Feminist to Know: Mary Lee Bendolph

(Image: Souls Grown Deep)

Mary Lee Bendolph was born in 1935 in Gee’s Bend, Alabama, a majority Black community in Alabama’s Black Belt. Quilting in the Gee’s Bend community is passed matrilineally, and Bendolph learned to make quilts from her mother starting at a young age. 

Bendolph’s work with the Gee’s Bend Collective and the Freedom Quilting Bee represents a tradition that traces back to enslaved African women in the 18th Century. Quilt making has been a form of warmth, income, memory, community, and self-expression for Black women for centuries, and it has ties to this area through generations of forcibly isolated communities, sharecropping, and cotton plantations.

Bendolph participated in Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1965 march in Camden, Alabama. Upon retiring, she devoted much more of her time to quilting. Bendolph and the Collective received significant praise and recognition from the civil rights movement and later from major museums. She was celebrated for her creative vision and her unique treatment of textiles.

Mary Lee Bendolph has been personally recognized for her quilts including a 2015 fellowship award from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her quilt “Housetop” was featured as an official USPS stamp in 2006. Her quilts have been exhibited in art museums across the United States and abroad. In 2020, the National Gallery of Art acquired one of her quilts.

“Most of the families down here did the same thing—piece by theirselves and come together to quilt. On my side, my family, we go fast, don’t follow no patterns so close. Other families take more time, do slow work. They don’t get out in the road much like us did. We just try to put it together and get it through with. We don’t try to style it or nothing. Folks call some of this kind of stuff ‘crazy quilts’—don’t know which-a-way it going. I never did go by a pattern. Didn’t none us.”