Jackson Artist Making Unconventional Quilts

Gwen Magee at work

As an artist with an uncompromising vision, Gwen Magee is used to getting strong reactions. As MPB’s Arts Reporter Ron Brown tells us, her inspiration is found in the very fabric of our history.

As a testament to her talent, Gwen Magee’s dramatic visual works hang in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. as well as in Mississippi museums. A self taught artist, her subject matter is often harsh and brutal, but always unflinchingly accurate.

“I primarily focus on the African American experience in this country from slavery to present day.”

Magee says the African American experience in her best artwork means she must deal with strong historical images that cannot be politely softened. Images of abuse.

“It deals with lynching, it deals with a number of things like that.”

One of her most celebrated works is called “Southern Shame” but because of the images she presents it’s also her most controversial.

“It is a recreation of a confederate flag. And superimposed on top of it, in sheer see-through fabrics, are depictions of lynchings and superimposed on top of that is a KKK hood.”

Magee created “Southern Shame” after Mississippi voters in 2001 decided to keep the rebel emblem in the state flag as a nod to southern heritage.

“Well I’m sorry but there is more to southern heritage than strolling around a plantation in a hoop skirt and carrying a parasol or sipping mint juleps on the veranda. And even for those who had that lifestyle, they only had it because of the slaves that were out in the cotton fields or in the tobacco fields in other states.”

If her art was on canvas, Gwen Magee might not be viewed as controversial. Painters often deal with powerful political statements. But Gwen Magee does not create her art with a brush or paint. She uses fabric and a sewing machine.
Her canvas is a quilt. And that upsets some people who are used to only seeing quilting as something their grandmothers do.

“They associate quilts with serenity and peace and warmth and comfort.”

Magee’s quilts are not made for comfort. They are meant to challenge. And challenge they do.

“It creates a dissonance in people and they have a hard time moving from the idea of quilt as warmth to, I guess, understanding the kinds of things that I depict in my art.”

Magee’s art was never meant to cover a bed, it’s made to be displayed on an art gallery or museum wall, like the Mississippi museum of art where Betsy Bradley is the director.

“Gwen to me epitomizes a renaissance artist in that she makes what people typically call quilts yet to me are paintings using thread and fabrics: very meticulous, very artistically composed.”

Bradley has seen Magee’s power to move people at a recent exhibit.

“People came to that exhibition and were surprised at how moved they were. I saw crying in the galleries. And that’s what great art does. Great art moves people who are kind of unsuspecting of what they are about to encounter.”

Whether they encounter hooded Klansmen, depictions of lynchings or African Americans at work on a chain gang, because of her subject matter, Magee says about the only thing comforting about her art is actually sitting down at the sewing machine and making the quilt.

“It’s soothing, it really is… your mind just goes off into different directions and it’s a comforting sound.

As Magee pushes the multi-colored fabric across the sewing machine needle, she’s also well aware that she is carrying on a traditional art form once used by her ancestors.

“I find it very comforting to take a medium that they had to use for survival and to tell their stories and the stories of their descendents.”

Stories that because of artists like Gwen Magee will continue to be passed on for many generations to come. For MPB News, I’m Ron Brown.