe. I'm gonna straighten
it, we'll straight it out I'm gonna put them
all back up there. All right. I'm gonna go home
and brag about this now. Oh my god. You'd
never believe what I did. What? I folded Lucy
Mingo's quilts. Joe, you a mess. I folded Lucy Mingo's quilts.
Yeah. My, my, my. I'm never washing
these hands again Well like I say I'm
trying to be free by making quilts
and it seemed to me that they had very
free ways of working and oh boy oh boy
it's been very inspirational to me,
yeah, yeah.
