"Housetop"

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    Photo: Stephen Pitkin/Pitkin Studio
1963
Cotton twill and synthetic material (men's clothing)
80 x 74 inches
Collection of
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gift of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation
Description

In a purely aesthetic sense, the more simplified constructions of the work-clothes quilts provided a blank canvas for experiments with a range of improvisational strategies, including sudden shifts in patterning, broken borders, irregular shapes, asymmetry, syncopation, and dissonant juxtapositions of prints and colors. During the early 1960s, Loretta Pettway created a captivating trilogy of quilts with vastly different and highly imaginative designs, all miraculously rendered from the same dreary batch of men’s clothing scraps.