The quilts come out of the houses early, before the heat settles over the river bottom. They go up on clotheslines strung between trees, over porch railings, across the fronts of homes scattered along the roads of a community that most maps still call Boykin. By mid-morning on Saturday, October 3, the yards of Gee's Bend will be billowing with color — bold strips of corduroy and denim, salvaged work clothes, cotton sheeting, whatever cloth was on hand — hung out to air in the sun the way quilts have been aired here for generations.
That is the whole idea behind the Airing of the Quilts Festival, now in its fifth year. It is not a convention-center craft fair. It is a community opening its doors, its porches and its family stories to visitors who drive hours down two-lane highways to reach a bend in the Alabama River in Wilcox County, one of the poorest counties in the state and one of the most artistically consequential places in America.
The festival runs from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Gee's Bend Welcome Center, co-organized by Freedom Quilting Bee Legacy and Sew Gee's Bend Heritage Builders. Dozens of quilters are expected to sell their work directly to visitors. There will be demonstrations and hands-on workshops, guided tours of the community, exhibitions, food vendors and live music from local choirs and performers. Admission is free; a hop-on, hop-off bus along the Gee's Bend Heritage Trail costs $25, and the Gee's Bend Ferry will run extra crossings from Camden across the Alabama River for $1 per pedestrian. The event is held rain or shine.
To understand why people come from dozens of states and multiple countries for a one-day quilt display, you have to go back to the beginning — and the beginning here is not a festival. It is a plantation.
In 1816, a North Carolina landowner named Joseph Gee settled with eighteen enslaved people along a deep loop of the Alabama River and established a cotton plantation. The place still carries his name. In 1845 the plantation passed to Mark Pettway, a relative, who expanded it and enslaved more than a hundred people, assigning them his surname. That name — Pettway — is still one of the most common in the community, and it belongs to many of the quilters who will be hanging work on October 3.
The women of Gee's Bend pieced quilts out of necessity, to keep their families warm. What they made, using scraps of everyday fabric, was something else entirely. Bold geometric shapes, dramatic shifts in scale and color, an improvisational approach to assembly — the results have been compared to jazz and to African art rather than to the orderly repetitions of traditional American quilting. Techniques passed from mother to daughter, but with a strong emphasis on individuality: no two quilts alike, even within the same family.
The community stayed isolated for most of its existence — by geography, by poverty, by the indifference of the outside world. Then came the civil rights movement. In 1965, Martin Luther King Jr. preached at Pleasant Grove Baptist Church in Gee's Bend, and, according to the account preserved by the Birmingham Museum of Art, women of the community showed him examples of their quilts. The following year, roughly sixty Gee's Bend quilters formed the Freedom Quilting Bee, a woman-led cooperative that turned their craft into income at a time when they were otherwise disenfranchised. The Bee sold quilts at auction in New York, took commercial commissions — including sewing pillow shams for Sears, Roebuck — and used the proceeds to bring electric lines and telephones into the community, along with washing machines, school supplies and transportation.
Estelle Witherspoon, who marched with King and was a founding member of the Bee, is part of that story; her daughter, Louise Williams, told the Montgomery Advertiser in 2022 that she had rebelled against the tradition as a young woman, leaving the state to go to school. "I barely can put a button on or sew a hem," she said. "But this was always home."
National recognition arrived in force in 2002, when the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston mounted "The Quilts of Gee's Bend," an exhibition of more than sixty quilts made between 1930 and 2000 by forty-two women, many of them mothers and daughters. The New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman called them "some of the most miraculous works of art America has produced." The quilts now hang in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Toledo Museum of Art and other institutions. In 2006, ten Gee's Bend quilts appeared on U.S. postage stamps — the same ten commemorated by the Gee's Bend Heritage Trail, the self-guided driving tour that visitors can follow on festival day.
The festival itself is younger than the fame. The first Airing of the Quilts was held on Saturday, October 8, 2022, organized by the Souls Grown Deep Foundation with the nonprofits Nest and Freedom Quilting Bee Legacy. The name came from an old practice: quilts used through the winter were taken out of summer storage and hung in the sun for a day or so before being spread back across beds for the cooler months. The result, as organizers put it at the time, was "a vibrant display of beautiful, hand-quilted creations displayed in front of homes throughout the town." That first edition featured panel discussions with community leaders, chances to meet local business owners, and education on the history of quilting in Gee's Bend.
It has grown quickly. The 2024 festival drew 2,100 people. The 2025 edition, the fourth, brought in Adidas as presenting partner and was named to Garden & Gun magazine's Southern Bucket List; organizers had expected at least 2,500 visitors. According to figures from Grey Research Solutions cited by the organizers, the 2025 festival ultimately drew 3,000 visitors and generated an estimated $878,000 in economic impact for Alabama. This year Wells Fargo joins as a key sponsor. Organizers say past festivals have welcomed visitors from more than 36 states and six countries, and they expect another record year.
"We are counting down the days until this year's Airing of the Quilts Festival," Kim Kelly, executive director of Freedom Quilting Bee Legacy, said in the June announcement that tickets were available. "Each year, this celebration grows in ways that continue to amaze us with more visitors, artists, and stories that will be shared. We can't wait to welcome people from around the world back to Gee's Bend this October."
What draws them is not just the quilts but the access. In most museums, these works sit behind glass. Here they hang outdoors in the weather, and the women who made them are standing right there. "Meeting people from around the world and sharing my quilts in person makes the Airing of the Quilts Festival truly special," quilter Doris Mosely said. "It's more than just selling quilts — it's about connecting with visitors and sharing the story of Gee's Bend."
Mary Margaret Pettway, a third-generation quilter who learned the craft from her mother, describes the moment sunlight hits a finished quilt as something close to magic. "When it hits that sun, it does something different to those quilts," she said.
Pam Swanner, executive director of the Alabama Black Belt Adventures Association, which supports the festival and named it a 2026 Black Belt Signature Event, put the appeal in plainer terms. "Every quilt has a unique family story behind it," she said. "I find that being able to see these works of art outside of a glass case, to touch them, and to talk directly with the artisans who created them makes the encounter truly immersive. Those personal connections are what people remember."
The Black Belt — 23 counties stretching across Alabama, named for its thick, fertile soil and long characterized as home to, in the words of one often-quoted description, "the richest soil and the poorest people" in the United States — has in Gee's Bend one of its most unlikely cultural destinations. The community had roughly 208 residents at the 2020 census. On the first Saturday in October, it will briefly hold several thousand.
Proceeds from the day support the quilters, the local cultural economy and efforts to preserve the quilting tradition. The River Gallery at the Welcome Center, curated by Souls Grown Deep, holds year-round exhibitions on the community's history and artistic heritage. Sew Gee's Bend Heritage Builders sells quilts and artwork by generations of makers, along with books, doormats and T-shirts, and runs hands-on quilting workshops. The Freedom Quilting Bee Legacy, in neighboring Alberta, operates a museum, community center and gift shop.
But the festival is the one day when all of it is out in the open at once — hundreds of quilts on the line, the makers on their porches, the sun doing whatever it is that sun does to a Gee's Bend quilt. "If you've never attended the Airing of the Quilts, this is the year to go," Swanner said. "And if you're returning, you already know what makes it so memorable — and why it's truly a day well spent."