They made unique quilts that captured the public’s imagination. Then Target came along

For the past two decades, Gee’s Bend quilts have captured the public’s imagination with their kaleidoscopic colors and bold geometric patterns. The innovative artistic practice was cultivated by direct descendants of slaves in rural Alabama who faced oppression, geographic isolation, and intense material constraints.

Starting this year, his improvisational art also began to incorporate a very modern question: what happens when a distinct cultural tradition collides with corporate America?

Enter the target. The multinational retailer has launched a limited-edition collection based on quilters’ designs for this year’s Black History Month. Consumer appetite proved to be high, as many stores across the country sold plaid sweaters, bottled water and quilted blankets.

“We’re actually in a quilting renaissance right now, like real time,” says Sharbreon Plummer, artist and scholar. “They are so popular and Target knew that. It created the biggest buzz when it was released.” In fact, there has been a resurgence of interest among Gen Z and millennials in conscious, at-home consumption — cottagecore, baked bread, DIY bracelets — but both are at odds with the realities of fast fashion.

Target’s designs were “inspired” by five Gee’s Bend quilters who reaped limited financial benefits from the collection’s success. They received a flat fee for their contributions, rather than being paid in proportion to Target’s sales. A Target spokesperson declined to disclose sales figures for the collection, but confirmed that it was indeed sold out in many stores.

Unlike the salary structure of the 1960s Freedom Quilting Bee—an artist-run collective that distributed equitable pay to Gee’s Bend quilters, who were salaried and eligible for Social Security benefits—unique partnerships with companies like Target benefit only a small number of people, in this case five women from two families.

The maxim “representation matters” is not new, but it is gaining more and more traction. Yet, when visibility for some does not translate into meaningful change for a marginalized community as a whole, how is this reconciled?

“Every step of the finances has been problematic,” says Patricia Turner, a retired professor of World Arts and Culture and African American Studies at UCLA, who traced the commodification of Gee’s Bend quilts to white collector Bill Arnett in the 1990s. really bothered by Target’s in-house designer manipulating the look of things to make them more palatable to their audience,” she says of the altered color palettes and patterns.

“Each quilter had the opportunity to provide information about the items featured in our collection on multiple occasions throughout the process,” Target spokesperson Brian Harper-Tibaldo wrote in an emailed statement.

Although thumbnail photos of manufacturers appeared in some marketing materials and the text “Gee’s Bend” was printed on clothing labels, the company’s involvement with quilters was limited. Once Black History Month ended, quilters’ names and images were scrubbed from the retailer’s website.

While Target has pledged to spend more than $2 billion on Black-owned businesses by 2025, there are no plans to work with the Gee’s Bend community again.

The current situation reflects that of the 1990s, when some quilters enjoyed new visibility, others were disinterested, and still others felt taken advantage of. (In 2007, several quilters filed a series of lawsuits against the Arnett family, but all of the cases were settled out of court and little is known about the lawsuits due to nondisclosure agreements.)

The profit-driven approach that emerged, which disrupted Quilting Bee’s price-sharing structure, created “real divisions and disharmony within the community,” Turner explains, throughout engagement with collectors, art institutions and commercial companies. “I think it’s sad to see those ties broken due to the commercialization of their art form.”

By reproducing an aesthetic but stripping it of its social fabric and familial context, Target has failed to capture the essence of what makes this specific artisanal tradition so rich and distinctive.

Quilts are made to mark important milestones and are given to celebrate a new baby or a wedding, or to honor the loss of someone. Repurposing fabrics—from tattered blankets, frayed rags, stained clothing—is a central ethos of the community’s quilting practice, which resists commodification. But the Target collection was mass-produced from new fabrics in factories in China and elsewhere abroad.

Older generations of Gee’s Bend quilters are known for unique designs with contrasting colors and irregular, wavy lines—visual effects arising from their material constraints. Most worked at night in homes without electricity and did not have basic tools such as scissors, much less access to fabric stores. Stella Mae Pettway, who sold her quilts on Etsy for between $100 and $8,000, characterized having scissors and access to more fabric now as a paradox of “advantage and disadvantage.”

Many third- and fourth-generation artists returned to quilting as adults in search of a creative and therapeutic outlet, as well as a connection to their roots. After her mother died in 2010, quilter JoeAnn Pettway-West revisited the practice and found peace in completing her mother’s unfinished quilts. “As I’m doing this stitch, I can see her hand sewing. It’s like we were there together,” she says. “It’s a little bit of her, a little bit of me.”

Delia Pettway Thibodeaux is a third-generation Gee’s Bend quilter whose grandmother was a sharecropper and whose bold, rhythmic quilts are now in the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. For the Target collection, she received a flat fee rather than a fee proportional to sales.

“I was a little worried at first” about how the quilts would be altered to fit the collection, says Pettway Thibodeaux. “But then again, when I saw the collection, I felt different.”

Because employment opportunities are so limited in Gee’s Bend, many fourth-generation quilters have left the area to work as teachers, day care workers, home health aides, and to serve in the military.

“We, as the next generation, were more dreamers,” says Pettway-West.

National recognition certainly brought some positive changes. But greater visibility—from museum exhibits, academic research, a collection of U.S. Postal Service stamps—has not necessarily translated into economic gains. After all, the median annual income in Boykin, Alabama, is still well below the poverty rate at about $12,000, according to the nonprofit Nest.

“This is a community that still, to this day, really needs recognition, still needs economic revitalization,” says Lauren Cross, Gail-Oxford Associate Curator of American Decorative Arts at the Huntington Museum of Art. you know, channel it back to them, I support it.”

Target’s line in particular, however, is disconnected from the group’s origins and artisanal practice, she says. It’s a problem that distills the very challenge we have when something handmade and linked to a deep tradition becomes national and corporate.

“On the one hand, you want to preserve the stories and that sense of authenticity,” says Cross.

“And on the other hand,” she asks, “how do you reach a wider audience?”