Mary Lee Bendolph

Mary Lee Bendolph (b. 1935), Blocks, strips, strings, and half squares (detail) 2005

Cotton, 84 x 81 in.; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Museum purchase and gift of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation

Mary Lee Bendolph’s quilt Blocks, strips, strings, and half squares bubbles over with African American improvisations, pattern redirections, and syncopation. At the same time, its stripped-down formalism (like so many Gee’s Bend quilts) fits easily with the universalist aesthetic claims of high modernism. But overarchingly, the quilt’s dominant theme is her ingenious take on what Gee’s Benders call “strings”—interlaced wedge shapes of cloth. Bendolph subsumes all of these crosscurrents into a piece of art that is also self-referential within the artist’s body of work.