Fourteen, 2014 by Mary Lee Bendolph

Mary Lee Bendolph is an icon of American folk art and perhaps the best-known quilter from the legendary Gee’s Bend community in Alabama. A master of abstraction, Bendolph crafts her free-form compositions using salvaged fabric, joining wedges, triangles, and rectangular strips into rhythmic, unpredictable patterns inspired by her everyday surroundings.

Her work—which also spans printmaking—expresses a distinctly modernist visual language. Much like jazz and blues, her quilts celebrate deep improvisation, structural intuition, and technical virtuosity. The New York Times has praised the Gee’s Bend quilts as “some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced,” and Bendolph’s pieces have been exhibited internationally in U.S. embassies worldwide.

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SOBU is proud to feature fine art prints created by our friends at Paulson Fontaine Press, a woman- and minority-owned publisher based in Berkeley, California. Founded in 1996, the press collaborates with visionary artists—including Kerry James Marshall, Martin Puryear, Tauba Auerbach, and the Quilters of Gee’s Bend—to produce exceptional limited-edition intaglio etchings. Grounded in a commitment to amplifying underrepresented voices, particularly Black artists, Paulson Fontaine Press creates works that are held in major institution collections nationwide, including MoMA, the Whitney, the National Gallery of Art, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.