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Season 15, Episode 2: A fifth-generation quilter from the legendary community of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, Loretta Pettway Bennett turns well used cloth into her own expressions of color and community.
Anne Merrow3 min read
Loretta Pettway Bennett began her quilting journey as a child, threading needles for her mother as she sewed scraps into bedcoverings. The women in the town of Gee’s Bend pieced quilt tops and got together to hand quilt their work, a tradition that spans decades. Loretta’s first quilt was an ambitious Flower Garden hexagon design that she cut and sewed entirely on her own when she was 12 years old. Half a century later, quilting is woven into Loretta’s life, as it is for her sister, aunts, cousins, and ancestors.
Although quilting has always been part of her life, Loretta’s vision is uniquely her own. In the early 2000s, Loretta decided to embrace her own style and gave herself the freedom to enjoy making quilts in her own way. She decided to resist rules that seams line up perfectly or that only certain colors go together. Instead, she lets the quilt make itself and invites the colors to talk to each other.
Working with thrifted and gifted material, she chooses the fabrics that speak to her (bright colors, few prints) and especially loves the pieces that have been well used and mended. The contemporary interest in thrifting and mending is a simple fact of life to Loretta, as natural as eating. Several of her designs include denim jeans, patched knees and all.
In 2002, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston mounted a major exhibition of quilts from Gee’s Bend, and Loretta saw her quilting traditions in a new light. A quilt that her mother made to cover her bed, on which Loretta and her sister had laid on the floor, was described as art in one of the country’s most important art museums. Standing in the exhibit, she says, “. . . the more I looked at the quilts, the more I started seeing what [viewers] saw in the quilts.”
Today, Loretta’s own quilts are part of museum, corporate, and U.S. State Department collections and have appeared in 19 U.S. Embassies worldwide. Her work has been recognized with numerous prizes and fellowships, most recently a 2026 Maxwell/Hanrahan Award in Craft.
Loretta teaches quilting both to children in her community and through Vacation with an Artist, a program where crafters work in her workshop and learn the community’s methods. She plans to put her recent award money toward a coloring book of her quilts, an echo of her childhood wish to be a painter. Having spent decades painting with fabric, she loves to see others playing with color for themselves through her classes and is excited to see their interpretations in her coloring book.
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