Can You Copyright a Quilt?

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From The Nation:

In 1998, an art collector named William Arnett arrived in Wilcox County, Alabama. Over the next two years, he went door to door in the African-American hamlet of Gee’s Bend, asking women if he could see their quilts: vivid, off-kilter assemblages of worn denim, outgrown school dresses and other salvaged bits of cloth, particular to Gee’s Bend and nowhere else.

Most of the 275 residents of Gee’s Bend are descendants of slaves from once-thriving cotton plantations. At the time of Arnett’s first visit, a serious art collector was an unlikely presence on their doorsteps, not least because Gee’s Bend is so far off the beaten path—a tangle of red dirt roads and overgrown fields nestled into a deep arc of the Alabama River. There are no stores or offices; just trailers, retired barns, and houses built for a short-lived economic program by the Roosevelt administration, some 40 miles from the nearest pharmacy.

For years, Arnett, a native Southerner, collected Asian art, then African art, and ultimately, African-American art from the South. He saw quilts from the Bend in a Civil Rights–era photography book, and became determined to track down their makers.

To the women he would meet—Annie Mae Young, Mary Lee Bendolph, Lucy T. Pettway, and dozens of others—quilts were much loved, given as gifts on most every occasion, and made for everyday use: blankets, curtains, floor coverings.

To Arnett, they were graceful, honest works of art. They represented the hardship endured by that community, from slavery, to sharecropping, tenant farming, and the harrowing upheavals of the civil-rights struggle. History was spelled out in each one: in worn materials torn from old work clothes, in batting of cotton lint salvaged from the fields, in unexpected color palettes and their inspired riffs on traditional patterns, handed down and uniquely interpreted by hundreds of women across generations.

Over the coming years, he would purchase dozens of their masterpieces for $200 to $300 a piece—10 to 20 times the going rate, often a relative windfall for the makers, many of whom were seniors, subsisting on Social Security checks, and living well below the poverty line. He was determined to introduce their work into the existing narrative of contemporary American art.

. . . .

Throughout the mid 2000s, the quilts were shown around the country at the Smithsonian, the Whitney, and other major American art museums from Atlanta to Minneapolis to San Francisco. They were widely written about in the press, drawing frequent comparison to Klee, Rothko, and Mondrian, and emblazoned on a limited-edition series of United States postage stamps. The quilt makers, who had not previously thought of themselves as artists, rode buses from Alabama to the early New York openings, dressed in their Sunday best, to see the quilts that had once kept their children warm in the winters displayed before throngs of museum-goers.

. . . .

Some of the artists—and their children—saw the fervor around the quilts, and wondered why their share of a supposed fortune had not materialized. And if you’ve been to that tangle of red dirt roads on the Alabama River, you’d understand why.

Last year, Philip Alston, the United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, visited the region, and told an Alabama news outlet that he had not previously been aware of conditions of this severity in the developed world. A number of homes are without septic systems. The post office was closed some years ago, after the postmaster became ill from black mold. It was from this disparate vantage that, in 2007, a small handful of women filed lawsuits against Arnett, challenging their history of handshake agreements—work exchanged for cash with no paperwork nor contract.

. . . .

Funds that were set aside in escrow from the proceeds of the licensing and other activities, and that were intended to benefit the community at large, instead went to settling the lawsuits, benefiting only the plaintiffs and dividing the community.

Many were grateful for Arnett’s efforts, and, satisfied with having sold the quilts to him in the first place, saw no need for litigation. “I have no real beef with [the Arnetts], other than the fact that they just wasn’t organized in my sense,” said Rubin Bendolph. He helps promote the work and legacy of his mother, Mary Lee Bendolph, now 83 and living beside her daughter—also a quilt maker—in Gee’s Bend. “They brought [the quilt makers] out of the darkness,” Mr. Bendolph said, “and into the light so that people could see who they are and what their stories were.”

After the lawsuits, one change did take hold: Everyone in Gee’s Bend had learned the term copyright—a set of rights inherent to the creator of an artwork that gives control over how images and reproductions of the work are used, and creates a pathway to licensing fees.

“I sold quilts, I got paid for ’em. In that sense, I’m like Walmart.” says Mary Margaret Pettway, quilt maker and lifelong resident of Gee’s Bend. “The bonus is the copyright, which we did not know we had, or we were entitled to.” Pettway lives in a worn trailer at the end of a steep, dirt driveway; when we spoke, she was quilting in the corner of a community center that serves a daily free lunch to seniors.

