Beginning September 19, 2024, Fort Gansevoort will present Beyond Patchwork: The Abstractions of Yvonne Wells, the gallery’s second solo exhibition of the Alabama-based artist. Born in 1939 in Tuscaloosa, Yvonne Wells is a self-taught textile artist living and working in the same region that was home to the enslaved female quilters of the rural community known as Gee’s Bend.
While versed in the heritage techniques associated with them, Wells possesses a deeply maverick attitude that has freed her to break the rules of traditional quilt-making and forge a decidedly individualistic artistic path with her own invented visual vernacular. Wells has attracted acclaim over past decades for works that assert a bold narrative figuration, taking on cultural and sociopolitical topics that range from portraits of Pop icons to the ongoing struggle for rights and equality.
Against that backdrop, the exhibition at Fort Gansevoort will be the very first to elucidate a different aspect of Wells’ practice— her unique relationship to abstraction as an intuitive and improvisational method of construction and a liberating form of self-expression.
Beyond Patchwork: The Abstractions of Yvonne Wells coincides with a milestone in the artist’s career. Wells’ work is being written into the canon of exceptional Black American textile arts via the first monograph devoted to her long career, to be published by University of Alabama Press in September 2024 and complemented by the survey exhibition Picture This: The Story Quilts of Yvonne Wells, on view at Paul R. Jones Museum in Tuscaloosa, Alabama from August 2 to September 27, 2024.
Fort Gansevoort’s exhibition will showcase fifteen quilts by Yvonne Wells, including very early examples alongside more recent works. Will you be checking this exhibit out?
