folkartwork

SALLY MAE PETTWAY MIXON Blocks (2020) // Cotton; 60 x 52 inches

via Souls Grown Deep Foundation

Sally Mae Pettway Mixon is Dinah Miller’s great-granddaughter, and the sister of Qunnie Pettway and Edwina Pettway.

Souls grown deep foundation

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