In the coda of Stitching Love and Loss: A Gee's Bend Quilt, Lisa Gail Collins offers a lengthy list, organized by decade from the 1930s to present, of “visitors from outside the community”—relief workers, activists, documentarians, collectors—who have been drawn to Gee's Bend, Alabama, the rural Black enclave known widely for its isolation and dynamic improvisational quilting traditions (p. 118). Counting herself among those fascinated by the place, its people, and their art, Collins adds a new chapter to the growing body of scholarship on Gee's Bend quilts.
Selecting a single bedcover—Missouri Pettway's 1941-1942 bereavement quilt made from her late husband's work clothes—as her subject, Collins sets out to consider “connections between a closely crafted material object, a pieced-together quilt, and the history of a community, a family, and the essential work of mourning” (p. xvii). Stitching Love and Loss joins recent material culture studies—notably the work of Tiya...