Art
Freedom and Order: The Quilt Masterpieces of Gee’s Bend – Revisited
THE TENNESSEE TRIBUNE — A new exhibition has just opened at the Philadelphia Museum of Art: “Souls Grown Deep: Artists of the African American South.” It includes sculpture, painting, and some of the amazing Gee’s Bend Quilts. As the public has a new chance to view these quilts, I want people to know of a thrilling class taught by Aesthetic Realism Consultant and artist, Marcia Rackow in which she described the beauty of so many of them and placed their importance as art and for people’s lives. In the museum/gallery classes she teaches, The Visual Arts and the Opposites, the art of the world is studied—from the masters at the Metropolitan Museum, treasures of African art, to the latest works showing in New York’s galleries—based on in the great principle stated by Eli Siegel, founder of the education Aesthetic Realism: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”
By Alice Bernstein
A new exhibition has just opened at the Philadelphia Museum of Art: “Souls Grown Deep: Artists of the African American South.” It includes sculpture, painting, and some of the amazing Gee’s Bend Quilts. As the public has a new chance to view these quilts, I want people to know of a thrilling class taught by Aesthetic Realism Consultant and artist, Marcia Rackow in which she described the beauty of so many of them and placed their importance as art and for people’s lives. In the museum/gallery classes she teaches, The Visual Arts and the Opposites, the art of the world is studied—from the masters at the Metropolitan Museum, treasures of African art, to the latest works showing in New York’s galleries—based on in the great principle stated by Eli Siegel, founder of the education Aesthetic Realism: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”
The particular class which I tell of now and was happy to attend in 2003 was taught by Ms. Rackow at the Whitney Museum’s exhibition “Gee’s Bend: The Women and Their Quilts,” which included 70 quilts made from 1920-1990 by descendants of slaves in rural Gee’s Bend, Alabama. Astounding in their variety and ingenuity they were described by one critic as “some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced.” They came to national attention with the Freedom Quilting Bee, a cooperative arising from the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, and were sold at Bloomingdale’s and Sak’s, providing income for the quiltmakers. But they were largely forgotten until the 1990s, when they were rediscovered by art collector William Arnett and his family—and led to travelling shows which have been touring museums ever since.
Ms. Rackow described the African American women who made the quilts, and whose families were tenant farmers on the former Pettway plantation. Most grew up in log cabins with walls covered with newspapers and magazines to keep out wind and cold. Here quiltmaking, handed down over four generations, was a necessity of life, making use of old, worn-out clothes, remnants, cotton sheets and feed sacks. In a documentary shown at the Whitney, women told how nothing was thrown away: “There were no extras. We were so poor, you couldn’t imagine it.” Some walked many miles a day working in the fields.
Yet in the midst of misfortune and pain they made these beautiful quilts. All art, Eli Siegel was the philosopher to explain, arises from the deepest desire in every person: “to like the world honestly.” We saw stirring evidence for this as Marcia Rackow discussed the designs and technique of many quilts. “Out of a life of great hardship,” she said, “these women show the indomitable desire to like the world, give form to it–beautiful form.”
She read these questions about Freedom and Order from Eli Siegel’s historic Fifteen Questions, “Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites?”:
“Does every instance of beauty in nature and beauty as the artist presents it have something unrestricted, unexpected, uncontrolled?—and does this beautiful thing in nature or beautiful thing coming from the artist’s mind have, too, something accurate, sensible, logically justifiable, which can be called order?”
Said Ms. Rackow, “There is a terrific sense of symmetry and order in the quilts, and also something very unexpected, free, even mischievous.” She discussed Arcola Pettway’s “Lazy Gal” Variation 1976, a Bicentennial quilt composed like an American flag—a drama in corduroy stripes of intense, vibrant colors and also cool colors. While the pattern is regular—horizontal bands of stripes, she pointed to subtle and unexpected color combinations—one dark blue horizontal strip next to the brown is restful, but next to red it vibrates. “There is,” she said, “a true spirit of independence in the way the women quilted.”
This was visually evident in varieties of classic and often used designs: Chinese Coins, Flying Geese, Housetop, and Lazy Gal, which I liked very much. Yet each work is unique. Annie Mae Young said: “I never did like the book patterns….I like big pieces and long strips. However I get them, that’s how I used them. I work it out, study the way to…find the colors and the shapes and certain fabrics that work out right.”
Loretta Pettway’s “Medallion” (1960), made of synthetic knit and cotton sacking is one of the most dramatic and beautiful. Said Ms. Rackow, “It looks so modern in its design. On a black background there is a narrow white rectangular border—very simple, with a rectangular shape in the center. The white band is wild—it doesn’t follow the outside shape but curves and dances in space. There are curving rows of white stitching on the black, like tiny stars in the night.”
