Sculpture and Quilts at Mount Holyoke College

A VERY LONG ENGAGEMENT

PIECE TOGETHER: THE QUILTS OF MARY LEE BENDOPH

Mount Holyoke College Art Museum

Through May 27, 2018

Those who read my art reviews know of my fondness for well-done small exhibitions. Mount Holyoke College currently features two shows that illumine without bludgeoning.

A Very Long Engagement: Nineteenth- Century Sculpture and Its Afterlives is small in that the sculptures on display rest easily on slender pedestals and there are just fifteen of them. The sculptors represent a potpourri of American, English, and French artists. What ties them together is that each work references past traditions. Today we might label them ‘meta.’ They are displayed beside photographs of older works of which they are commenting or from which they drew inspiration. A reclining figure from Henry Moore, for example, bears remarkable similarity to a 10^th century Toltec figure. Paul Jena Baptiste Gasq’s Diana is his take on Classical Roman depictions of the goddess of the hunt. 

Rox

In addition to the above pair—and you seldom see a Henry Moore this small—my favorite works are: Frederic  Leighton’s languid The Sluggard, Auguste Rodin’s Monument of Honore de Balzac, Pierre Auguste Renoir’s Dancer with a Tambourine, and Henry Rox’s whimsical Girl with Flowers, the latter a work from a former Mt. Holyoke art professor. I also greatly admired the mottled texture of Emilie Stamm’s Standing Nude.

Stamm

What an inspired idea it was to run the sculpture show simultaneously with the quilts of Mary Lee Bendolph. What better way to demonstrate how old barriers between fine art and folk art have crumbled like the Berlin Wall. If Bendolph’s name doesn’t immediately resonate, perhaps you’ve heard about the Gee’s Bend quilts that took New York by storm when they went of display at the Whitney in 2002. (I saw that show. It was both exhilarating and exhausting.) Bendolph is an acknowledged queen bee of that tradition—and it’s an old one. Gee’s Bend refers to an elbow in the Alabama River southwest of Selma and the first quilts and coverlets made there came from slaves on the Pettway plantation. To this day, Gee’s Bend is largely an African American region and many of the quilters are descendents of Pettway slaves.

The end of slavery did not bring a lot of prosperity to the area, which meant that quilts were made for plebeian reasons—not with an eye toward hanging them in a gallery. That is to say, they were everyday items of use. Gee’s Bend was also the kind of country living in which things got repurposed rather than tossed away. Old shirts and feed sacks became part of bedspread, leftover scraps of material got stitched together in a crazy quilt, and it mattered little if a coverlet mixed corduroy, cotton, and linen.

Bendolph’s quilts tend to favor big pieces and bright colors and patterns of straight lines and basic geometric shapes. I love the idea of workaday items standing side by side with the output of academically trained artists. Those who has ever run their hands down the sides of a cabinetmaker’s bookcase, smiled upon seeing an eccentric weathervane, or beheld the simple elegance of a sampler knows that everyday objects often contain a beauty of their own. Also memories. I was deeply moved by one of Bendolph’s “ghost’ quilts. When her husband died, she cut up a pair of his dungarees and used the faded inside of the pockets to anchor her quilt. I defy anyone to tell me this is a less tribute than the Medici tomb.

Rob Weir