Pieced Together: Mary Lee Bendolph at Nicelle Beauchene

In the kaleidoscopic patterns of the eleven quilts on display in Mary Lee Bendolph’s exhibition “Piece of Mind” at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, each stitch, swatch, and geometric configuration feels as important as the larger work of which it is a part. Bendolph hails from Gee’s Bend, Alabama, and she inherited the piecework quilt-making techniques and visual styles that generations of Black women developed and passed down in that hamlet on a peninsula. Bendolph and other G