“The rectangular shape in the center,” she pointed out, “is created by two columns of lively colored stripes—vertical on the left, horizontal on the right. Lavender, pale green, orange, bright red and black, are in a free, vibrant relation. There is an optical effect of almost opposite colors: lavender and orange and the sweetness and acidity of lavender again with green. There’s a terrific interplay of surface and depth: we go into darkness and emerge from it. It is very orderly and symmetrical, but also wonderfully mischievous: the shapes are not quite rectangular, and the stripes are uneven and curve in space. The regular is irregular, in motion. It is an amazing work.”
Ms. Rackow continued, “The women who made these quilts came to expression that shows the desire for aesthetics in the human spirit. These quilts, in their form and beauty, are an implicit criticism of the brutal economic and racial injustice these women endured.” I have learned from Aesthetic Realism that unless the opposites of freedom and order, or freedom and justice are together, horrors result. Slaveowners in the South, after all, felt it was their freedom to own other human beings.
I have also learned that we all have a choice when we see something in the world that is ugly and can’t be liked—we will use it either for contempt or respect. With all these women saw and endured, they made art in these beautiful quilts. There is good freedom, even something critical—things are shaken up—but that shaking up is in behalf of respect and true order.
I was moved to tears by Lutisha Pettway’s “Bars,” 1950, denim and cotton 80×84 inches. A memorial to her husband who died, it is made from his only possessions: work clothes. The worn out, faded areas, bleach stains, dark places where pockets and cuffs were removed, become elements of a large design. Nine vertical columns of pant legs and sleeves, patches filling out holes, and here and there a syncopated horizontal band—all make for a tremendously alive feeling: a oneness of presence and unbearable absence. Through the energetic rhythms of fabric, what emerges from the worn cloth is something that puts together abstract design and deep emotion.
What I saw and learned in this wonderful class brought to my mind these lines from Eli Siegel’s poem, “Let the Seeing Go On,” lines I see as standing for the Gee’s Bend artists and their quilts:
Take worn and tattered something
And show it, too, unworn, untattered,
unimpeached;
Seen largely.
Alice Bernstein is a journalist, Aesthetic Realism Associate, civil rights historian and editor/co-author of the book, Aesthetic Realism & the Answer to Racism. Consultant and art educator Marcia Rackow is on the faculty of the not-for-profit Aesthetic Realism Foundation. Learn more at: www.AestheticRealism.org
This article originally appeared in The Tennessee Tribune.
Art
BLACspace Cooperative Invites Bay Area to Experience Oakland’s Black Cultural Ecosystem Through a BLAC Map Tour + Party
BLACspace Cooperative invites the Bay Area to experience Oakland’s Black cultural ecosystem through its BLAC Map Tour + Party on October 2. Presented as part of the Museum of the African Diaspora’s Nexus: SF/Bay Area Black Art Week, the event offers a guided field trip through creative and cultural spaces, followed by a celebration. Guests will explore the people and places shaping Black arts and culture across Oakland. The tour highlights BLACspace’s interactive guide to spaces stewarded by its members. Read more to learn about this unique event.
Presented as part of MoAD’s Nexus: SF/Bay Area Black Art Week, the October 2 experience takes guests inside the spaces, practices, and relationships that keep Black arts and culture rooted in Oakland
What does Oakland’s Black cultural ecosystem look like from the inside?
On Friday, October 2, BLACspace Cooperative will bring its BLAC Map to life with The BLAC Map Tour + Party, a two-part experience connecting artists, cultural workers, community partners, funders, and arts lovers with the people and places shaping Black arts and culture across Oakland and the greater Bay Area.
Presented as part of the Museum of the African Diaspora’s Nexus: SF/Bay Area Black Art Week, the day begins at MoAD at 685 Mission St. at 12 noon with a guided field trip through creative and cultural spaces connected to the BLACspace ecosystem.
Guests will travel together by bus from San Francisco to Oakland, stepping inside studios, cultural hubs, creative businesses, and gathering places while experiencing artist talks, exhibitions, film, music, movement, ancestral practice, and opportunities for conversation.
The Tour is an extension of The BLAC Map of Oakland, BLACspace’s interactive guide to creative and cultural spaces stewarded by members of its ecosystem. The map makes visible a network of people and places working to keep Black culture rooted in a city where displacement, rising costs, and shrinking arts funding continue to threaten cultural permanence.
