Visiting a Quilting Collective Started During Slavery That Fashion Designers Now Love
"Through these quilts, I have finished paying off my house.”
My small rental car winds its way along silent Southern roads as I eagerly search for signs that point to the tiny community of Gee’s Bend, Alabama. Gee’s Bend is a remote town about a five-hour drive from New Orleans of approximately 300 African Americans, a network of connected families that have always lived and worked together. It’s nestled amongst lush greenery and a peaceful quiet that’s only interrupted by the rustling of the surrounding pine trees.
What’s unique about this community, though, is that it’s home to a collective of world-famous artists, the Gee’s Bend Quilting Collective, who have taken their practice of vibrant, bold quilting—handed-down from the slavery era and born out of necessity —from rural Alabama to far-flung corners of the world.
Among those I’m greeted by upon arrival is Mary Ann Pettway. The unsuspecting brown exterior of the collective’s headquarters leaves no clues as to the bursts of blocked color, designs, and imagery I’m greeted with as I enter the door. Surrounded by stunningly intricate quilts, Mary Ann, the manager of the collective, is deep into laying down freehand stitches on a newly commissioned quilt. Her hands are quick but deliberate as she works the thin white stitches in a criss-cross design over a crisp white fabric with bright red squares of cloth in the middle. I can only tell that the red squares are separate pieces of fabric upon closer inspection, so seamless are the stitches, so straight are the lines.
“Mama started teaching me how to make a quilt between six or seven years old,” the bespectacled Mary Ann tells me. “I did want to quit when I was younger. I wanted to play with the other children. But Mama made us, because we didn’t have no beds to lay on. We had to lay on the floor. So she had to make quilts to put on the floor for us to lay on.”
Mary Ann sold her first quilt in January 2006 and tells me that since then, “through these quilts, I have finished paying off my house.”
At one point in our conversation, she asks if I’d like to try my hand at quilting. This feels enormously precious, as if I’m taking a step into history under Mary Ann’s watchful gaze. That’s because, in the community of Gee’s Bend quilters who are direct descendants of people who were enslaved, in the place where Martin Luther King Jr. stopped by on his voting rights tour, I’m doing just that.
Emma Mooney Pettway pulls up in a white bus a few minutes later, determined to beat the heat in a black T-shirt and jeans. She greets us with a warm smile, a tote brimming with handmade quilts, and stories of her mother who also passed down the skills of quilting to her. Around the age of 10, she would sit under her mother’s quilting table and watch the motion of the needle with fascination. “I used to thread the needle for my mother and others that came over to quilt with her,” Emma explains. “She finally gave me some scrap and told me to do what I do. And that’s what I did.”
Emma has now passed on the practice to her three daughters (ages 24, 35, and 45) and her son (age 29). “They started watching me quilt,” she tells me. “At night they would come in the room and ask, can they try? At first I tell them I just don’t have the time to be trying to teach you. But I said to myself, that was what my mother did. To me, you really can’t say this quilt is wrong because I figure you can’t do it a wrong way.”
Nest, a nonprofit organization that works toward responsible growth for the artisan and maker economy, has provided business development training and helped establish sustainable revenue streams for the quilters, like individual Etsy shops where they can sell their quilts directly to the consumer. (The quilts sold on Emma’s Etsy shop cost anywhere from $375 for a 15-inch by 17-inch square quilt to $6,000 for a 78-inch by 94-inch square one.)
Nest also supports the Gee’s Bend quilters in choosing collaborations. French fashion house Chloé’s minimalist aesthetic was elevated through functional blankets and crisp long coats, all with the quilters’ signature block pattern. Meanwhile, their collaboration with Marfa Stance, perhaps their largest to date, featured cozy outerwear designed with the unique geometric designs of the quilters as well as oversized blankets with the quilters’ signatures tucked into the corners. Greg Lauren’s multi-year collaboration merged his upcycled aesthetic with the quilters’ techniques for products that were at once eye-catching and transcendent of typical fashion garments. And for Black History Month this year, Target worked with Nest and the Gee’s Bend quilters to offer a printed quilted tote and unisex T-shirts with quilted pockets.
Gee’s Bend locals are predominantly descendants of families that were forced to adopt the surname of the plantation owner, Mark H. Pettway. Their ancestors worked as sharecroppers after the Civil War, and traditions like quiltmaking sustained the community even amidst potential economic ruin. Case in point: The Black women of Gee’s Bend founded the Freedom Quilting Bee to maintain an income through selling their quilts (the Freedom Quilting Bee Legacy is now a museum and community learning and resource space.) “My mother started working with the Freedom Quilting Bee. She didn’t work at the Quilting Bee,” explains Mary Margaret Pettway, the board chair emeritus of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, an organization instrumental to the growth of the quilters. “She worked at home, but she started working with them in the form of quilting. Sometimes they’d have like a big order or whatever, and they would send my mother a quilt, scissors or sometimes the pieces were all already cut, and my mother would go get on that sewing machine and run up a quilt.”
Today, Emma says she makes between 50 to 100 quilts per year, and she and Mary Margaret usually take two weeks to finish each one, keeping at it even without orders. “I just keep making quilts,” Emma laughs. “I have stacks that I got stored away. I love to make the house top. I make it all the time. I imagine the square in the middle, and it makes me just start going around the square in different colors. I like bright colors, and I always use bright colors for the house top. I just like going in circles.” (The house top is named because of the design of the block of color in the middle.)
William Arnett, an art collector and the founder of Souls Grown Deep, originally helped bring the quilts to larger markets. “When he came in the late 1990s, Bill didn’t buy quilts from two or three people, he bought quilts from everybody in Gee’s Bend that had quilts on sale,” Mary Margaret remembers. Known as a passionate supporter of Black art of the American South, Arnett died in 2020 with a prolific collection of quilts.
For those who would like to see the quilters in action themselves, every October, there is an Airing of the Quilts Festival in Gee’s Bend, an annual celebration featuring quilt displays, workshops, guided tours and more. Emma’s eyes light up as she describes it: “Just the music and just seeing the bright sun and the wind blowing the quilts back and forth. I talk to so many people at it. And they make me feel good about myself, and they was excited. And once they was excited, it made me excited about what I was doing.”
My visit to Gee’s Bend ends in the most appropriate way possible—with a resoundingly powerful rendition by Mary Ann of a song, belted from the depths of her being, about giving people their flowers when they’re alive. As another group of admirers arrive and gather in the tight space surrounded by the quilts that have made this small community legendary, Mary Ann gets to her feet and sings, punctuating how, despite all the history of the Gee’s Bend quilters, we should honor them as much today as ever before.
Or as she puts it in song:
I don’t want nobody to praise me when I’m gone mmmm
I don’t want nobody to praise me when I’m gone nooo
I don’t want nobody to praise me when I’m gone ohhh
Give me my flowers whilst I yet live
Whilst I yet live
The Quilting Collective is available to see by appointment. Visitors can also check out the Gee’s Bend Heritage Trail which commemorates the quilts used in stamp designs in 2006, located near where the quilters live and work.