LORETTA PETTWAY

The women of Gee’s Bend, a small rural Black community in Alabama of about seven hundred residents, have been creating bold, visually distinctive quilts since at least the 1920s.

Loretta Pettway created this quilt using textiles upcycled from everyday clothing worn by her family and friends. Her choice of pattern, Roman Stripes (also referred to locally as a "crazy quilt"), was inspired by a quilt that her stepmother, Plummer T. Pettway, made a few years earlier.