“We call this work Cultural Reforestation,” said Zakiya Harris, Vision and Leadership steward of BLACspace Cooperative. “It’s about repairing, replenishing, and rooting Black arts and culture where it has been displaced, and creating the conditions for our cultural ecosystem to remain for generations to come.”
The Tour will move through several Bay Area cultural spaces, including Minnesota Street Project, The Barn, B-Love’s Guest House, Koo Labs Production & Design Center, BAM House, and BlaQyard, with experiences featuring members and collaborators across the BLACspace ecosystem.
At 5 p.m., the field trip gives way to The BLAC Map Party, a celebration of the ecosystem the Tour spent the day exploring. The evening invites the wider community to gather for music, food, art, cultural activations, an opening Ring Shout ceremony, and connection among Black artists, cultural workers, organizations, and the people who support their work.
The experience reflects BLACspace’s larger belief that the future of Black arts and culture requires cooperation.
As a Black arts and culture-promoting cooperative, BLACspace brings together artists, cultural workers, creative businesses, and organizations to share resources, relationships, knowledge, and stewardship.
Through membership, holistic business coaching, mutual aid, consulting, storytelling, and advocacy for cultural spaces, the cooperative is building infrastructure intended to strengthen Oakland’s Black cultural economy for the long term.
EVENT INFORMATION
The BLAC Map Tour + Party
Friday, Oct. 2
BLAC Map Tour: 12–5 p.m.
Begins at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD)
685 Mission St., San Francisco
BLAC Map Party: 5–8 p.m.
Oakland, California
Party location provided to confirmed RSVP guests.
Tickets, RSVP information, and additional event details are available through BLACspace Cooperative at ABOUT BLACSPACE COOPERATIVE
About BLACspace Cooperative:
BLACspace Cooperative connects and cultivates an ecosystem of artists, cultural workers, creative businesses, and organizations shaping Black arts and culture. Through holistic business coaching, values-aligned consulting, shared stewardship, and advocacy for cultural spaces, BLACspace works to create the conditions for its ecosystem to remain rooted and thrive.
Its work is grounded in Cultural Reforestation: strengthening what is here, restoring what has been displaced, and building toward cultural permanence in Oakland and beyond for the next 100 years.
Adéniké Amin is the storytelling steward for BLACspace Cooperative. For media and other information, please reach out to adenike@blacspace.coop
Art
Misty Copeland Shapes Ballet’s Tomorrow
THE POSITIVE COMMUNITY — Misty Copeland will curate the 2026 Joyce Ballet Festival, a two-week event in New York City from August 4-16. This role allows her to influence the future of ballet by showcasing a wide range of dancers, choreographers, and companies. The festival will present both established and contemporary works, blending classical traditions with new artistic expressions.
This summer, Misty Copeland will step into a different kind of spotlight. Instead of taking center stage as a dancer, she will help determine what audiences see onstage as curator of the 2026 Joyce Ballet Festival. Taking place August 4 through August 16 at The Joyce Theater in New York City, the two-week celebration will bring together dancers, choreographers and companies representing a broad spectrum of ballet. The festival gives Copeland an opportunity to share not only her appreciation for ballet’s traditions, but also her vision for its future.
Copeland understands better than most how powerful a ballet stage can be. Her historic career with American Ballet Theatre changed the conversation about representation in one of the world’s most traditional performing arts. When she became the company’s first Black woman to reach the rank of principal dancer, her achievement carried significance far beyond a personal milestone. It gave young dancers of color a new image of what was possible and challenged the industry to reconsider who belonged at the center of ballet.
That history informs the perspective she brings to the festival. Copeland has spent much of her career moving between performance, mentorship, advocacy and storytelling. Her curatorial role allows her to bring those interests together by creating a program that does not treat ballet as a museum piece. Instead, the festival presents dance as an evolving language capable of carrying classical traditions into new cultural and artistic territory.
Audiences will encounter a mixture of established works and contemporary creations during the festival. Classical ballet vocabulary will share space with choreography that pushes dancers toward different physical, emotional and theatrical possibilities. The result is intended to give audiences a broader understanding of the art form while demonstrating that tradition and innovation do not have to be competing forces.
The lineup also provides an opportunity to see dancers from different artistic environments. Performers connected to organizations including American Ballet Theatre, New York City Ballet, Paris Opera Ballet, Houston Ballet, Dance Theatre of Harlem and Complexions Contemporary Ballet are among those represented in the festival. Each company carries its own history and artistic identity, making their participation part of a larger conversation about the many ways ballet can be performed and interpreted.
The presence of Dance Theatre of Harlem is particularly meaningful within the larger story of Copeland’s career and the evolution of Black representation in ballet. Founded during a period when opportunities for Black dancers were severely limited, the company helped demonstrate that excellence and classical training could flourish in a Black cultural environment. Its legacy continues to influence dancers and audiences, making its connection to a festival curated by Copeland especially resonant.
