EXHIBITION | Whiles I Yet Live: Matriarchy and Generational Exchange in Gee’s Bend
National Quilt Museum, Paducah, KY, August 1 – December 28, 2025
A testament to the survival of ancestral knowledge systems, the exhibition, Whiles I Yet Live: Matriarchy and Generational Exchange in Gee’s Bend presents a selection of over twenty quilts, spanning nearly a century of artistic practice within the community. This exhibition borrows its title from the 1955 song “Give Me My Flowers” by The Consolers, which inspired the later Christian Gospel performed by Reverend James Cleveland. The hymn was re-recorded by Boykin-based quilters Mary Ann Pettway, China Pettway, Lorene Pettway, and Nancy Pettway in 2016.
In dialogue with its cocooned locality and the continued movement for longevity, early quilts presented alongside contemporary variations from some of the Bend’s most emerging artists imagine a sustainable futurity stitched across generations, where needle and thread are passed down hand-to-hand. Featuring works by Minder Coleman, Nettie Young, Stella Mae Pettway, Arcola Pettway, Arie Pettway, Loretta Pettway, Candis Pettway, Ruth P. Mosley, Mary Lee Bendolph, Doris Mosely, Marlene Bennett Jones, Loretta Pettway Bennett, Mary Ann Pettway, Mary Margaret Pettway, Essie Bendolph Pettway, Mary Spencer Abrams and daughter, Jennifer Abrams, Andrea Williams, and introducing father and sons Quinnard, DeShaun, and Alexander Smith. Whiles I Yet Live: Matriarchy and Generational Exchange in Gee’s Bend plants a seed of a future to be sewn. A nod to the longevity of these practices, their continuity and proposed horizons, the centering of the Gee’s Bend quiltmakers at the National Quilt Museum, solidifies these artists as an integral branch of today’s quilters.
Whiles I Yet Live: Matriarchy and Generational Exchange in Gee’s Bend is organized by Starasea Camara, Guest Curator; Rachael Baar, NQM Curator; and Laura Hendrickson, NQM Director of the Collection & Registrar.
