When UnderMain contributor Zach Hall attended a preview of the Storied Quilts exhibition, running through December 6 at the Headley Whitney Museum, the sprawling farmland around the museum made him think of the quilts he was about to see. “The horse farms surrounding the museum sit at right angles to one another, a geometry disrupted only by the natural rise and fall of hills and fences cutting across the contours of the Kentucky landscape.” 

That rhythm was echoed inside as Christina Bell, the museum’s curator and director, told him how she brought seventy quilts together for the exhibit, many on loan from the collections of Phyllis George Brown, the National Quilt Museum, Kentucky Historical Society, the Henry Clay Estate at Ashland, and the Mary Todd Lincoln House. 

Some are pristine and finely stitched; others show signs of struggle and toil, especially those by the African-American quilters of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, which take up one of the three main galleries of the museum. They echo a time when nothing could be wasted and bits of cast-off work clothes found new life as quilt scraps. These quilts evoke the lived experience of an isolated African-American community where many residents are descendants of enslaved people who worked a cotton plantation there. All quilts provide warmth, but these also commemorated family members who had passed and important events in the life of the community, including the Civil Rights Era Freedom Quilting Bee women’s cooperative. 

Over the past few decades these quilts have made their way to museums around the world and now to Lexington. “Few other places can boast the extent of Gee’s Bend artistic achievement,” as John Beardsley wrote in “Gee’s Bend: The Women and Their Quilts,” the result of both “geographical isolation and an unusual degree of cultural continuity.” 

The second gallery houses eleven quilt renderings by the late Cincinnati-based Rebekka Seigel of iconic women, part of her “Women’s Work” series. Her large, intricate quilt designs portray influential American women of the 20^th century, from Rachel Carson and Ella Fitzgerald to Lucille Ball and Jean Ritchie, each rendered paper doll-style. 

With an exhibition this large and varied, Bell intentionally sought to bring in a diverse audience. “I work hard to make people feel a part of the experience,” she told Hall.  The third gallery hosts Dr. Eugene Poole’s “Legacy in Motion: Black Jockey Kentucky Derby Winners,” thirty-one life-sized images of Black jockeys in bright silks atop unseen horses. Oliver Lewis, winner of the first Kentucky Derby, gets his own quilt, as does Isaac Murphy, the first jockey to win three Derbies. They symbolically reclaim the lead in a sport they once dominated—Black jockeys won 15 of the first 28 Derbies—but in which they were later marginalized. 

Hopkinsville native Poole mostly worked in oils but found that with fabric he could still use color symbolically, as a painter might. His silks are historically accurate but the jockeys’ skin tones are rendered in warm red and soft blue. “I wanted to juxtapose those two colors,” Poole told Louisville Public Media. “At times, they had to be docile because they had to survive.” 

At other times, “they were enraged about what was happening either to them or their families.”