The Baltimore Museum of Art recently held an exhibition, She Knew Where She Was Going, looking at the connection between Gee’s Bend quilts and the Civil Rights movement. Anything that was sewable.” At this time, they were highly practical household objects – although they were often beautiful, they were sewn primarily to keep a family warm through winter in draughty houses. Sometimes you can see the striped material of bedding. “Things like leftover pants or the cloth sacks that the flour and sugar came in. “They used anything they could get their hands on,” says Loretta. The earliest existing quilts from this period are crafted from used and found materials. “And then after the harvest time, they would quilt them.” In this way, the women of the community would ensure the blankets were finished and ready in time, before the colder months of winter truly set in. “In the summer months, when everything had started to grow and didn’t need as much attention, the women would have more time to piece their quilt tops,” Loretta explains. Originally, the practice was inextricably connected to the seasons and the farming calendar. It was against this backdrop that the tradition of quilt-making flourished. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, many of the residents were provided loans by the Federal Government to buy the land that their ancestors had worked. The residents of this community are direct descendants of generations of slaves, who worked on a nearby cotton plantation. Gee’s Bend, also known as Boykin, is a small rural community in Alabama, just southwest of Selma, where quilts have been part of the fabric of life for over a century. “Our eyes were beginning to open, to see that these are really art.”
“I got to see all these people from different backgrounds and different ages and nationalities and races, all coming and admiring the quilts,” Loretta says.
Until we got to Houston and saw them on the walls.” The exhibition was a huge success and marked a shift in how the quilts were perceived – not just by the art community but by the actual artists themselves. I saw them in pictures before they were displayed in Houston and the photos really didn’t do them justice. “It took a little while for us to see what they were seeing in these quilts. “It was mind-blowing for me,” she says, recalling the day nearly two decades ago when she visited the show in Texas. For Loretta, it was the first time she had seen these quilts – which she’d been surrounded by her entire life and which had been crafted by her own mother and grandmother, among others – displayed high on the walls of a gallery. That was the year the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York put on the country’s first major exhibitions dedicated to the Quilts of Gee’s Bend. If you are sending some in, email me for the mailing addresses.Looking back, 2002 was a major turning point for Loretta Pettway Bennett. I keep my sections shorter than my ruler so I can trim them without having to scoot my ruler along the edge but other than that I don't worry about how long the sections are.Īny questions? Email me at sections will be mailed to Megan in AUS and to me in the US. When the section was as long as I wanted it, I ironed all the seams in one directionĪnd trimmed the section to 5.5 inches wide - trimming some off of each side to get straight edges on both sides of the section. (As I'm sewing my pairs together, I'm careful to keep my left edge fairly even so that when I go to trim the section I won't end up with a shorter strip not being long enough to square up.) Then I sewed two of these pairs together and had 4 strips, then sewed 2 of those and had 8 strips - last I added an additional pair.
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