The Souls Grown Deep Foundation & Community Partnership (SGD) announced today that it is launching a custom print program with more than 100 fine art prints and archival reproductions. The prints and reproductions will support more than 30 Black artists and their estates from the American South, including Thornton Dial, Nellie Mae Rowe, and over 20 quilt makers from Gee’s Bend, Alabama.
This program is SGD’s latest effort to support its community of artists. Last year, the foundation partnered with Macy’s to sell reproductions of the Gee’s Bend quilts, with funds from those sales also going to support the artists. In 2021, SGD brought one-of-a-kind creations made by the Gee’s Bend quilters to Etsy, which also financially helped contributing artists.
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The custom print collection will be offered exclusively online, with prices ranging from $30 to $85 (for works unframed) and $135 to $295 (for framed pieces). Fifty percent of the sales will benefit the artists through an equitable revenue sharing model, according to Maxwell L. Anderson, the organization’s president; the foundation’s 50 percent share will cover print production costs and benefit its programming. New prints and artists will be added throughout the year.
The revenue-sharing model allows for a larger percentage of the proceeds to directly benefit participating artists. Essentially, the model “makes artists equal revenue-sharing partners on sales of both paintings and frames, unlike most print-on-demand programs that typically share only a small percentage of revenue with the artists themselves,” a press release explains.
“The level of poverty in Wilcox County is so extreme that any income is welcome by virtue of the fact that the majority of people are on federal assistance,” Anderson said in a phone conversation with ARTnews. “When we talk to some of the artists who suddenly pay off credit card bills—or they’re able to support their kids, opportunities for education—it’s quite meaningful for them. And I think part of a challenge we’ve always faced at Souls Grown Deep is that the artists that we advocate for have remained in the Deep South—they’ve remained in a part of the country that’s under resourced and is saddled with poverty to a far greater extent than other regions and countries.”
SGD represents the largest collection of works by Black artists from the American South, and the foundation has placed more than 500 works in 32 museum collections around the world in an effort to raise awareness of these artists and generations of their work. Even though the artists’ works have been placed among some of the world’s top museum collections, the artists “see the parties at museums and the celebrations of exhibitions, and the glamorous full color catalogues, but they’re still living here [in the American South] on federal assistance,” Anderson said.
The full list of participating artists is as follows below.
Thornton Dial
Joe Light
Ronald Lockett
Nellie Mae Rowe
Mose Tolliver
Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers
Nellie Mae Abrams
Willie “Ma Willie” Abrams
Annie Bendolph
Louisiana Bendolph
Mary Lee Bendolph
Delia Bennett
Linda Diane Bennett
Loretta Pettway Bennett
Mary L. Bennett
Rachel Carey George
America Irby
Lucy Mingo
Aolar Mosely
Annie E. Pettway
Arcola Pettway
Creola Bennett Pettway
Jessie T. Pettway
Lola Pettway
Loretta Pettway
Lucy T. Pettway
Martha Pettway
Martha Jane Pettway
Nancy Pettway
Qunnie Pettway
Rita Mae Pettway
Sue Willie Seltzer
Gearldine Westbrook
Irene Williams
Magdalene Wilson