During her brief life, Linda Diane Bennett (1955 - 1988) created some of Gee's Bend's most elegant quilts. She descends from a line of accomplished quilters, including her grandmother, Delia Bennett, and her mother, Ella Mae Bendolph. Ella Mae describes her daughter.
Linda Diane Bennett was my second child. She was a deputy sheriff working at Camden Courthouse. Come home and piece her quilts, lay them across her lap and quilt them. I don't know how she did that. Wasn't a wrinkle in it. Didn't use no horse, that's the way she did it—right across her knee. Come home, you don't even know she there, just back there piecing them quilts. Mama taught her how to do it. That's who taught me, too: Mama. We'd piece us into the night and then go to quilting. Learned to do it without a frame.
Linda Diane Bennett’s work is in the permanent collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
Learn more about Linda Diane Bennett
here.
