Loretta Pettway Bennett facts for kids

Loretta Pettway Bennett (born December 29, 1960) is an amazing American artist. She is famous for her beautiful quilts, especially those made with the Gee's Bend quiltmakers. Her mother, Qunnie Pettway, also worked at the Freedom Quilting Bee, a special group that helped quilters. Loretta is very dedicated to keeping her community's traditions alive and teaching them to younger generations.

Loretta's Early Life

Loretta Pettway Bennett was born on a farm in Gee's Bend, Alabama. Her parents were Qunnie Pettway and Tom O. Pettway. Loretta and her brothers and sisters often helped on their grandfather Tank Pettway's farm. They grew crops like cotton, corn, peanuts, and sweet potatoes.

Loretta shared an interesting fact about names in Gee's Bend. Many people there have the last name Pettway. So, they often get middle names that show who their fathers are. This helps prevent close family members from marrying by mistake. For example, her father and grandfather used the middle initial "O." for Ottaway, a name from an early Pettway slave.

Life in Gee's Bend was different when Loretta was young. Her family's home did not get running water or paved roads until 1975, when she was 15. Before that, they carried water from neighbors' homes or nearby wells.

When Loretta was in seventh grade, the schools in Gee's Bend went through desegregation. This meant schools were no longer separated by race. Soon after, the schools closed. To keep learning, Loretta had to ride a crowded school bus for two hours each morning and night. This long trip made it hard to join after-school activities. Even so, Loretta graduated and married her high school sweetheart, Lovett "Bennett" Bennett, on July 7, 1979.

Travels and Return Home

After graduating, Loretta's husband joined the U.S. Army. For the next twenty years, they moved often with the military. Loretta and her family lived in places like Germany, El Paso, Texas, and Georgia. While living in Germany and Texas, they traveled a lot. They explored different parts of Europe and the American Southwest.

Loretta and her husband raised three boys. They eventually moved back to Gee's Bend, Alabama, after Loretta's grandmother, Candis Pettway, passed away in 1998. Loretta also trained and worked as a medical and dental assistant. She still found time to return to quilting and work with her mother, Qunnie.

The Gee's Bend Quilters

The Gee's Bend quiltmakers are a group of African-American women. They live in a town in Alabama now called Boykin (formerly Gee's Bend). These women have been making quilts for a very long time, passing down their skills through generations. Both Loretta's mother, Qunnie, and her grandmother, Candis Mosley Pettway, were Gee's Bend quilters.

Loretta's mother first taught her about quilting when she was five or six years old. At that young age, Loretta was only allowed to thread needles for the quilters. Every summer, her mother and aunts taught her more sewing skills, little by little. Her very first completed quilt was a baby blanket. She made it as a home economics project for her teacher's new grandchild.

One of Loretta's famous quilts is made from her husband's and son's old jeans. This special technique shows a main idea of the Gee's Bend quilters: to make something beautiful and useful from things that might have been thrown away.

Loretta's Quilting Career

As Loretta traveled with her husband, she noticed how different cultures used colors. In Germany, she saw that people didn't use many bright colors on their houses or clothes. But in springtime, things changed. Many houses were decorated with flower boxes of red geraniums and pansies. These bright flowers stood out against white and black-trimmed houses.

Some of Loretta's quilts, like her two-tone block and strip works from the early 2000s, might remind you of the Bauhaus art style or the organized patterns of Piet Mondrian. While living in Germany, she often traded craft ideas with her neighbors. She learned to knit from them and even sold some of her mother's quilts to her friends there.

Loretta truly understood how important the Gee's Bend quilts were when she saw them displayed at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts in 2002. She described that moment: "There my eyes were opened, and it touched me in a way as to question myself: Can I make a quilt that someday might hang on the wall of a museum?"

Determined to continue her family's legacy, Loretta applied for and received a special grant. This grant from the Alabama State Archive Council on the Arts allowed her to study the detailed art of Gee's Bend quiltmaking. With this fellowship, she and her mother created a "Pine Burr" quilt. This quilt is the state quilt of Alabama. Loretta donated this quilt to the Alabama Council of the Arts, where it is now displayed at the Alabama Department of Archives and History.

Loretta Bennett's amazing quilts are part of permanent art collections. You can find her work at the Studio Museum in Harlem, The Legacy Museum, and the Binghamton University Art Museum. Her quilts Sew Low and Vegetation are also part of the Eskenazi Health Art Collection.

Loretta's Artwork Style

Loretta Bennett has created countless quilts throughout her career. Her very first quilt, which she made at age 13, had a flower garden pattern. Between 2003 and 2006, Loretta completed about 25 quilts.

Loretta usually plans her quilt designs on paper first. She colors them with crayons to see how they will look. Then, she pieces the patterns together using old clothes. She collects these garments from family and friends or finds them at thrift shops. This way, she continues the Gee's Bend idea of creative reuse. She builds her quilts at home, using different rooms for different parts of the process. One of her unique styles is to take a single quilt square and make it the full size of a quilt, instead of repeating it as a small pattern.

Some of Loretta Bennett's well-known quilts include:

• Two-Sided Geometric Quilt (2003)
• Work Clothes Strips (2003)
• Strips (2005)
• Medallion (2002)