Gee’s Bend Quilters

Gee’s Bend, officially called Boykin, is a small community of 544 people (2020 census) on a bend of the Alabama River in northern Wilcox County, in the Alabama Black Belt. Its women, many of them members of the extended Pettway family, have made quilts since the nineteenth century, and several generations are estimated to have produced about 1,000. Since 2002 their work has been shown at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Whitney Museum of American Art and more than a dozen other museums, and quilt designs from the community appeared on ten U.S. postage stamps in 2006.[1][2][3][4]

The community

Gee’s Bend lies in the west Alabama Black Belt, on a loop of the Alabama River with limited road access. The land was part of a cotton plantation founded in 1816, and after emancipation many families remained as sharecroppers and tenant farmers, many taking the Pettway name. In 1937 the federal government bought the former plantation, about 10,000 acres, and the Farm Security Administration created Gee’s Bend Farms, Inc., giving residents low-interest loans to buy land and build homes. Ferry service to the county seat was cut in the early 1960s and restored only in 2006, and a dam on the river flooded thousands of acres of fertile land in 1962.[1][3]

Quilting tradition

Quilts were first made to keep families warm and often to memorialise loved ones. Because resources were scarce, makers used reclaimed materials such as work clothes, flour sacks and fertiliser sacks, and the resulting designs are often improvisational. Locals call them “my way” quilts, as makers start from basic forms such as Housetop, Log Cabin, Bricklayer, Nine Patch and Snowball and develop unexpected shapes and colours. Skills and aesthetic knowledge passed from mothers to daughters across generations.[3][4]

Notable quilters

Missouri Pettway (1902-1981) made the Blocks and Strips Work-Clothes Quilt in 1942 from her late husband’s work clothes; it is now in the National Gallery of Art. Lucy T. Pettway (1921-2004) made her first quilt at 13 and mastered the Snowball pattern, and Jessie Pettway (1929-2023) favoured the Bricklayer design. Loretta Pettway (born 1942) began a Nine Patch quilt at 11 and has work in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Annie Mae Young became well known for her Housetop quilt, and Mary Lee Bendolph, Lucy Mingo and Loretta Pettway shared a 2015 National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the nation’s highest honour in folk and traditional arts.[2][3][4]

The Freedom Quilting Bee

The Freedom Quilting Bee, a cooperative founded in 1966 for women of Gee’s Bend and nearby Rehoboth, gave quilters economic independence by selling their work to major retailers, and brought their free-form style wider recognition. In the 1960s the quilts reached New York trendsetters including Diana Vreeland, Sister Parish and the designers Ray and Charles Eames, and in 1967 the painter Lee Krasner visited the community and bought several quilts. The cooperative closed in 2012.[2][3]

The 2002 exhibition

Folk-art collector William Arnett, who had promoted self-taught Black Southern artists, bought hundreds of quilts in the late 1990s. The exhibition The Quilts of Gee’s Bend, with more than 70 quilts by 45 quilters, opened at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in 2002 and then at the Whitney from November 2002 to March 2003. The New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman called the quilts “some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced”. The show toured 11 further museums, including Mobile, Washington (Corcoran), Boston, Auburn, Atlanta (High Museum) and San Francisco (de Young), and set attendance records before closing in 2006. A second exhibition, Gee’s Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt, toured from 2006 to 2008, and the acclaim also sparked debate about how art is defined and about the quilters’ interests.[2][3][5]

Collective, stamps and museums

More than 50 quilters formed the Gee’s Bend Quilters’ Collective in 2003 to market and promote their work, selling quilts at the Gee’s Bend Ferry Terminal and Welcome Center. In August 2006 the U.S. Postal Service issued a sheet of ten Quilts of Gee’s Bend stamps in its American Treasures series, featuring quilts made between about 1940 and 1998. The Quilt Mural Trail along County Road 29, installed in 2007, displays the same ten designs and marks quilters’ homes. From 2016 the Souls Grown Deep Foundation began transferring works to museums worldwide, and by May 2024 Gee’s Bend quilts were in the permanent collections of more than 40 museums including the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Later shows include the Royal Academy in London (2023) and the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin (2025), and the annual Airing of the Quilts Festival, begun in 2022, draws thousands of visitors.[2][3][5]

FAQs

Where is Gee’s Bend? In northern Wilcox County, Alabama, on a bend of the Alabama River; its official name is Boykin.

Who makes the quilts? Generations of women, many of the Pettway family, working in an improvisational “my way” style.

Where have the quilts been exhibited? Houston, the Whitney Museum, the Royal Academy in London and many other museums; more than 40 hold them.

Were the quilts on stamps? Yes, ten designs were issued by the U.S. Postal Service in August 2006.

Sources

1. Wikipedia: Quilts of Gee’s Bend
2. Encyclopedia of Alabama: Pettway Family Quilters
3. Encyclopedia of Alabama: Gee’s Bend Quilters’ Collective
4. Encyclopedia of Alabama: Pettway Family Quilters
5. Wikipedia: Quilts of Gee’s Bend

Editorially reviewed by Specialty Digest Editorial TeamLast reviewed November 10, 2026Researched and drafted with AI assistanceReport an issue