Loretta Bennett

Loretta Pettway Bennett is a direct descendant of Dinah Miller, the earliest quilter from Gee’s Bend, Alabama whose name is known today. She continues to create hand-stitched quilts in the tradition taught to her by her mother, Qunnie Pettway, and passed down through her family for many generations. Since 2006, her works have featured in dozens of major museum exhibitions nationwide and in nineteen U. S. Embassies worldwide. In 2007 she collaborated with Paulson Fontaine Press in Berkley, California to create a suite of limited-edition prints based on her quilt designs. In addition to her residency with Paulson Fontaine Press, she was an artist in residence at the Pilchuk Glass School in Stanwood, Washington in 2013 and received Visual Arts Fellowships from the Alabama State Council on the Arts in 2001 and 2009. Today her quilts and prints are in numerous museum and corporate collections, as well as the U. S. State Department, and have been published in books including Gee’s Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt which accompanied a group exhibition of the same name that toured six museums across the United States. The most recent catalog to publish her work was Souls Grown Deep Like the Rivers: Black Artists from the American South, from a 2023 group show at the Royal Academy of Art in London, England. In addition to gallery and museum exhibitions, she shares the tradition of making quilts by hand by teaching regular workshops in Gee’s Bend and at special events nationwide. 

Artist Statement

As a fifth-generation quilter from Gee’s Bend, Alabama I learned to piece and quilt quilts from my mother Qunnie Pettway and my family. My ancestry traces back to Dinah Miller, my great-great-great grandmother, who was trafficked on the illegal slave ship Clotilde at 12 and was the first quilter in the Bend whose name is known.  

I made my first quilt when I was 12 or 13, a Flower Garden quilt, pieced by hand like all my work the way my mother taught me. I continued to help my mother and her mother make quilts until I got married and left home, using the traditional hand sewing techniques I learned to create my own compositions and ideas. 

Fabric for quilts in Gee's Bend was repurposed out of necessity for generations. Today I can use material from designer collaborations with Greg Lauren, Marfa Stance, Chloe, and others as well. 

In 2006 I was one of the youngest Gee's Bend Quilters featured in the exhibition, "The Architecture of the Quilt," which traveled to 13 museums across the US including the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 2009 I collaborated with Paulson Fontaine Press to create prints based on my quilts, and I paint abstract compositions related to my quilt making, but I always return to sewing.