Birds in the Air by Lucy T. Pettway

Lucy T. Pettway (American, 1921–2004), Birds in the Air, 1981, cotton and cotton-polyester blend, 79 × 79 inches, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, museum purchase and gift of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation from the William S. Arnett Collection, 2017.70. © Lucy T. Pettway.

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This quilt is a classic example of a quilt pattern known as Birds in the Air or Flying Geese because of how the directional triangle patches that comprise it create the sense of movement akin to a flock of migrating birds.

One of the earliest origins given for Birds in the Air is a pre–Civil War quilt by White quilter and Quaker abolitionist Deborah Coates. Another historic example is pictured below.

Lucy T. Pettway began quilting after her family’s land was flooded by the Millers Ferry Dam in the 1960s: “I had a lot more time then to piece up quilts and quilt them,” she remembered. She began working for the Freedom Quilting Bee, which was established in Wilcox County in 1966 to help quilters earn living wages from their textile production while raising money for the Civil Rights Movement.

The careful distribution of alternating colors and the regularity of the triangle patches exemplify why Pettway had a reputation as a perfectionist. She was influenced by the symmetries of patterned quilts at the Freedom Quilting Bee and a pattern book that her aunt had been given by a White family she worked for.

This quilt was part of The Quilts of Gee’s Bend, an exhibition organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, that traveled to a dozen venues including the High Museum of Art. This exhibition revived interest in Gee’s Bend quilters, whose rich and multigenerational quilting traditions had been recognized outside of Alabama earlier at multiple points in the twentieth century, though not to the degree that this exhibition afforded. When it was at the Whitney Museum of American Art, for instance, The New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman declared the quilts on view as “some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced.”