folkartwork

My Way (2003) // Cotton, denim, corduroy, and polyester; 88 x 69 inches

via Souls Grown Deep Foundation

Loretta Pettway was born in 1942 and had many quilt-making mentors growing up, Missouri, Louella, Qunnie, her grandmother Prissy, and stepmother Plummer T., but has found her own artistic journey to make some exquisite quilts. Her earliest surviving quilts are made of everyday clothing, especially men’s work clothes. Pettway’s quilts are in private and public collections throughout the United States, including one in the permanent collection of the Met Museum.

The residents of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, are direct descendants of the enslaved people who worked the cotton plantation established in 1816 by Joseph Gee. After the Civil War, their ancestors remained on the plantation working as sharecroppers. In the 1930s, the price of cotton fell, and the community faced ruin. As part of its Depression-era intervention, the Federal Government purchased ten thousand acres of the former plantation and provided loans enabling residents to acquire and farm the land formerly worked by their ancestors. Unlike the residents of other tenant com­munities, who could be forced by economic circumstances to move—or who were sometimes evicted in retaliation for their efforts to achieve civil rights—the people of the Bend could retain their land and homes. Cultural tradi­tions like quiltmaking were nourished by these continuities.

Souls Grown Deep Foundation