The Quilters of Gee’s Bend Head to the Blockchain, collaborating with a young generative artist on a series of NFTs

NFTs

The project goes live on 17 May at Arsnl.

The quilters of Gee’s Bend, Alabama practice a brand of craftsmanship that has been passed down through generations. Theirs is an art shaped by ancestry and intuition, not markets and institutions.

It is for this reason that the community’s newest project is sure to draw a few eyebrows. To ArsnlArtists Rights Society’s (ARS) NFT platform, three Gee’s Bend quilters have collaborated with generative artist Anna Lucia on a series of works that blend the digital and the physical, the old-fashioned and the neoteric.

“Generations” is the name of their joint effort, which comprises 500 NFTs created by an algorithm Lucia evolved in response to the quilters’ work—as well as the actual quilts that inspired the code. On offer, in other words, are the products of artists from very different backgrounds who respond to each other’s creations – and find a surprising amount of overlap in the process.

That Lucia would be interested in the Gee’s Bend quilters makes sense. The self-taught 31-year-old artist, who was born in the Netherlands and is now based in Cairo, Egypt, has made a habit of drawing thematic links between computer code and textile art. Her latest project, for example, drew on the Bauhaus movement’s unknown female designers for influence.

“When I first saw images of Gee’s Bend quilts, I was immediately captivated by … their vibrant colors, bold patterns, and expressive compositions,” Lucia told Artnet News in an email. “I saw a connection to generative art in a completely different setting. Each quilt is unique, but all share familiarity.”

“At first glance,” she continued, “the quilts may seem like simple geometric compositions. But I found great complexity in the patterns when I described them in logic and code.”

For their part, the participating quilters – Loretta Pettway Bennett, Essie Bendolph Pettway and Mary Margaret Pettway – brought a completely different perspective to the project. All three are direct descendants of the enslaved people brought to the region in the early 19th century by plantation owner Joseph Gee. (The rugs of Lucy T. Pettway, who passed away in 2004, also informed Lucia’s code.)

The women are now in their 60s and had knowledge of, but little interest in, NFTs, according to Katarina Feder, ARS’ director of business development and one of the founders of Arsnl. But it wasn’t long until one Zoom meeting earlier this year that the four artists found common ground.

“What I thought was remarkable, to be a fly on the wall for [those discussions], was just how similar they can be when they speak the language of the creators,” Feder said. “It’s a real symbiosis.”

Indeed, shift your eyes between a Gee’s Bend rug and its digital counterpart, and you’ll see both exude a command of color and pattern, despite the processes that went into making them.

Each of Lucia’s NFTs is one output from the same algorithm. The samples for sale were chosen by the quilters themselves.

“It was fascinating to see the final selections,” Lucia said. “Sometimes they were just like what I would have chosen; other times they were completely different.” Embedded in the metadata of each NFT is information about who chose the design in question and which artwork it was based on.

Scheduled to launch on May 17th, the NFTs will be priced at 0.15 ETH each (currently around $300). Thirty percent of profits will go back to the quilters, with an additional five percent of each sale earmarked for Alabama’s Freedom Quilting Bee Cooperative. Lucia and Arsnl will each take 25 percent, while the remaining income is shared between them Refraction and Seed clubtwo DAOs who helped organize the project.

Also for sale are six Gee’s Bend quilts, which are priced between $8,000 and $20,000. (The quilters will receive up to 75 percent of these sales.

Greg Liburd, one of Refraction’s co-founders, framed the scope of the project nicely in his curatorial statement: “‘Generations,'” he wrote, “is an expression of the “heritage algorithms” so vivid in Gee’s Bend’s hand-stitched masterpieces, artistically remixed through digital code.

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