Mary Lee Bendolph

"Mary Lee Bendolph (born 1935), the seventh of seventeen children, descends from generations of accomplished Quiltmakers in Gee’s Bend, Alabama. She learned to quilt from her mother, Aolar Mosely. She worked in the fields and attended school intermittently until she was fourteen, when she began her own family. She married Rubin Bendolph in 1955 and their family grew to include eight children. She has seven living children.

Over the years, Mary Lee worked in a variety of textile-related jobs, mostly making army uniforms. Since retiring in 1992, Mary Lee Bendolph found more time to quilt. She gathers design ideas by looking at the world around her. Anything—from people’s clothes at church, to her barn, to quilts hanging on clotheslines in front yards, to how the land looks when she’s high above it in an airplane—can inspire her. For her materials, she prefers fabric cut from used clothing because it avoids wastefulness and because she appreciates the “love and spirit” in old cloth.

Mary Lee Bendolph was one of many Gee’s Benders who accompanied Martin Luther King Jr. in his march at Camden, Alabama (across the river from Gee’s Bend), in 1965. In 1999, her life was profiled in a Los Angeles Times Pulitzer Prize-winning article, “Crossing Over: Mary Lee’s Vision.”

In 2002, Mary’s work was featured in the exhibition The Quilts of Gee’s Bend. Her quiltmaking style marries a flair for creativeness to traditional construction techniques that emphasize rectangles and squares. Her simple patches small compositions of cloth build to create complicate overall compositions that occasionally contain humorous touches and autobiographical references.

Since 2002 Mary worked to promote greater understanding of her community and its unique art form. She has appeared on numerous television and radio programs, and figured notably in PBS’s documentary The Quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend. Her Quilts have been featured in numerous museums and galleries, and in a second traveling exhibition, Gee’s Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt."

[Source: Artist]