"Housetop" work-clothes quilt

Artist: Rita Mae Pettway (American, born 1941)

Date: 2005

Dimensions:

88 × 73 1/4 in. (223.5 × 186.1 cm)

Medium: Denim and cotton

Place of Origin: Gee's Bend Quilting Community, Boykin, Alabama, United States

Classification: Textiles and Fiber

Credit Line: Purchased with funds from the Florence Scott Libbey Bequest in Memory of her Father, Maurice A. Scott and gift of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation

Object number: 2021.24

Description"The 'Housetop,' from the composite block down to its constituent pieces, echoes the right angles of the quilt's borders, initiating visual exchanges between the work's edges and what is inside. Traditional African American "call and response," a ritual technique of music and religious worship, is intrinsic to the target-like push and pull among elements. The feedback effects have mesmerized and inspired generations of Gee's Bend quiltmakers. Conceived broadly, the "Housetop" is an attitude, an approach toward form and construction. It begins with a medallion of solid cloth, or one of an endless number of pieced motifs, to anchor the quilt. After that, "Housetops" share the technique of joining rectangular strips of cloth so that the end of a strip's long side connects to one short side of a neighboring strip, eventually forming a kind of frame surrounding the central patch; increasingly larger frames or borders are added until a
block is declared complete."

Not on view