Irene Williams (1920–2015) was an American artist. She is associated with the

Gee's Bend Boykin, also known as Gee's Bend, is an African American African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa. The te ...

quilting collective, although she made her quilts "in solitude" and "uninfluenced." Her work has been exhibited at the

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), is an art museum located in the Houston Museum District of Houston, Texas. With the recent completion of an eight-year campus redevelopment project, including the opening of the Nancy and Rich Kinder Build ...

and the

Frist Art Museum The Frist Art Museum, formerly known as the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, is an art exhibition hall in Nashville, Tennessee, housed in the city's historic United States Postal Service, U.S. Post Office building, which is listed on the National ...

, and is included in the collections of the

Philadelphia Museum of Art The Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMoA) is an art museum originally chartered in 1876 for the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. The main museum building was completed in 1928 on Fairmount, a hill located at the northwest end of the Benjamin Fr ...

, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the

Museum of Fine Arts Boston The Museum of Fine Arts (often abbreviated as MFA Boston or MFA) is an art museum in Boston, Massachusetts. It is the 20th-largest art museum in the world, measured by public gallery area. It contains 8,161 paintings and more than 450,000 works ...

, and the

National Gallery of Art The National Gallery of Art, and its attached Sculpture Garden, is a national art museum in Washington, D.C., United States, located on the National Mall, between 3rd and 9th Streets, at Constitution Avenue NW. Open to the public and free of char ...

Life

Irene Williams was the daughter of Sandy and Tom Williams. She grew up on a farm with common crops like cotton, watermelon, etc. They also raised various livestock. She completed school until the ninth grade. At seventeen, she married Cornelius Williams, a man whom she adored, and together they raised six children – three boys and three girls. One of her sons died young, trying to save a logging truck driver from his wrecked vehicle. Williams' sister-in-law was fellow quilter, Liza Jane Williams.

Work

Williams did not begin making quilts until she was married and began to have children. Although members of her family and community made quilts, Williams always quilted alone in her house. having never participated in quilting bees, William's style developed on its own, uninfluenced by her peers. In "Strips," created around 1960, Williams deconstructed used basketball jerseys to form a quilt that mimics a street map, with a main street lined with houses with street numbers. Her "Vote" quilt, a housetop-style quilt featuring red, white, and blue fabric strips with the word "vote" printed on them, was inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s 1965 visit to Gee's Bend. Williams' "Blocks and Strips" quilt features bright colors and irregular, geometric shapes. It is part of the permanent collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

References

Gee's Bend quilters 1920 births 2015 deaths {{us-artist-stub