Gee’s Bend takes its name from Joseph Gee, a North Carolina enslaver and planter who, in 1816, acquired 6,000 acres of land along a horseshoe bend in the Alabama River and established a plantation with 17 enslaved people. The Gee family operated the plantation until 1845, when, to settle significant debts, they relinquished ownership, including 98 enslaved people, to Mark H. Pettway, a relative, enslaver, and then sheriff of Halifax County, North Carolina. The following year, Pettway relocated to Gee’s Bend, transporting his family and furnishings in a wagon train while 100 enslaved men, women, and children were compelled to journey on foot from North Carolina to their new life in Alabama.

For generations, the women of Gee’s Bend have been creating patchwork quilts by piecing together scraps of fabric and clothing in abstract designs that had never before been expressed on quilts. Their patterns and piecing styles were passed down over generations, surviving slavery and Jim Crow. Enlivened by a visual imagination that extends the expressive boundaries of the quilt genre, these astounding creations have expanded the realm of Black visual culture and opened a door to new understandings of American art and history.

In 2002, the seminal exhibition The Quilts of Gee’s Bend debuted at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, celebrating the artistic legacy of four generations of Gee’s Bend quiltmakers. Hailed by the New York Times during its display at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art as “some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced,” the quilts were displayed at 11 other museums nationwide. Since this first exhibition, Gee’s Bend quilts have been exhibited in museums worldwide, including, most recently, at the Royal Academy of Arts in London and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark.