PRAIRIE VIEW, Texas-- Prairie View A&M University’s John B. Coleman Library will welcome the AT&T Gee’s Bend Quilters Spoken-Word Tour to campus on Oct. 16. The tour will be on “The Hill” for a one-day performance.
This event is being hosted by the 4th Floor Exhibit Space of the John B. Coleman Library, and an afternoon performance will occur in the Willie Albert Tempton, Sr. Memorial Student Center at 1:30 p.m. on Tuesday, October 16, 2007. This event is free of charge and open to the public.
For additional details about this event, please link onto the up and coming events page of the John B. Coleman Library website at http://www.tamu.edu/pvamu/library/.
The women of Gee’s Bend have been recognized by everyone from New York’s Whitney Museum to the U.S. Postal Service for making quilts that have been hailed by the critics with The New York Times as “some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced.”
Since the success of these quiltmakers debut art exhibition in 2002, a new tour has been formed and five of this fifty-woman collective are taking their story on the road. AT&T Proudly sponsors a performance of story telling, song and spoken word poetry that celebrates the vibrant heritage of this historic community.
Gee’s Bend is a small rural community nestled into a curve in the Alabama River southwest of Selma, Alabama. Founded in antebellum times on the site of cotton plantations owned by Joseph Gee, the town’s women developed a distinctive, bold and sophisticated quilting style based on traditional American (and African-American) quilts, but with a geometric simplicity reminiscent of Amish quilts and modern art.
The women of Gee’s Bend passed their skills and aesthetic down through at least six generations to the present and in 2002, an exhibition of seventy quilt masterpieces from the Bend was shown at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. Since then, the “Quilts of Gee’s Bend” exhibition has visited 12 cities. These quilt makers have been featured in hundreds of print and broadcast media organizations including Newsweek, NPR, CBS News Sunday Morning, House and Garden, and Oprah Winfrey’s O magazine. For more information, visit www.quiltsofgeesbend.com.
AT&T wants to help deliver the women’s inspirational story and ensure it is preserved,” said Tracy Brown, AT&T multicultural marketing manager. Quilts made by the women of Gee’s Bend are currently being featured in AT&T broadband marketing introduced earlier this summer – including television, print, and direct mail and Internet ads.
While the ad campaign runs through the end of September, the tour is scheduled to visit Historically Black Colleges and Universities throughout the fall – such as Winston Salem State University, Shaw University in Raleigh, Detroit’s Wayne State and Prairie View A&M University in Prairie View, Texas. AT&T’s long heritage serving the African-American community stems from the company’s commitment to diversity at every level. The relationship with The Quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend is just the most recent commitment to celebrate and preserve African-American culture.
About AT&T:
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About Prairie View A&M University:
Ranked No. 27 on Black Enterprise magazine’s 2006 list of “Top 50 Colleges and Universities for African-Americans,” Prairie View A&M University was founded in 1876 and is the second-oldest public institution of higher education in Texas. With an established reputation for producing engineers, nurses and educators, PVAMU offers baccalaureate degrees in 50 academic majors, 37 master’s degrees and four doctoral degree programs through nine colleges and schools. A member of the Texas A&M University System, the university is dedicated to fulfilling its land-grant mission of achieving excellence in teaching, research and service. During the university’s 131-year history, nearly 48,000 academic degrees have been awarded. For more information regarding PVAMU, visit www.pvamu.edu.
