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58 PÄR BENGTSSON COURTESY THE MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, HOUSTON The American Design Revolution By Rebecca Sherman and Catherine D. Anspon For 250 years, America has made chairs, pottery, textiles, china, and skillets. What has survived? More than you might think. Gee's Bend Quilts The breakout exhibition of the 2000s emerged from an unlikely place: the remote rural community of Gee's Bend, Alabama, which takes its name from a slave owner who acquired land in 1816 around a bend in the Alabama River, then erected the area's first plantation with enslaved people. During the 19th century, the quilt-making tradition began at Gee's Bend, to keep warm in unheated shacks. Using modest materials, the quiltmakers repurposed what was at hand — work clothes, flour bags, fertilizer sacks — transforming them into striking works of art that belied their humble roots. The Texas institution that first put these textiles on museum walls — the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston — exhibited "The Quilts of Gee's Bend" in 2002, which went on to the Whitney Museum of American Art, then a global tour. The artists who captivated the world, a tightly knit, multi-generational circle of African- American quilters, displayed an abstract and sophisticated visual aesthetic that placed them among the pioneers of modernism, earning comparisons with Newman, Albers, Klee, Reinhardt, Stella, and Mondrian. CDA Casci Plaster When planners designing the 250th anniversary pavilions for the National Mall in Washington, D.C., wanted something genuinely handcrafted at the top, they turned to Dallas' Casci Plaster — founded in 1930, one of the country's most eminent ornamental plaster companies, operating today under owner Mark Marynick out of the historic Mrs. Baird's bakery plant in South Dallas. The commission: 54 gilded eagles, one for each state and U.S. territory, to crown the pavilions lining the Mall in a design inspired by the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. Cast in Glassworkers moving a color pot to the furnace Gee's Bend quilt by Annie Mae Young, circa 1965, collection the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Fifty-four gilded eagles made by Casci Plaster for the National Mall