Loretta Pettway, "Crazy Quilt"
SPECIAL ORDER ONLY. Please email us at info@ClassicRug.com for more information.
Loretta Pettway’s “Medallion” quilt appears on the cover of “Gee’s Bend:: the Women and their Quilts,” the definitive catalog of the Gee’s Bend quilts The photo of Ms. Pettway looking pensively out of a window appears on the back of the book jacket. When Barbara Barran signed her first licensing agreement with the quilters, the “Medallion” design (shown in the photo) was the first one that she had made.
Ms. Pettway is shown quilting Mary Lee Bendolph’s “Blocks and String-Pieced Columns,” and her daughter, Claudine, is shown accepting an award from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Classic Rug Collection has used many of Ms. Pettway’s designs. You can see “Crazy Quilt” in a client’s home in Buffalo, and another of Ms. Pettway’s designs is shown in the home of designers Everick and Lisa Walker Brown.
Barbara Barran has been working with the Gee’s Bend Quilters since 2003. She has shown and sold their work at over 25 US museums, paying the quilters a royalty for the use of their designs. She has visited Gee’s Bend, AL, several times and stayed at the home of Ruth Kennedy and Lucy Mingo. Working with the quilters has been the highlight of her design career.
Custom Gee’s Bend Quilt designs and sizes are available. For more information, please write to info@Classicrug.com or call us at 718-768-3338.
Hand-tufted New Zealand wool rug. Made in India.
6' x 9'
About Gee’s Bend
The women of Gee’s Bend—a small, remote, Black community in Alabama—have created hundreds of quilt masterpieces dating from the early twentieth century to the present. Resembling an inland island, Gee’s Bend is surrounded on three sides by the Alabama River. Some seven hundred or so inhabitants of this small, rural community are mostly descendants of slaves, and for generations, they worked the fields belonging to the local Pettway plantation. Enlivened by a visual imagination that extends the expressive boundaries of the quilt genre, these astounding creations constitute a crucial chapter in the history of American art.