"Because they are so reductive in design, these works suggest obvious parallels with another clannish group of artists practicing at the same time. Both Minimalism and Gee's Bend began practically (Gee's born out of slavery, Minimalism as an ideological rejection of Greenbergian formalism), and each thrived as out groups. Both pared away detail to reveal elemental structure, marrying process to form as the basic emblem of a human signature. Each drew inspiration from what was close at hand (the log cabin, the modernist grid), making variations on those essential forms the hallmark of an individual artist's sensibility. Both groups rehabilitated humble, discarded, nontraditional materials into their work, as a practical response to their environment and as a statement of their difference."

—Christopher French, Glasstire: Visual art in Texas Online, 2002

Quilting is part of a faith tradition in Gee's Bend, and spiritual songs often accompany sewing. The music of this region has been recorded, and many quilters have commented on their need for song to accompany their work:

Nettie Young has said, "Quilting is mostly singing. And so it sound like it ought to be music in that quilt, it really do, because that's sure the way we make them."

Linda Pettway says that as she sews, "I'll strike out on a moan. I'll sing, 'Lord, if you don't help me, I can't stand the storm.'"

Jessie Pettway credits singing with energizing her: "When I'm sitting up at night, if I can have that spirit of singing, I can sew longer and I won't even get sleepy. And everybody else has gone to bed, and I could be sitting up here way in the night sewing."

—Bernard L. Herman, Gee's Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt, 2006, p. 217

Gee's Bend is a small-town community living on a u-shaped sliver of land on a curve in the Alabama River. It gets its name from James Gee, a plantation owner who sold his plantation to Mark Pettway in 1845. Many Gee's Bend residents are decedents of former Pettway plantation slaves and bear the Pettway name. After emancipation, many Gee's Bend residents continued to work the land as tenant farmers and then were able to buy their homesteads during a New Deal-sponsored program in the 1940s. Gee's Bend became known for its participation in the Freedom Quilting Bee in the 1960s and for its strong response to Dr. Martin Luther King's voting rights crusade. Since 2002, the quilts made by four generations of women have made the community famous for its artistic vision.

"The textile artists of Gee's Bend are the inheritors of a tradition that undoubtedly goes back many generations, though earlier examples of their community's quilts are lost. The Gee's Bend quilts also represent only a portion of the rich tradition of African American quilt making in the South, but they are in a league by themselves. Few other places can boast the density of Gee's Bend's artistic achievement, which is the result both of geographical isolation and an unusual degree of cultural continuity. In few other places can we find surviving examples of work by three and some times four generations of women in the same family, or trace the lineages of different community quilting groups. And in few places can we find so many quilts with so much flair, pieced in bold, improvised geometrics from salvaged work clothes and dresses, cotton sacks and fabric samples."

—Alvia Wardlaw, "Introduction," The Quilts of Gee's Bend, 2002, p. 8