Scenes from the Airing of the Quilts

On October 6, 2023, a team from the High Museum of Art in Atlanta loaded up a Dodge Durango and headed to Selma, Alabama, to spend the weekend at the second annual Airing of the Quilts festival. This festival, which is a collaboration between the Freedom Quilting Bee Legacy Museum and the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, makes a public-friendly event out of the seasonal ritual of “airing quilts” in October—something folks in rural Southern communities have done for generations.
The festival is a way of coordinating the splendor that results when families all along County Road 29 hang their quilts out on their lines and fences. It’s also a kind of homecoming for Gee’s Benders who have moved away to other cities but still have family homes and histories there.
Now, more than ever, the brilliant artistic community of Gee’s Bend and the surrounding area are better represented in museums, with more than thirty museums holding quilts from the community in their permanent collections. For members of the High’s team, this trip served as an invaluable opportunity to interview quilters and community members for the exhibition “Patterns in Abstraction: Black Quilts from the High’s Collection,” on view now through January 5th, 2025.

Visit the High Museum: https://high.org/