The program also reaches beyond a single definition of contemporary ballet. Choreographers with different backgrounds and artistic philosophies contribute to an evening that can move from recognizable classical structures to works shaped by modern dance, theater, popular culture and new approaches to movement. That diversity reflects a generation of artists who increasingly see ballet not as a rigid vocabulary but as a foundation from which they can explore.
For New York audiences, the festival offers something that is increasingly valuable: the opportunity to experience outstanding dancers in an intimate setting. The Joyce is known for presenting dance in a theater where audiences can see movement and artistry up close. That environment can make a familiar ballet work feel newly personal while allowing experimental pieces to communicate with unusual immediacy.
Copeland’s role as curator also sends a message about the importance of artistic leadership. The people who select performers and choreography help determine which stories receive attention and which artists receive opportunities. By bringing a range of voices into the festival, Copeland is using that responsibility to broaden the conversation around ballet. Her choices can introduce audiences to artists they may not otherwise encounter while encouraging longtime ballet followers to look at the form from a different perspective.
The 2026 Joyce Ballet Festival ultimately arrives at an important moment for the art form. Ballet is carrying centuries of tradition into an era defined by changing audiences, broader representation and increasingly adventurous choreography. Copeland’s festival reflects that transition. For two weeks in August, The Joyce will become a meeting place for the familiar and the unexpected—a celebration of where ballet came from and a preview of where it may be going. And with Misty Copeland helping shape the conversation, the future of ballet promises to be as expansive as the dancers who are defining it.
Based on reporting by The Positive Community.
Art
BOOK REVIEW: Never Tell a Black Girl How to Black Girl: Essays
Growing up in North Carolina, she Black Girled her hair her entire life. Her grandma made her sit for box braids when she was small, telling Brown that she was “tenderheaded.” Later, Brown had relaxed hair until she “went broke” and couldn’t afford the process anymore. That was when she got acquainted with her natural hair – although she returned to box braids at least once, and loved them all over again.
Author: Amena Brown, Copyright: c.2026, Publisher: Tiny Rep Books, SRP: $30.00, Page Count: 320 pages
Some things can really make you cross.
People telling you your business, for instance. People asking questions they have no reason to know the answers to. Folks who criticize your hair or clothes or life. These things would set anyone off; they’d be the last straw for anybody. As in the new book, “Never Tell a Black Girl How to Black Girl” by Amena Brown, some folks just cross the line.
In a way, it’s a matter of grammar.
Depending on how you say it, “Black Girl is a noun and a verb,” says Brown. A Black Girl can be a Black Girl… and she can Black Girl. Brown herself has done it “in six countries.”
Growing up in North Carolina, she Black Girled her hair her entire life. Her grandma made her sit for box braids when she was small, telling Brown that she was “tenderheaded.” Later, Brown had relaxed hair until she “went broke” and couldn’t afford the process anymore. That was when she got acquainted with her natural hair – although she returned to box braids at least once, and loved them all over again.
As the child of a strict Pentecostal mother, Brown was a “late bloomer.” She didn’t drink alcohol until she was in her twenties. She was chaste while dating and a better church girl than a party girl. After she left the church, she began experimenting with wine first, then cocktails. She learned to cook, reasoning that the path to finding love started in a kitchen, one that happened to be her grandmother’s. And yes, love did eventually come in the form of a red-headed White man who was her friend before he became her boyfriend — and before he became her mother-sanctioned, grandma-approved husband.
Overall, says Brown, there is no single right method for doing this.
“There are so many ways to Black Girl, which means the way you Black Girl is beautiful, and the way I Black Girl is beautiful too.”
Looking for a collection of addictive, can’t-read-just-one essays that’ll make you laugh but that also feel like author Amena Brown is peeking at your life? Want a book that speaks to every corner of your existence?
Yeah, then you want “Never Tell a Black Girl How to Black Girl.”
You know how it is when you spot something so profound, so right, that you just have to call your friends and read it out loud to them? That’s what you’ll find here: truth told with humor that’s also oozing with warmth. Add honesty that’s smart and bold and practically begging for a “Heck, YES!” and you’ve got your new favorite book.
The essays here are short enough to read in a few minutes, but compelling enough to make you want more, so give yourself room.
This is a book for twenty- and thirty-somethings, but also for their mothers and grandmas who can handle respectful irreverence and surefooted playfulness. Can men enjoy “Never Tell a Black Girl How to Black Girl”? Sure, but it’s more for women, cross your heart.
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