By SHAILA DEWAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/29/us/29quilt.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&th&emc=th
GEE’S BEND, Ala. — Until a decade ago, worn-out quilts made by generations of black women in this remote, rural loop of land were stuffed under mattresses or burned to keep mosquitoes away.
But then Bill Arnett, a white champion of self-taught black artists, began a rescue mission, buying dozens of the quilts and ultimately creating one of the biggest surprise hits in the art world’s recent memory. The Gee’s Bend quilts, pulsating with a sense of color and rhythm more akin to abstract painting, have since broken attendance records in the country’s most elite museums. They have been reproduced on calendars, scarves, Visa gift cards and first-class postage stamps.
If the quilts were a blockbuster, however, the sequel came this summer: two of the quilters, Loretta Pettway and Annie Mae Young, filed lawsuits against Mr. Arnett and his sons, saying they had been cheated out of thousands of dollars in proceeds from their work and copyrights.
The story line — poor, uneducated black women swindled by “scheming Atlanta businessmen,” as one newspaper article called the Arnetts — was juicy enough to be front-page news in the South. The reality, though, is more nuanced. The vast majority of the quilters remain satisfied with the Arnetts (there were works by 22 living quilters, including Ms. Pettway and Ms. Young, in the most recent museum exhibit).
“Martin Luther King got us out of the cotton patch; the Arnetts got us out from under the bedsprings and onto the museum walls,” said Nettie Young, whose living room furniture is arranged around a rug patterned after one of her quilts. Of the plaintiffs, she said: “I don’t know what they sued for. They ain’t told me, and I ain’t asked them.”
From lawsuits to hexes, disputes are a time-honored tradition in the field variously called folk, outsider or visionary art — a field whose biggest stars include many isolated Southerners and whose biggest champions include art-world sophisticates like Mr. Arnett, who once dealt in high-end Asian and African pieces. But in Gee’s Bend, the Arnetts said they tried to avoid the usual pitfalls. They encouraged the women to set up a collective to sell the quilts themselves and a foundation to control money from royalties.
The Arnetts say that they take no cut from either kitty, only occasionally take commissions from gallery sales, and that they have poured hundreds of thousands of their own dollars into cataloging, promoting and licensing the quilts. What is more, they said, they bought hundreds of quilts of little artistic value just to help the women.
But even those measures did not forestall the inevitable.
“When you mix the old South, race, educational and class differences, the subjective value of art, the egos of the art elite and the good old greenback, you’ve got yourself a powder keg ready to blow,” said Andrew Dietz, the author of “The Last Folk Hero,” a book published last year about Mr. Arnett’s relationships with Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley and other notable black artists, many of whom also defend him.
The book portrays Mr. Arnett as disorganized to the point of dysfunction, passionate to the point of self-righteousness and wary to the point of paranoia, but it presents no evidence that he was anything but honest with artists.
As the lawsuits suggest, Gee’s Bend, a community of about 700 people, virtually all of them descendants of slaves, has not changed as much as might be expected since the quilters attained fame. The foundation was slow to obtain nonprofit status and only this month elected a board. And some of the largest licensing deals have yet to ramp up. Kathy Ireland, who licensed the quilts for a line of home décor products, said in a June 15 statement that her company had paid more to the quilters than it had earned.
When the Arnetts began visiting Gee’s Bend, laying out hundreds of dollars for old quilts, the women thought they were crazy. Since the exhibit, which originated at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston in 2002 and went on to the Whitney in New York and many other museums, the quilts have occasionally sold for more than $20,000. But the most valuable quilts, the ones in the original show, are owned by the Arnetts, who say they will not sell them on the open market.
Most of the rest do not bring such high amounts. The quilters’ collective, an informal group of about 40 members, pays $150 a month to rent a former day care center marked by a small, hand-painted sign, where one room is stacked floor to ceiling with quilts. Small quilts go for $200 to $1,000, while bed-sized ones are priced at $950 to $7,500.
When a sale is made, half the money goes to the quilter and half to the collective, which periodically disburses dividends to all members. Royalties from reproductions of the quilts go into the foundation, which now contains $147,000. The system was designed to forestall jealousy, protect elderly quilters who can no longer sew, and acknowledge the interdependent nature of the community, where many quilters are related and styles were handed down from mother to daughter.
“We’re not trying to set up a socialized state,” Mr. Arnett said, “but we were doing something in between.” Ms. Pettway and Ms. Young acknowledge receiving multiple payments from the Arnetts ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, but say they have no accounting of the total or any list of the quilts bought or borrowed. They also say they received dividends from the collective even though they never placed quilts there to sell.
But Ms. Young and Ms. Pettway, whose quilts have been featured on the covers of two of the three books the Arnetts have produced, contend that they have not seen the full benefits of their success.
“I was just hearing them say, the quilts were worth more than that,” Ms. Young said. “The quilts were worth more than they was giving us.”
A third lawsuit, brought by Lucinda Pettway, a resident of Mobile, Ala., whose forebears lived in Gee’s Bend, accused the Arnetts of refusing to return two of the community’s oldest quilts, dating to slavery times. The Arnetts have since returned the quilts, but say an appraisal showed that they were not nearly that old and were worth less than $500.
To Loretta Pettway, a woman for whom indoor plumbing is a relatively recent luxury, big-city museums, glossy hardcover books and color postage stamps can look like a lot of money, even though they rarely produce profits.
“You’re making money,” she insisted, gesturing at an oversize book containing color reproductions of her quilts. “Because you ain’t going to be doing this if you’re not getting paid.”
Just because a book is published does not mean the author makes money. Unfortunately, people not familiar with book publishing or the art world can't understand that these are areas where the very few make bundles of money. Most people do not, no matter how good they are. Excellence of the work has nothing to do with what someone will pay for it. Too bad about the situation described in this story, since most likely, no one has made much money from the whole thing, quilters and Arnetts alike.
ReplyDeleteI saw the show. I found it interesting.
ReplyDeleteI had previously taken a class on quilt-making where the emphasis was on the neatness of the stiches to the point of being so nit-picking that I ran as fast as I could in the opposite direction.
Needless to say, quilts with neat stiches do not make the walls of museums, nor are they featured on postage stamps!
Bravo to women who try to provide for the families as best they can with the materials at hand, carrying on a way of life taught them by their mothers. They deserve every ounce of recognition they can get in this world.
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