Arlonzia Pettway (Image: David Raccuglia, 2000)

1923–2008

Arlonzia Pettway

About

Spanning six decades, Arlonzia Pettway’s quiltmaking career was a gathering of mentors, ideas, philosophies, and challenging materials, all of which entered her life through close family connections. Her mother, Missouri Pettway, taught her the basics, and two of her mother’s sisters, City and Ella, provided the young Arlonzia with suggestions and encouragement. But it was her mother-in-law, Jennie Pettway, who steered her toward the creation of a personal artistic style, free from convention but within the bounds of tradition. Arlonzia Pettway describes her quiltmaking beginnings:

"Before I married, I was wanting to make pretty quilts, fancy quilts, and my aunt Mattie Ross gave me some patterns to go by. I made up five pattern quilts for my marriage. After I was married, my mother-in-law, Jennie, taught me how to make different “Housetops” and “Hog Pen Pole” quilts and “Lazy Gals,” and how to just follow my imagination. I had not made that sort of stuff, ’cause I thought they was ugly, but when my mother-in-law learned me how to make them beautiful, I didn’t want to make nothing else.

"I watched her tear up old dress tails and make a quilt any kind of way she wanted to. She told me, “You don’t have to worry yourself trying to make a ‘Star of Bethlehem’ or any of those things you got to follow a pattern for. Just take what you know and do what you want to.” And that’s what I did, and I do it yet, and it’s a good way, too. It was when my mother-in-law told me I didn’t have to follow nobody’s ideas that I learnt myself to follow my head."

Arlonzia Pettway’s work is in the permanent collections of the High Museum of Art, The Legacy Museum, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and The Phillips Collection.

Publications

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.

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.

Exhibitions

Intersections: Sanford Biggers

The Phillips Collection

October 16, 2021 to January 2, 2022

Sanford Biggers’s Intersections project presents a visual and conceptual interplay—a mosaic—of distinct histories, cultural narratives, and art styles. Drawing from works in the Phillips’s permanent collection, including the Gee’s Bend quilts that were recently acquired and a number of European modernist sculptures, Biggers produced a new body of work that bridges past art traditions with current multimedia practices.

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.

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.”

Media

"Flower Garden" by Arlonzia Pettway

In 2003, quilts made by women working in Boykin, Alabama—known as Gee’s Bend—caused a sensation when they were exhibited across the country in major museums, including the High Museum of Art. The High began collecting the quilts of Gee’s Bend at that time, but in 2017, a milestone acquisition from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, which included this vibrant Flower Garden quilt by Arlonzia Pettway (American, 1923–2008), quadrupled the Museum’s holdings of Gee’s Bend textiles.

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."