The Quilts of Gee's Bend, collected by William Arnett of Tinwood Media and curated by Alvia Wardlaw at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, have inspired and impressed museum-goers and art critics alike since 2002 in museums around America. But in the Fall of 2005 these quilts, created by some 45 Alabama artists, African-American women from a rural community in the Black Belt, were exhibited at Auburn’s Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Arts.  The quilts are currently on exhibit at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, California.

In anticipation of this exhibit of Alabama quilts by Alabama artists, Auburn University’s program in Women’s Studies undertook an ongoing interdisciplinary project to study the Quilts of Gee's Bend and develop strategies and materials for making them a part of the cultural education of Alabama’s – and America’s – children.

On this site, you will find materials gathered from many sources to explore some of the issues surrounding the quilts and the women who created them. For classroom teachers and home-schoolers, we have provided some lesson plans and teaching materials and a template for using what we offer to develop a plan for teaching the materials that is your own. And for those looking for games, we provide some of our favorite ways of playing with quilts.

The researchers and teachers in the Quilts of Gee's Bend in Context project at Auburn University are very excited about these quilts. We hope you will be too. We invite all of you to explore the quilts, teach them, have fun with them. And check our calendar to locate the quilts and ongoing activities related to them.