Gallery 150/151, first floor (Morgan Galleries)
Main Building
Gallery 150/151, first floor (Morgan Galleries)
Main Building
The women of Gee’s Bend, a small rural Black community in Alabama of about seven hundred residents, have been creating bold, visually distinctive quilts since at least the 1920s.
Annie E. Pettway created this vibrant quilt in the middle of the Great Depression of the 1930s. She improvised on the traditional Flying Geese design of triangles to create a joyful composition of solid, plaid, and confetti-patterned fabrics. This quilt inspired her great granddaughter, visual artist Louisiana Bendolph, to take up quilt-making again, and later print-making, after seeing it displayed in the 2002 exhibition Quilts of Gee’s Bend at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Gallery 150/151, first floor (Morgan Galleries)
| Title: | Flying Geese Variation Quilt |
| Date: | c. 1935 |
| Artist: | Annie E. Pettway (American, 1904–1971) |
| Medium: | Pieced cotton and wool |
| Dimensions: | 7 feet 2 inches × 71 inches (218.4 × 180.3 cm) |
| Classification: | Textiles |
| Credit Line: | Purchased with the Phoebe W. Haas Fund for Costume and Textiles, and gift of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation from the William S. Arnett Collection, 2017 |
| Accession Number: | 2017-229-5 |
| Geography: | Made in Gee's Bend, Boykin, Wilcox, Alabama, United States, North and Central America |
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Gallery 150/151, first floor (Morgan Galleries)
Main Building