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.

Andrea Pettway Williams is one of at least eleven Gee’s Bend quiltmakers whose lineage can be traced back to a single enslaved woman, Dinah Miller, whose history remains alive in the quilts made by her descendants and stories handed down through generations.