Today’s New York Times Magazine (Sunday, April 6, 2008 issue) includes a full-page print ad for ABC Carpet and Home. The ad announces rug designs based on the quilts stitched by four generations of African-American women in the rural town of Gee’s Bend, Alabama (now known as Pettway). Apparently, Gee’s Bend still generates a profit for those who’ve never threaded a needle.

Some background: Gee’s Bend is a rural community built on the site of former plantation properties owned by Joseph Gee and his relative Mark Pettway. Over the years the women of Gee’s Bend—descendents of slaves and tenement farmers—have created a remarkable variety of quilts. The quilts were sewn to commemorate important events in the women’s lives, to warm their beds and to block out cold air seeping in through the floor boards and timbers of their modest homes. Many of the quilts were made from old work clothes worn by the men in the family.

Gee’s Bend and its quilts have gradually come to be recognized, beginning with Federal intervention on the community’s behalf during the 1930s. Intermittent contact with the outside world continued into the mid-1960s, when, during the Civil Rights Movement, Gees Bend quilters participated in the Freedom Quilting Bee. Calvin Trillin wrote about the quilters in The New Yorker in 1969, and the Alabama Humanities Foundation took an interest in the 1980s, exhibiting the quilts and recording oral histories.

A critical mass of media attention was reached in 2002 when an exhibition of the Gee’s Bend quilts opened at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, TX. As the show traveled to major arts venues around the country, acclaim was heaped on the women and the quilts were recognized as remarkably modern works of art. A documentary was done about the quilters and their journey into “the land of fine art.” The women, many of them in their 80s, traveled together and told their stories to audiences who were rightly captured by the beauty of their work.

The upside to all this attention was an influx of income that has helped stabilize the community and its residents. However, the Gees Bend quilters have also seen their work co-opted on many fronts for the commercial benefit of others. To be fair, a portion of sales do go to the quilters. ABC Carpet and Home notes in their ad that a portion of each sale goes to Gee’s Bend. Nevertheless, this has not happened without resistance from some of the quilters.

In 2007, according to Wikipedia, “two members of the Gee’s Bend quilting community filed lawsuits in US Federal Court in Selma, Alabama. The suit filed by Annie Mae Young alleged that Tinwood Ventures and art dealers William, Matt, and Paul Arnett falsely claim to own the intellectual property rights to quilts made in Gee’s Bend before 1984, including her work. They also improperly used her name and image to promote sales, the lawsuit alleges. The suit filed by Loretta Pettway, claims ‘gross exploitation’ at the hands of the Arnetts and Tinwood Ventures. Both suits also list as defendant Kathy Ireland Worldwide who have licensed the designs from some of the famous quilts from Tinwood and the Arnetts for use in Kathy Ireland products.”

We are lucky to know the Gee’s Bend quilters (who include Loretta Pettway, Patty Ann Williams, Nettie Young (born 1917), Willie “Ma Willie” Abrams and Gearldine Westbrook (born 1919), among many others).Their work is part of our national history, a treasure that reveals the worst and the best in us. And the quilters have benefited in many ways from having had their quilts shown and celebrated around the world. But has Gee’s Bend paid too high a price for world recognition, like other “discovered” outside-the-mainstream communities? Though the quilters continue to make originals, they are created for buyers, not for themselves. I wonder how this alters—or if it alters—the quilts they create? Does lack of community kinship with the buyer diminish the richness of the object? Are the quilts, sewn with the intention to sell, emptied of their meaning? Have the quilts, reproduced as silkscreens, rugs and commemorative stamps, become pure image?