Loretta Pettway

Loretta Pettway (b. 1942), "Housetop" (detail), 1963

Cotton twill and synthetic material (men's clothing), 80 x 74 in.; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation

In a purely aesthetic sense, the more simplified constructions of the work-clothes quilts provided a blank canvas for experiments with a range of improvisational strategies, including sudden shifts in patterning, broken borders, irregular shapes, asymmetry, syncopation, and dissonant juxtapositions of prints and colors. During the early 1960s, Loretta Pettway created a captivating trilogy of quilts with vastly different and highly imaginative designs, all miraculously rendered from the same dreary batch of men’s clothing scraps.

Here the focus is on the inherent design elements and abstract imagery in the quilts rather than as finished objects.