As a general matter, copyright is inherited, like any part of one’s estate—an immaterial heirloom. In some countries, like Australia, artists receive royalties on a resale, so if a quilt were purchased for $200 and next sold to a museum for $20,000, the artist would benefit, receiving some percentage of the increase. In the United States, at least for now, there are no resale royalties; copyright can police only the most egregious instances of appropriation, paying scant dividends on use of images of the work. But at least, as Ms. Pettway puts it, “it acknowledges the quilter.”

Many Bend residents have little to pass on to their children but their quilts. If those quilts were long ago removed to hang on the walls of a museum in a faraway city, the copyright attached means that they can still, in an abstract way, be handed down. In the absence of a final will and testament by the artist, copyright is inherited along pathways of descent that vary state by state. In Alabama, if someone like Ms. Pettway has no living descendants—children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren—copyright transfers to her siblings. If all siblings are deceased, it rolls to their direct descendants. If no siblings, then it would be divided among grandparents, aunts, and uncles, and next to their descendants. If none of those people are living, claim of copyright is awarded to the state of Alabama until the work passes into the public domain, 70 years after the death of the artist.

. . . .

Few publishing houses, museums, and other institutions—however prestigious—are eager to pay for usage for an image. Enter the Artists Rights Society, which represents the intellectual property rights of over 80,000 artists and estates, from Frida Kahlo to Andy Warhol to Le Corbusier. Souls Grown Deep approached ARS to track requests, review contracts, process payments, and pursue usage opportunities for the artists in the Arnett collection. With the addition of Zu Pettway to the ARS roster, the rights of 61 of the 120 quilt makers on Browning’s list are now represented. But it is a constant, everyday battle to make sure that images aren’t used without permission, and that when copyright fees are owed, the artists get paid, and fairly.

. . . .

“Now, it’s not a fortune,” Browning assures Moore. He walks her through examples of artists whose quilts appeared in the exhibition catalog at the de Young museum in San Francisco. They received $75 each. Artists with work on coffee mugs at the gift shop received $350. For deceased quilters, living heirs would be asked for their approval of the image use, and then would divide that sum among them.

“Well, I want to become a member.” Moore signs the contract Browning handed her, bringing the number of quilters represented by ARS up to 62. “Something’s better than nothing!”

While the dollar amounts are small, and unlicensed artifacts like “Quilts of Gee’s Bend” greeting-card sets are sold to this day at Black Belt Treasures gift shop right across the river, the significance of the contract Moore just signed is not. Copyright protection by the Artists Rights Society is the first time the quilters have had a lasting connection to the work they sold, or any agency in its usage, since it left their homes.

Link to the rest at The Nation

3 thoughts on “Can You Copyright a Quilt?”

  1. I loved this story because I’m starting to gather research material for an upcoming project. I found this article, which I find ironic considering you just posted this story. Check out the last line, name and occupation!

    Snipped: Gee’s Bend in Wilcox County, Alabama was originally a Plantation. “The plantation was started by Joseph Gee and passed to his nephews Sterling and Charles Gee upon his death, along with 47 slaves. The brothers then sold it to their relative Mark H. Pettway in 1845 to settle a $29,000 debt. About a year later, the Pettway family moved from North Carolina to Gee’s Bend, bringing about one hundred slaves with them. When slavery was abolished many of them continued working for the Pettways as sharecroppers. Many of the black tenants Arthur Rothstein photographed were named Pettway. The white Pettway family owned the property until 1895, when it was sold to Adrian Sebastian Van de Graaff. Van de Graaff, a lawyer from Tuscaloosa, then operated it as an absentee landlord.

  2. And did you notice that the original article, all about art/craft works, had no illustrations of them at all, other than the header image which probably falls under fair use?

    So the reader gets no idea what the quilts look like, because the author is so worried about the ability to show the images.

    Oh, yeah, that level of copyright throttle is real useful to the copyright holder.

    Makes you wonder how they can even put an auction catalogue together…

  3. I’ve been fans of these quilts and these artists for many years. Stories about these creators have always been slanted to make it seem like these women have benefited financially from their art becoming popular. I’m feeling pretty angry honestly.

    Because if anyone felt this was fair and ok then the misdirection in the eyes of fans wouldn’t need to happen.

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