Black Quilts from the High Museum

 

Black Quilts from the High Museum

 

Blocks by China Pettway

China Pettway (American, born 1952), Blocks, 1975, corduroy and cotton hopsacking, 83 × 70 inches, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, museum purchase and gift of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation from the William S. Arnett Collection, 2017.68. © China Pettway/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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The corduroy in this quilt was sourced from the Freedom Quilting Bee, a collective organized in 1966 by minister and Civil Rights organizer Frances X. Watler and quickly embraced by many quilters both in Gee’s Bend and the greater area of Wilcox County. China Pettway’s mother, Louella, was among the quilters who quickly signed in March of that year. After the Quilting Bee received a contract with Sears, Roebuck and Co. to create pillow shams out of corduroy in 1966, Louella brought home scraps of corduroy to make her children’s clothes.

China remembers that this black fabric came from a skirt she liked.

Corduroy of this era came in a narrow range of colors, and Sears sent fabrics that blended well with 1970s interior design, like avocado, as well as the gold, tangerine, and brown seen here.

Corduroy is a difficult fabric to work with because of its thickness and the rigidity of its vertical pinwales. As many quilters did, Pettway took advantage of those pinwales to make her cuts, and as a result, her quilt is dominated by parallel lines and right angles.

Pettway always considered this side to be the back of the quilt, until members of the Arnett family—major patrons of Gee’s Bend quilters who brought greater awareness to their work through important books and exhibitions beginning with the 2002 exhibition The Quilts of Gee’s Bend—told her this was the “art” side. Pettway went on to embrace this side after her son told her he had always preferred this side when he was a baby playing on the quilt.

Although the quilt shows some signs of bleach or detergent that remind of its use in Pettway’s household, she marveled that her children loved to play on the blanket as babies and somehow never soiled it.

China Pettway (American, born 1952), Blocks, 1975, corduroy and cotton hopsacking, 83 x 70 inches. Museum purchase, and gift of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation from the William S. Arnett Collection, 2017.68. © China Pettway/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.