Lucy Mingo

Lucy Marie (Young) Mingo (born 1931) is an American quilt maker and member of the Gee's Bend Collective from Gee's Bend (Boykin), Alabama. She was an early member of the Freedom Quilting Bee, which was an alternative economic organization created in 1966 to raise the socio-economic status of African-American communities in Alabama. She was also among the group of citizens who accompanied Martin Luther King Jr. on his 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.

Mingo is a recipient of a 2015 National Heritage Fellowship awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts, which is the highest honor in the folk and traditional arts in the United States.

Early life Lucy Young was born in 1931 in Rehoboth, Alabama, a settlement near Gee's Bend to Ethel and Earl Young. Her nickname is "Toot". Her father was a sharecropper who also worked as a longshoreman in Mobile, Alabama which required him to be away from the family for long periods of time. Lucy and her siblings worked the fields growing corn, peas, potatoes, peanuts, and cotton

Mingo went to Boykin elementary school, and at age 13 was sent to the Allen Institute in Mobile. After graduation from Allen, she moved back to Boykin and married David Mingo in 1949, at age 17. She retired at age 69, after her mother became ill.

Freedom Quilting Bee Mingo was a founding member of the Freedom Quilting Bee (FQB), At one point, the Bee was the largest employer in the town of Rehoboth.

The Freedom Quilting Bee's numbers declined in the 1990s due to an aging membership, plus weather damage to their community space. After the death of the last original board member, the Bee officially closed in 2012.

Gee's Bend Collective Mingo made this pieced quilt in 1979. It includes a nine-patch center block surrounded by pieced strips. Collection of Bill Volckening, Portland, Oregon. Mingo quilted as a member of both the Freedom Quilting Bee and the Gee's Bend Collective, which had similar economic missions and some overlapping membership. The FQB, however, required the quilters to use standardized patterns to make the quilts more marketable, while the Collective members are allowed artistic freedom in the design and execution of their quilts. The work and artistry of the Collective gained national attention in 2002 when an exhibition of seventy of the women's quilts was assembled by folk art collector and art historian William Arnett and his Tinwood Alliance in conjunction with The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The exhibition called "The Quilts of Gee's Bend" traveled to ten other museums around the country, including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. An article about the Whitney exhibition in The New York Times brought even more national attention to the artistry of the Gee's Bend quilts, when the reviewer wrote that the quilts "turn out to be some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced".

Mingo's contribution to the 2002 exhibition was in the area of "work clothes" turned into quilts. In her early years, Mingo frequently used old denim and cotton shirts worn during field work as material for her quilts. Mingo said about these quilts, "You know, we had hard times. We worked in the fields, we picked cotton, and sometimes we had it and sometimes we didn't. And so you look at your quilt and you say 'This is some of the old clothes I wore in the fields. I wore them out, but they still doing good.' "

In 2006, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Tinwood Alliance mounted a second exhibition titled "Gee's Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt" that included works by Mingo. That exhibition's itinerary included eight museums throughout the United States.

In 2014, it was reported that because she is over 80 years old, Mingo rarely makes new quilts anymore. But her quilts are still included in exhibitions, including the 2017 Outsider Art Fair held in New York City. In May 2018, Mingo traveled to New York City to attend the opening of an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art titled "History Refused to Die: Highlights from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation" that included some of Mingo's quilts, as well as others from the Gee's Bend Collective.

Exhibitions Mingo's quilts have been included in museum and gallery exhibitions throughout the United States, including: Metropolitan Museum of Art (2018) LSU Museum of Art (2024) Oliver Art Center, Frankfort, Michigan (2025)

Awards and honors Folk Arts Apprenticeship grant from the Alabama State Council on the Arts (2006) National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts (2015)