Olivia Joseph

speaker

668 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 26 Feb

Olivia Joseph’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.

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Ologies with Alie Ward · Culcitology (QUILTS) with Luke Haynes, Olivia Joseph, and Joe Cunningham · 26 Feb 2026 podcast

that person with, and it's such a beautiful thing.

I just saw it for the first time a couple years ago.

A good friend of mine, Mike McNamara, had a big part in the local AIDS quilt chapter in the headquarters, and also he's a very generous guy and has helped make quilts for people for that.

He's made dozens of them.

I've made a few.

Let's hear it.

Okay.

So, Gee's Bend is in Alabama.

It's about 40 miles north.

West of Selma, there's a bend in the river that used to be a plantation.

And it's called Gee's Bend.

It's a very isolated community.

And when the Voting Rights Act came along, people in the nearest town that had a ferry that went back and forth across the river that the people could take to go over there and vote, the local town stopped that ferry so as to isolate the black people who are the descendants of the former enslaved people in that neighborhood, primarily, on that plantation, were not able to get over there and vote, at least not easily.

Then in the 90s, there was a couple of guys, art collectors from Atlanta, that started going to Gee's Bend regularly because they realized that the women there had been relatively isolated and had developed their own aesthetic, which is much more improvisatory and free than the kind of rigid quilt style.

designs that had been held up as the ideal before that.

So they amassed this collection, put up a show at the Houston Art Museum, and it was so sensational.

It ended up going to the Whitney in New York, getting a big write-up in the New York Times, and becoming world famous.

This is around 2000 to 2004 or 2005.

And they would sing.

They sing when they're making quilts, and they've been singing together since the cradle.

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