Going Appalachian

I started "going Appalachian" at age 18— at the Gulfport (Miss.) Naval Air Station in 1945. I had just come from my hometown, Detroit, where droves of poor Southern whites and equally poor Southern blacks were rushing into the lucrative defense industry’s factories and squabbling over the tiny housing inventory. They were laying the kindling for the bonfires that would destroy my hometown in the ’60s.

Gulfport whites would grimace when I, always a racial egalitarian (blame those Dominican nuns at Holy Rosary Academy!), would hustle to the back of the bus to Biloxi, where the best Liberty was. (Pleased but puzzled blacks would smile nervously.) These teenage memories flooded my recollections the other day as I eagerly entered the glorious Gee’s Bend (Ala.) quilt show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

My later Appalachian mentors were Bill Ferris and Judy Peiser, who bonded in the ’60s at the Jackson (Miss.) Public TV station: he planned the Center for Southern Culture he would found at Ole Miss; she dreamed of a Center for Southern Folklore that she eventually built on Beale Street in her hometown of Memphis.

Judy was especially effective as a mentor. In 1977, she introduced me to James "Sonny Ford" Thomas, the middle nickname memorializing his chopping cotton— until Bill and Judy put him back in his proper place as a great blues singer. That same day Judy persuaded us to go to Yazoo City to visit the great quiltmaker Pecolia Warner. She took out her huge inventory, from which I would ultimately choose seven, for a piddling $75. I later gave six of them to the Ole Miss art museum— to memorialize Bill Clinton’s appointing our Bill Ferris the head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, by far the most intelligent decision Clinton ever made.

Gee’s Bend, a tiny islet in the Alabama River, has justly earned an international reputation as a major center of black American creativity. But I was amazed at the raggedy condition of a third of these quilts. The one Pecolia I kept for myself is by far handsomer than even the best from Gee’s Bend. In its excruciatingly diverse patches of soft orange and two pushy shades of light green, it’s the absolute treasure of my entire artistic life. And that sweet old septuagenarian made it.

There are no fewer than three solid complementary exhibits, one in the Perelman wing of a local celebrity’s quilt collection, and a black photographer’s New York Times assignment of picturing the Gee’s Bend’s sweeties. Finally a solid self-taught folk artist from Boise, Idaho struts his anonymous stuff. All of this leading to a day long Art Museum symposium on the great artist Anon.

Nevertheless, this show is a major move in a neglected esthetic genre. Don’t miss any of it, even if you can’t afford (or even carry!) the superb $50 catalog. Well done. Somewhere in the hereafter, Anne d’Harnoncourt has a mile-wide smile.