Loretta Pettway Bennett (b. 1960), Dinah Falls, 2006
Polyester blends, 32 × 23 in.; Collection of the Artist
Pettway Bennett made this quilt to honor Dinah Miller, her great-great grandmother and the earliest known quiltmaker in Gee’s Bend:
“The story I learned about [Dinah] was that she was from Africa and was sold away from her mother and brother for only a dime—I thought surely her life was worth more than that. My thoughts turned to how terrified and helpless she must have felt. When I was collecting used clothes to make quilts like the women before me, I saw this beautiful small dress and for some reason it made me think of Dinah because of the size and colors. I also thought of Jacob‘s daughter Dinah in the biblical Book of Genesis, Chapter 34, even though this Dinah story was different in so many ways. I decided to make and name this small piece Dinah Falls because I want her to be remembered generation after generation.”
Like most girls in Gee’s Bend, Loretta Pettway Bennett learned to quilt from the women around her. Creating quilts was so essential to the women of her family that she says, “It was implanted in my genes.” She was married at eighteen and moved with her husband to Germany for the first of three tours with the armed forces there. Over the years, between her travels and raising her children, she made some baby quilts and a full-sized quilt or two, and most ambitiously, after a trip back to Gee’s Bend, a “Wedding Ring” quilt that took her three years to complete. The Quilts of Gee’s Bend exhibition was something of a born-again experience for her. After seeing it at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in 2002, “My eyes were opened,” she remembers. She began to wonder whether she, too, could make a quilt that might someday hang on the wall of a museum.
Between 2003 and 2006, Bennett made approximately twenty-five quilts and frequently collaborated with her mother, Qunnie Pettway. They are informed by her travels. It was always the colors she noticed—the dour monochrome of German winters or the displays of red and green chili peppers and the bright yellow, orange, pink and purple clothes and cars in Mexico.
Bennett frequently draws her patterns first on paper and colors them with crayons. She then pieces the patterns into quilts with old clothes she gathers from family and friends or scavenges in thrift shops, continuing the Gee’s Bend ethos of creative reuse.
Loretta Pettway Bennett’s work is in the permanent collections of the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Legacy Museum.
Learn more about Loretta Pettway Bennett here.
