1908–1992

Lottie Mooney

    About

    Lottie Mooney was born in Brown’s Quarters, a family unit on the former Pettway Plantation in Gee’s Bend. As a sharecropper, Mooney spent her childhood engaged in the hard labor of farming and learning the artistry of quiltmaking under the mentorship of her mother, Bessie Irby. When she married and had children, she assumed the traditional matriarchal role of sewing her children’s clothes and teaching her daughters the value of quilting with recycled fabrics, using worn-out clothing and rice and flour sacks as material for her quilts.

    Her granddaughter Emma Mooney Pettway remembers her fondly as a spiritual woman with a generous spirit who was “always quilting and cooking”—ensuring that her family was greeted with a hot meal after working in the fields harvesting corn, peas, and cotton. Letting nothing go to waste, the children collected stray cotton fluff from the ground, teasing out the small seeds, twigs, and stones that would adhere to the fiber; the cleaned raw cotton was then used as batting for Mooney’s quilts.

    Although life was difficult for her grandparents, Emma recalled their house being alive with joy, community, and family during her quilting circles and that, before her death, Mooney made a quilt composed of her grandchildren’s clothing that she presented to her son, Minniefield Mooney, Jr.

    Gee's Bend: The Women and Their Quilts

    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.

    The Quilts of Gee's Bend

    The Quilts of Gee's Bend

    The women of Gee’s Bend—a small, remote, black community in Alabama—have created hundreds of quilt masterpieces dating from the early twentieth century to the present. The Quilts of Gee’s Bend tells the story of this town and its art.

    In the Presence of Our Ancestors: Southern Perspectives in African American Art

    In the Presence of Our Ancestors: Southern Perspectives in African American Art

    Minneapolis Institute of Art
    December 12, 2020 to December 5, 2021

    In the Presence of Our Ancestors: Southern Perspectives in African American Art” brings together methods of visual storytelling and ancestral memory through the individual practices of artists from the “Black Belt” region of the American South—a term that refers to the region’s black soil, as well as the le

    The Quilts of Gee's Bend

    The Quilts of Gee's Bend

    Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
    September 6 – November 10, 2002

    "The Quilts of Gee’s Bend" celebrates the artistic legacy of four generations of African-American women from a small, historically all-black community in rural southern Alabama. This exhibition of over sixty extraordinary quilts that were made between 1930 and 2000 showcases a body of work that is bold, spirited, moving, and hailed by Michael Kimmelman, in The New York Times, as “some of the most miraculous works of art America has produced.”

    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."