Hello, my name is Kristin Shauntel Pettway and I’m a Gee’s Bend Quilter. My great-grandmother, Delia Bennett; my grandmother, Georgianna Pettway; and my aunt Stella Pettway, were all quilters. All my life, I've been around quilts. I’m inspired to keep sewing quilts to keep the legacy going.

I find beauty everywhere—I think songs are beautiful, I think flowers are gorgeous. Music is important, I'm a pianist myself. I make quilts to express myself, to show how I'm feeling. This is how I feel things. This is how I feel cloth should go together. The thing that really draws me in is the pattern on the cloth. I don't have any special colors that draw me in, it's the pattern on the cloth that gets me.

My favorite thing about making quilts is showing people who I am without having to say much. I'm quiet, but there's a lot going on inside me. I'm quiet, but there's a lot going on inside me. I'm here! I'm just quiet.

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History of Gee’s Bend:
The women of Gee’s Bend—a small, rural, community in Alabama's Black Belt—have created hundreds of quilt masterpieces dating from the early twentieth century to the present. Resembling an inland island, Gee’s Bend is surrounded on three sides by the Alabama River. The some seven hundred or so inhabitants of this small, rural community are mostly descendants of enslaved Africans who, for generations, worked the fields belonging to the local Pettway plantation. Quiltmakers there have produced countless patchwork masterpieces, 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 American art.

Gee’s Bend quilts carry forward a 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 geographical isolation and an unusual degree of cultural continuity. In few places across the country have works been found by three - and sometimes four - generations of women in the same family, nor have many works been discovered that bear witness to visual conversations among community quilting groups and lineages. Gee’s Bend’s heirloom pieces stand out for their flair—quilts composed boldly and improvisationally, in geometries that transform recycled work clothes and dresses, feed sacks, and fabric remnants.