Hi, I’m Doris Jean Pettway Mosely. I was born and raised down here in Boykin, Alabama—known also as Gee’s Bend. I’ve been here all my life and have been a Gee’s Bend Quilter since 2008. My mother is Leola Pettway, I learned how to sew and quilt from her.

In my early life, I played a lot of softball, but now I’m too old for that! I still love sewing. I used to make all of my family’s clothes. Now, quilt making is a hobby, something to keep me going all day. I quilt because I love doing it—making quilts for my family and my friends--and it helps me provide.

I find beauty in fabrics, colors, and different patterns. I love using cotton the most. I make my own patterns up. When I have little bits of materials left, I get them, quilt them together, and see how it comes out with all them different colors.

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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.