LORETTA PETTWAY BENNETT / GEES BEND
Loretta Pettway Bennett is a quilt artist and member of the acclaimed Quilters of Gee’s Bend. She is the 5th generation born in the town and like many of the quilters in the Gee’s Bend community, Bennett creates quilts that are striking compositions made up of brilliantly colored geometric blocks. Her quilts are often paired with semi-descriptive titles relating to architecture or place such as “Unfinished House” (2008), “Broken Housetop” (2008), or “Log Cabin With Cracks” (2014).
After traveling the world with her husband, who was in the military, Bennett returned to the States and received a fellowship grant from the Alabama State Archive Council on the Arts to study the fine details of Gee’s bend quilt- making. From this fellowship, her and her mother created a “Pine Burr” quilt, which was designated the official quilt of the State of Alabama by the Legislature on March 11, 1997.
She is a prolific artist and culture-bearer, dedicated to propagating her community’s traditions for future generations.
TANK, 2004
Quilted fabric
60 x 75 inches
Courtesy of Greg Kucera Gallery
FLOW PLANS, 2012
Quilted fabric
76 x 89 inches
Courtesy of Greg Kucera Gallery
“I quilt with music. If there’s a good song on, I stop and dance because that runs in the family. And that’s what gets me going. I just let it happen. I like to lay my pieces out. I like to get a good color first and good music, and Loretta goes to work.”
“Loretta Bennett, daughter of Qunnie Pettway, is a “new generation” quilter from Gee’s Bend. Inspired by the Quilts of Gee’s Bend exhibition in Houston in 2002, she recalls:
‘There my eyes were opened, and it touched me in a way as to question myself; can I make a quilt that someday might hang on the wall of a museum?
At that time, according to me, the answer was, No way, no way – not after seeing my relatives’ quilts hanging in a museum; they had been making quilts for generation after generation. Several months passed and the Quilts of Gee’s Bend exhibition opened in New York; still I had not made any quilts.
Finally, after hearing all the great news reports about my ancestors’ quilts, I decided to try my hand at it. After all, I am an offspring of some of the great quiltmakers from Gee’s Bend. I came to realize that my mother, her mother, my aunts, and all the others from Gee’s Bend had sewn the foundation, and all I had to do now was thread my own needle and piece a quilt together.’ ”
“Bennett’s practice is part of a quilting tradition that has continued uninterrupted for five generations, and, because many members of the predominantly female community are descendants of slaves, quite possibly longer. Gee’s Bend, in Wilcox County, is part of the Black Belt—a narrow peninsula surrounded by a bend in the Alabama River whose name is derived from both the soil and its historically all African American population.”
Leola Pettway and Qunnie Pettway working at the Freedom Quilting Bee in 1972.
Photo: © Mary McCarthy
“Bennett was introduced to sewing around age five by her mother, Qunnie, who worked at the Freedom Quilting Bee, a sewing cooperative established in 1966 in the nearby neighborhood of Rehoboth.”
“The Gee's Bend Quilts : Loretta P. Bennett”,
Philadelphia Museum of Art