2003

Housetop Variation Quilt

Louisiana P. Bendolph

American, born 1960

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.

Louisiana P. Bendolph, daughter-in-law of Mary Lee Bendolph, made her first quilt, a Housetop design, when she was twelve, using scraps from clothing her mother, Rita Mae Pettway, made for the children.

After seeing the first exhibition of Gee’s Bend quilts in 2002 with her mother at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Louisiana began having visions of quilts that were unlike anything she had seen before. Working with new fabrics she "un-Housetopped" the traditional pattern and recombined it into a new form even more abstract than other Housetop variations.