Loretta Pettway Bennett (b. 1960), Strips (detail), 2005
Cotton and denim, 96 x 76 in.; Studio Museum in Harlem, Gift of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation
An often-mentioned design triumph of the Gee’s Bend aesthetic has been its quiltmakers’ magnification of small pattern blocks to monumental scales so that the single element becomes the entire composition. Loretta P. Bennett takes this tendency a step further in her quilts. Instead of amplifying a single block or making freeform abstractions of rectangles and strips (another Gee’s Bend specialty), she composes in ways reminiscent of a photographer. She is able to identify and expand alluring details and passages of traditional Gee’s Bend “quilts”—not actual quilts, but ones of her own imagining. She enlarges these framed and cropped passages to become quilts unto themselves. She preserves the monumental structure of the one-block quilts while combining it with a photographer’s eye for the telling detail and the perfectly bounded arrangement of elements.
