The women of Gee’s Bend, a small rural Black community in Alabama of about seven hundred residents, have been creating bold, visually distinctive quilts since at least the 1920s.

Nellie Mae Abrams was a member of the Freedom Quilting Bee, which contracted to produce corduroy pillow covers for Sears, Roebuck and Co. that were sold through the company’s mail order catalog from 1972 until the mid-1980s. Left-over scraps and longer lengths were made available to the quilters for their own work, as seen in Abrams’s Housetop Variation shown here in three of the most popular 1970s colors: gold, brown, and avocado green.