Saturday, Maria and I made our way through the snow-laded streets of the Bronx to the Lehman College Museum of Art to see some of the Gee’s Bend quilts that have so influenced her art and her life. The Gee’s Bend Quilters are all descendants of the slaves of the Pettway Planation in Southern Alabama, their work is beautiful, individualistic, political and revolutionary. The Gee’s Bend Quilters made their quilts out of necessity and desperation – they needed to stay warm and seal off their poorly-made cabins from the wind and the cold.

They used old and discarded fabrics and defied the conservative and stratified world of conventional quilting. All of their pieces are rebellious and ferociously independent in their own way, they contain all kinds of secret signals and messages. If you love Maria and share a creative life with her, seeing these quilts is essential to understanding her creativity and soul. It is the closest thing to a pilgrimage for her, for us. I was grateful to be there.

I learned a lot about these quilts and the determined creative sparks of the brave and unstoppable women who made them.

We spent a couple of hours at the museum and then went on to New York City, where we stopped and visited the carriage horses in Central Park – the rally was canceled – and then went on to visit MOMA, the Museum Of Modern Art, and then have a wondrous Chinese meal with my daughter and her fiance, they are getting married in April. It was a wonderful day, easy, creative and needed – we are handling the winter by taking short trips here and there, a chance of scenery, we loved drinking up the atmosphere of New York City, walking around the Lower East Side, and then raced another winter storm up the Hudson Vally to get home. More photos in a bit.