The exhibit will feature quilts made by women in the Gee’s Bend community of Alabama, as well as other works by Black vernacular artists associated with the state.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. – Oct. 8, 2024 – The Haley Gallery, a contemporary art gallery at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, presents Heritage: Southern Vernacular. The exhibition will feature quilts made by women in the Gee’s Bend community of Alabama, as well as sculptures and two-dimensional works from Black vernacular artists who are also associated with the state.

Gee’s Bend quiltmakers featured in the exhibit include Loretta Pettway Bennett, Marlene Bennett Jones, Polly Middleton, Cathy Mooney, Doris Pettway Mosely, Cynthia Pettway, Emma Mooney Pettway, Mary Margaret Pettway, Stella Pettway, Andrea Pettway Williams and Shu’Nae Williams. Complementing the quilts are sculptures, paintings and works on paper, by Richard Dial, Thorton Dial, Charlie Lucas, Betty Sue Matthews and Mose Tolliver. The exhibition, which is guest-curated by Paul Barrett, is free and open to the public beginning the evening of Nov. 7 through Jan. 7, 2025.

The artists included in Heritage: Southern Vernacular have been exhibited at museums including the Frist Art Museum, High Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New Orleans Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

Panel discussion and opening reception – Nov. 7
On Thursday, Nov. 7, Gee’s Bend quilters will participate in a panel discussion moderated by Paul Barrett about Gee’s Bend’s history and its connection to the museum’s expanded box set of recordings and online experience From Where I Stand: The Black Experience in Country Music. The collection, which spans a century of country music by Black artists, is illustrated with Gee’s Bend quilts from roughly the same time periods as the music. The program will be in the museum’s Ford Theater at 3:30 p.m.

Following the panel, a reception will be hosted in the Haley Gallery between 5 and 8 p.m. to celebrate the exhibition’s opening. Both events are free and open to the public.

Quilting demonstration – Nov. 8
On Friday, Nov. 8, Gee’s Bend quilters Loretta Pettway Bennett, Francesca Charley, Marlene Bennett Jones, Cathy Mooney, Stella Pettway and Andrea Pettway Williams will participate in a quilting demonstration in the Haley Gallery in the afternoon.

More information on both events can be found on the museum’s website.

All work on view in Haley Gallery is available for purchase. Prices and details are available upon request. The Haley Galley is located at 224 Rep. John Lewis Way S., Nashville. Visit the Haley Gallery’s website for more information on the exhibition and the gallery.

About Gee’s Bend
The residents of Gee’s Bend (located about 85 miles west of Montgomery) are direct descendants of enslaved people who worked the cotton plantation established in 1816 by Joseph Gee. The community’s tradition of quiltmaking survived much — the Civil War, Jim Crow laws, the Great Depression, the Great Migration — as many descendants worked the land, initially in bondage, then as poorly paid sharecroppers and eventually as landowners through federal government programs. Just as Black country musicians and singers produced remarkable work in the face of adversity during this time period, so too the local women of Gee’s Bend brought their artistic talents together to establish the Freedom Quilting Bee, a workers cooperative that provided much-needed economic opportunity and political empowerment for their community. The Gee’s Bend quilts constitute a crucial chapter in the history of American art and have been featured in exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Whitney Museum of American Art; and the Royal Academy of Art in London, and can be found in the permanent collections of numerous leading art museums worldwide.

About Richard Dial and Thorton Dial
Thornton Dial, along with his sons Dan Dial and Richard Dial, founded Dial Metal Patterns in 1985 after the Pullman Standard Company plant where they built boxcars closed. While crafting lawn and patio furniture for more than 500 Badcock Home Furniture stores throughout the United States, Richard Dial began creating more sculptural furniture, and Thornton Dial began creating sculpture and paintings that would soon lead him away from production work and establish his art career. Thornton Dial has pieces in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and others. Richard Dial’s work is represented in the collections of the Birmingham Museum of Art, High Museum of Art and more.

About Charlie Lucas
Charlie Lucas is a descendant of many generations of craftspeople. His mother and grandmother were skilled quilters and ceramicists, while his maternal grandfather and great-grandfather were blacksmiths. His great-grandfather made sculptures from discarded metal that Lucas saw as a boy. Lucas learned how to work on car engines from his father — who worked as an auto mechanic — and studied blacksmithing and metalwork with his grandfather. It was through his grandfather that Lucas learned to make toys for other children when he was young, and it was due to his influence that Lucas was later inspired to pursue art as a career. In 1984, at the age of 33, Lucas fell off the back of a truck on a construction site and was bed-ridden for nearly three years. Through his recovery, he found his artistic practice again. Lucas’ work has been featured in early, transformative exhibitions of Southern vernacular artists including the High Museum of Art’s 1988 exhibition, Outside the Mainstream: Folk Art in Our Time, and Souls Grown Deep: African-American Vernacular Art of the South at the Michael C. Carlos Museum during the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.