DEBORAH PETTWAY YOUNG Two-Sided Quilt: [1] Nine-Block “Log Cabin” Variation And [2] “Roman Stripes” Variation (c. 1960) // Cotton twill, print, jersey knit, denim, polyester; 83 x 64 inches
via Souls Grown Deep Foundation
Pronounced “D-bora”, Deborah Pettway Young (1916–1997), was an American artist who is assoicated with the Gee’s Bend quiltmakers. She never worked from preexisting patterns, while she could look at any dress or quilt and replicate it herself without any guidance. Having work in the permanent collection of the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, her daughter Lola once said, “I never dreamed that people would pay attention to her and Arcola’s (another daughter) quilts. They were just making them to keep warm.”
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 comÂmunities, 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 tradiÂtions like quiltmaking were nourished by these continuities.
Souls Grown Deep Foundation
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