1927–2015

Creola Bennett Pettway

About

Creola Bennett Pettway's quilts favor lucid geometries and frequent modulations in motif. She is a member of one of the largest families of quilters in Gee’s Bend, which includes her sisters, Ella Mae Irby and Georgiana Pettway, and her mother, Delia Bennett, who taught her to quilt.

When I first started out to making quilts, it was with my mother, Delia Bennett. And when she got her some pieces, we sot down watched her. Then we decided we would get up and get o needle and thread, too, and kneel down and look after her put her pieces together. And after she would put her pieces together, I decided I would put me some pieces together, too. And after we put them together, then we looked up at her lap—she had them laying in her lap—to see was my quilt block pieced like hers. She said, “You coming on good, girl.” And we just continued piecing, piecing, piecing, piecing, piecing.

Quiltmakers in Gee’s Bend typically locate the origins for their designs in their heads, and many disavow the use of printed patterns. Pettway describes her mother’s and her own design abilities in just those terms:

She had it in her head, so that’s why we don’t use patterns. I don't use patterns. When I get ready to make me a quilt, I just get me some cloth and start sewing. We had the pattern in our head, and that was the best. My mother had the quilt in her head. She didn't use no pattern. She used her brains!

A deep Christian spirituality runs through the creative lives of the quiltmakers, and many of them perceive quiltmaking as an occasion of spiritual reflection through song, prayer, and meditation. Working on quilts creates for the quiltmakers a special space, a place somehow disconnected from the grind of everyday life, where they can relate to a higher and more transcendent power. Creola Pettway gives thanks for each completed quilt:

There’s praise. Thank God. That quilt I tied just now. I just praise God for giving me the opportunity to sit down and allow me my mind and my health and my knowledge and understanding. When I got through that, now I just got up. I said, “Thank you. Jesus!”

In addition to quilting, Pettway sang with the gospel quartet White Rose alongside fellow quilters Arlonzia Pettway, Leola Pettway, and Georgiana Pettway. For over thirty-five years, the group performed in Gee’s Bend and throughout the South.

Publications

Fabric of a Nation: American Quilt Stories

A mother stitches a few lines of prayer into a bedcover for her son serving in the Union army during the Civil War. A formerly enslaved African American woman creates a quilt populated by Biblical figures alongside celestial events.

Cosmologies from the Tree of Life: Art from the African American South

This catalogue accompanies the exhibition Cosmologies from the Tree of Life: Art from the African American South, presented at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, June 8-November 17, 2019.

Creation Story: Gee's Bend Quilts and the Art of Thornton Dial

Creation Story explores parallels and intersections in the works of Dial and his fellow Alabamians, the remarkable quilters of Gee’s Bend. In the tradition of African American cemetery constructions and yard art, these artists harness the tactile properties and symbolic associations of cast-off materials in creating an art of profound beauty and evocative power.

Gee's Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt

This book and exhibition are part of a growing family of research projects about the African American community of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, and its quilts. Surrounded on three sides by a river, Gee’s Bend developed a distinctive local culture and quilt design aesthetic. In 2002 the inaugural exhibition The Quilts of Gee’s Bend documented these quiltmaking achievements. Expanding upon that initial exhibition and its accompanying publications, Gee’s Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt offers a deeper look into the women and their art, and a more focused investigation into the nature and inspirations—and future—of the Gee’s Bend quilt tradition.

Gee's Bend: The Women and Their Quilts

Gee’s Bend quilts carry forward an old and proud tradition of textiles made for home and family. They represent only a part of the rich body of African American quilts. But they are in a league by themselves. Few other places can boast the extent of Gee’s Bend’s artistic achievement, the result of both geographical isolation and an unusual degree of cultural continuity. In few places elsewhere have works been found by three and sometimes four generations of women in the same family, or works that bear witness to visual conversations among community quilting groups and lineages. Gee’s Bend’s art also stands out for its flair—quilts composed boldly and improvisationally, in geometries that transform recycled work clothes and dresses, feed sacks, and fabric remnants.

Exhibitions

Cosmologies from the Tree of Life: Art from the African American South

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

June 8, 2019 to November 17, 2019

As embodiments of the African American experience and cultural legacies, the works of art featured in Cosmologies from the Tree of Life: Art from the African American South are rooted in African aesthetic legacies, familial tradition, and communal ethos. Previously marginalized as “folk or self-taught” art, they now take their rightful place as significant contributors to the canon of American Modernism.

Gee's Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

June 4 – September 4, 2006

"Gee's Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt" features seventy spectacular quilts made by four generations of women in Gee's Bend, a small, isolated African American community in southwest Alabama. With bold improvisation of traditional quilt motifs, these women have created a style all their own. Made between the 1930s and the present, the Gee's Bend quilts’ bright patterns, inventive color combinations, lively irregularities and unexpected compositional variations make them outstanding examples of modern art.

Media

The Quilts of Gee's Bend

The Quilts of Gee's Bend documentary accompanies the major exhibitions of Gee's Bend quilts. Set in the quiltmaker's homes and yard, and told through the women's voices, this music-filled, 28-minute documentary takes viewers inside the art and fascinating living history of a uniquely American community and art form.

The Quiltmakers of Gee's Bend

This uplifting, Emmy-winning PBS film tells the modern-day "Cinderalla" story of the quiltmakers of Gee's Bend, Alabama. Artists born into extreme poverty, they live to see their quilts hailed by a The New York Times art critic as "some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced."