by Anna Furman
Associated Press
Over the past two decades, Gee’s Bend quilts have captured the public’s imagination with their kaleidoscopic colors and their daring geometric patterns. The groundbreaking art practice was cultivated by direct descendants of slaves in rural Alabama who have faced oppression, geographic isolation, and intense material constraints.
As of this year, their improvisational art has also come to embody a very modern question: What happens when distinctive cultural tradition collides with corporate America?
Enter Target. The retailer launched a limited-edition collection based on the quilters’ designs for Black History Month this year. Consumer appetites proved to be high as many stores around the country sold out of the checkered sweaters, water bottles, and faux-quilted blankets.
“We’re actually in a quilt revival right now, like in real-time,” says Sharbreon Plummer, an artist and scholar. “They’re so popularized, and Target knew that. It created the biggest buzz when it came out.” Indeed, there has been a resurgence of interest among Gen Z and millennials in conscious consumption and the homemade — with “cottagecore” style, baking bread, and DIY bracelets — but both are at odds with the realities of fast fashion.
The Target designs were “inspired by” five Gee’s Bend quilters who reaped limited financial benefits from the collection’s success. They received a flat rate for their contributions rather than pay proportionate to Target’s sales. A spokesperson for Target wouldn’t share sales numbers from the collection but confirmed that it indeed sold out in many stores.
Unlike the pay structure of the Freedom Quilting Bee of the 1960s — an artist-run collective that disbursed payment equitably to Gee’s Bend quilters, who were salaried and could set up Social Security benefits — one-off partnerships with companies like Target benefit only a small number of people, in this case five women from two families.
The maxim “representation matters” is not new, but it’s gaining wider traction. Still, when visibility for some doesn’t translate into meaningful change for a marginalized community as a whole, how is that reconciled?
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