Girl at Gee's Bend, Alabama

In this iconic 1937 portrait, ten-year-old Artelia Bendolph gazes out the window of her family's log cabin in Gee's Bend, Alabama, an isolated peninsula on the Alabama River at the edge of the Black Belt. One of approximately 50 photographs of Gee's Bend taken by photographer Arthur Rothstein, the image was commissioned by Roy Stryker of the Farm Security Administration to promote the agency's programs and document life in rural America. Like other Southern river communities shaped by slavery and the cotton economy, Gee's Bend has long been home to African American families like Artelia's, descended from people enslaved on the land—first by Joseph Gee, the area's namesake, and later by Mark H. Pettway, a surname many residents still carry. After emancipation, many families remained, continuing to work the land as sharecroppers well into the 20th century.

Born in 1927, Artelia came of age during the Great Depression. With wages held below subsistence levels and much of the land owned by absentee white landlords, Gee's Bend residents faced severe poverty and food insecurity. Beginning in 1932, Gee's Bend received aid from the Red Cross and various federal programs, as part of broader New Deal interventions. By 1935, the Resettlement Administration was issuing agricultural loans to residents, and the 1937 Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act brought further investment.

This photograph captures Gee's Bend in a moment of transition, as the government began implementing development programs that reshaped the area's physical and social landscape. Still, the community endured, sustaining deep ties to the land through mutual aid, religious life, and artistic expression. Their celebrated quiltmaking tradition, once born of necessity, is now recognized as a vital American art form, with works held in museum collections around the world.