PLAY THE HAND THAT'S DEALT YOU Will Be on View Beginning This Week

Beginning June 8, 2023, Fort Gansevoort will present Play The Hand That’s Dealt You, the first New York solo exhibition of Alabama-based artist Yvonne Wells. Born in 1939 in Tuscaloosa, Wells is known for her intricate narrative quilts depicting American history subjects, pop culture figures, and religious subject matter. As a self-taught artist living and working in the same region as the enslaved female quilters from the rural Alabama community known as Gee’s Bend, Wells is aware of heritage techniques, yet cleaves to her own contemporary visual vernacular. Through a practice that illuminates the craft of quilt making as a form of fine art, in addition to its utilitarian function, she has developed a style that uniquely melds geometric abstraction with bold figuration. The evolution of Wells’ personal aesthetic and technical mastery will be seen through over a dozen large works on view, spanning three decades of the artist’s career. 

Improvisation and chance are integral to Wells’ artistic process. Instead of following a pattern or planning her compositions in advance with preparatory drawings, she embraces an intuitive approach, sewing together fragments of fabric by hand into the compositions she envisions in her mind. Wells primarily uses repurposed fabric and found objects as the raw materials for her quilts. This generative practice of reuse and adaptation continues to fuel her creative production. The patterns and textures in front of her guide her spontaneous aesthetic choices. As the artist has said, “the materials I use have their own stories and histories… the quilts talk to me, and I listen.”

In 2022, a solo exhibition of Wells’ quilts was presented at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, Alabama. This year, Wells’ work is featured in the Art Bridges Cohort Program's Spotlight exhibition series. Over the next year and a half, the exhibition will travel to all the museums that comprise the American South Consortium: Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, AL, Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, SC, the Mobile Museum of Art, Mobile, AL, and the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT. Beginning in 2024, the American South Consortium will present an expanded exhibition at each venue including works by Wells and other Spotlight series artists.

A monograph devoted to Wells’ career will be published by University of Alabama Press in 2024, co-authored by the artist and University of Alabama Professor Stacy Morgan. This comprehensive publication will include scholarly essays, a chronology of Wells' artistic production to date, and over 100 color plates of her quilts.