Yvonne Wells

Yvonne Wells was born in 1939 in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where she continues to live and work. She is known for her intricate narrative “story quilts” rendered in a personal style that uniquely melds geometric abstraction with bold figuration. 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. 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 has exhibited her work in solo exhibitions at Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, AL; Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, SC; Mobile Museum of Art, Mobile, AL; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT; the International Quilt Museum, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE; Carnegie Visual Arts Center, Decatur, AL; and Fort Gansevoort, New York, NY. Her work is held in numerous collections in Alabama and throughout the country, including Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; the International Quilt Museum, Lincoln, NE; Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham, NC; Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC; and Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, MN.