About the artwork
Loretta Pettway
Old Beauty, 2007
Dimensions(h x w x d): 28" x 24.75"
Softground and spitbite aquatint etching
Located in Peter Stott Center, seating lounge at the south end of the main floor
Old Beauty is one of two works in PSU's collection by quiltmakers from the Gee’s Bend community in rural Alabama. Resembling an inland island, Gee’s Bend (AKA Boykin) is surrounded on three sides by the Alabama River. The seven hundred or so inhabitants of this small, isolated community are mostly descendants of slaves, and for generations they worked the fields belonging to the local Pettway plantation. Quiltmakers there have produced countless patchwork masterpieces beginning as far back as the mid-nineteenth century, with the oldest existing examples dating from the 1920s.
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 African American art. Gee’s Bend quilts carry forward an old and proud tradition of textiles made for home and family. They represent only a part of the rich body of African American quilts. But they are in a league by themselves. Few other places can boast the extent of Gee’s Bend’s artistic achievement, the result of both geographic isolation and an unusual degree of cultural continuity. In few places elsewhere have works been found by three and sometimes four generations of women in the same family, or works that bear witness to visual conversations among community quilting groups and lineages. Gee’s Bend’s art also stands out for its flair—quilts composed boldly and improvisationally, in geometries that transform recycled work clothes and dresses, feed sacks, and fabric remnants.
Limited editions of prints, including Old Beauty and New Generation, were created by several of the women from the Gee's Bend quilt co-op in collaboration with master printmakers in the San Francisco Bay Area. The quilters visited the master printmaker's workshop in Berkley and created new unique small quilt faces with recycled used clothing fabric. The quilts were never "finished" in the sense that the backing and top stitching never occurred. The quilt faces created for the print project were a tool for the quilters to create compositions within their tradition and technique that could be utilized to make printing plates. The quilt faces, which were close to one to one in terms of scale to the prints, were then used to make soft-ground etching plates. In that process, the quilt faces were destroyed by the etching chemicals but the seams, stitching, fabric texture, and other details were transferred from the fabric quilt face to the etching plates. Each plate is inked multiple times in order to complete the printing of the whole composition. After the edition of prints were run off the press and dried, then the quilters signed them and numbered them.
About the artist
Loretta Pettway’s statement, from the Gee's Bend Quiltmakers website: “In her youth, Loretta Pettway (b. 1942) had many Pettway quiltmaking mentors—including Missouri, Louella, Qunnie, grandmother Prissy, and stepmother Plummer T.—but she has kept to herself artistically throughout her adult life. Her earliest surviving quilts are made of everyday clothing, especially men's work clothes.”
Learn more about Loretta Pettway and the Gee's Bend Quiltmakers on the Souls Grown Deep website.
This work was acquired through Oregon's Percent for Art in Public Places Program, managed by the Oregon Arts Commission.
Banner image courtesy of the artist and Elizabeth Leach Gallery.