[upbeat music]
[sewing machine whirring]
- 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 quiltmaker,'"
and nobody can prove that you're not a professional quiltmaker.
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 quiltmakers
in the country.
Now, it's a $4.5 billion annual industry
and there's thousands of professional quiltmakers
in many different capacities.
It's a huge industry.
My part of the industry is that I'm a teacher, a lecturer,
and a quiltmaker, 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 that 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? - Woman: Yes, 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?
- Mm-hmm. - And that's what I like best
about coming here is just this, just sitting around the frame
and quilting. - Mm-hmm, you ready, Joe?
I'm enjoying.
I don't know about... - Joe: 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.
- Joe: Men in quilts are guests.
It's totally a woman's world.
It's very kind of women to allow us to do this.
* Steal away
* Steal away to Jesus
- 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 you, 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.
* My Lord, he's calling
* He's calling by the thunder
* The trumpet sounds
* Within my soul
* I ain't got long
- Joe: 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.
* Steal away
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.
* Green trees are bending
* Oh sinner man stands a-trembling *
This was your learning quilt. - Lucy: Right.
This is the first little thin jacket I made.
- And what do you call the pattern?
- Robbing Peter to Pay Paul.
And had the 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 'em, 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.
* Steal away, steal away
- Joe: In the 1960s, people associated
with Sears & Roebuck and Bloomingdale's
from New York thought it would be a great thing
to have these quiltmakers make quilts
for the New York market,
and they then created the Freedom Quilting Bee.
- Lucy: 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.
- Joe: It provided jobs for women in Gee's Bend
to make quilts to order.
- Mary Ann: They 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.
- Lucy: When we were working on quilts, you know,
we always made the little, small stitches.
You couldn't see 'em,
but people want to see the stitches in the quilt now.
They get to the quilt and can't see the stitches,
they say, "We need to see the stitches."
- Mary Ann: 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 you 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 it got started.
Bill Arnett saw this quilt in a book.
Somebody had taken this photograph of Annie Mae Young
and her great-granddaughter
standing by a wood pile with a quilt spread over it,
and when he saw that quilt, he said,
"I need to find the lady that made this quilt."
* I don't want nobody
- Joe: The Arnetts went to Gee's Bend
and found these incredibly art-like objects
that looked 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.
It's just fantastic.
There's no design.
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
and made a quilt out of them.
- Lucy: 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.
They 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 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 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 like snake,
snake quilting you call that. - Right.
I quilted that by myself. - All by yourself?
- Mm-hmm.
- 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.
- 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 straighten it out.
- We'll put 'em all back up there.
- All right.
I'm gonna go home and brag about this now.
- Oh, my God.
- You'll never believe what I did.
- What? - I folded Lucy Mingo's quilts.
[both laughing] - Joe, you a mess.
- I folded Lucy Mingo's quilts. - Yeah.
- My, my, my.
- I'm never washing these hands again.
- Oh, yes. [both laughing]
[gentle guitar music]
- 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.
* Steal away