Gee's Bend Nancy Pettway Housetop Woven Rug

Hand-woven cotton rug based on the quilt by Gee’s Bend Quilter Nancy Pettway. 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.