The Famed Quilters of Gee’s Bend Are Using Their Sewing Skills to Make a Face Mask for Every Citizen in Their Small Alabama Town

From creating visuals to
promote public health tips, to producing posters that
celebrate hospital workers, artists of every ilk are using their skills
to help fight the coronavirus pandemic.

Even down in Gee’s Bend—the tiny
Alabama hamlet formally known as Boykin that has nurtured three
generations of quiltmakers—artists are lending a hand, using their
skills to make masks for members of their
community. 

The project started when two of
the community’s longtime quilters, Mary Margaret Pettway and Mary
McCarthy, saw an article about medical professionals in a
neighboring city dealing with a face mask shortage. Included
in the story was a template for how to make masks at home—which is
exactly what the quilters did. 

“I started making a few samples
two or three weeks ago,” Pettway tells Artnet News over the phone.
“I’ve been a sower all my life, so switching from one thing to
another is not hard.” She and her crew focused on
providing masks for local community members whose health
leaves them particularly vulnerable, since the patterns were not
medical grade but would still offer some
protection. 

Eventually, Pettway and
McCarthy’s plan grew, and others joined in to help, coordinating
their efforts over the phone. Now the six or seven quilters are
working to make 500 masks—enough for the entire
community. 

The Souls Grown Deep Foundation,
which is dedicated to promoting and preserving work made by artists
from the American South, is
assisting by distributing materials to the quilters and by
delivering finished masks.

“Because this is an elderly
community, we’re trying to keep them safe,” says Pettway, who also
serves as the chair of the foundation. “We’re going to drop off the masks on
their doorsteps and in their mailboxes—whatever we can get to. I’ll
call and let them know that they’re there. We have a senior
nutrition center down here as well, so we’ll leave a few down there
too.”

Much of the fabric used for the
non-medical masks comes from American Giant, a clothing company
that has offered to give materials for the cause. The business has
also reconfigured its factories in North Carolina to produce medical-grade masks certified by the
U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. 

When they aren’t making masks,
the Gee’s Bend’s quilters are creating what New York
Times critic Michael Kimmelman has described as “some
of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced.”
Their dazzling geometric artworks have traveled around the globe
and been reproduced on official US postage stamps.

But for the foreseeable future,
the quilters are applying their skills to a more urgent cause. If
Pettway, McCarthy, and the other quilters meet their goal of
supplying every person in the Gee’s Bend, they’ll move on to
the next town.

“We’ll start going up the road,”
Pettway says. “We’ll go as far as we can. It’s simple. We want to keep people safe.
Everything that we can do, we’re doing it.” 

The post The Famed Quilters of Gee’s Bend Are Using Their Sewing
Skills to Make a Face Mask for Every Citizen in Their Small Alabama
Town appeared first on artnet News.