{"person":[{"sourceId":{"label":"Source ID","value":"2548"},"lastName":{"label":"Last Name","value":"Pettway"},"endDate":{"label":"Death Date","value":"2008"},"displayName":{"label":"Name","value":"Arlonzia Pettway"},"objects":{"label":"Objects","value":{"objectTitle":"Frames and Squares Quilt","objectNumber":"2017.18.1","objectID":"6090"}},"geographyDied":{"label":"Died","value":"Boykin"},"geographyActive":{"label":"Active","value":"Boykin"},"geographyBorn":{"label":"Born","value":"Boykin"},"beginDate":{"label":"Birth Date","value":"1923"},"firstName":{"label":"First Name","value":"Arlonzia"},"textEntries":{"label":"Text Entries","value":"Arlonzia Pettway has received recognition as one of the celebrated quiltmakers of Gee\u2019s Bend, Alabama. This example of her work has a personal history deeply connected to the donors, who met her in 2002 at the opening of The Quilts of Gees Bend exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Pettway was standing by her quilt and they entered into a conversation. The donors revealed that they owned a textile company and asked whether Pettway would like to use some of their fabrics to make quilts. Over the next year they sent about 8 to 10 boxes of 1/4-yard swatches to Pettway. When the year was ended, they received a box containing this quilt and a lovely letter of thanks (now unlocated). Arlonzia Pettway is documented in the Souls Grown Deep Foundation:Excerpt from their oral history with the artist:I worked on the farm with my brother Ike. He runned the farm after Daddy passed in 1941. I had started working in the field when I was twelve. I did all the usual stuff people do on a farm. I was twenty years old when I married Jennie Pettway\u2019s son, Bizzell. He was a farmer, too. Everybody was a farmer in those days. I had twelve children\u2014four girls and eight boys. Everybody had the same crops in Gee\u2019s Bend the first ten years we farm: cotton, corn, peas, sweet potatoes. After that, we started raising turnips and cucumbers to sell to some company in Montgomery. We did that for five or six years. After that, my husband went to New York to work on a farm where they were picking peas. He done all kinds of different things up there for three years straight. He\u2019d go last of June and stay until September.\tEverybody had a log cabin when I was young. Every family built their own log cabin. The family would get together; all the men would help. About seven or eight men would get together to build a house. They would do it for each other for nothing. You didn\u2019t have to do nothing but cook some food for them. But that was before I was born. That\u2019s what my daddy tell me that\u2019s what they do. And they went from one place to another. If you needed something, they do it for you\u2014no charge.\tAt first, we had a log cabin with just two rooms to it. We lived in that cabin until I was seventeen years old. Then the government came along and gave us the project houses. We had three bedrooms, a kitchen, and a dining room. I added three or four more rooms to this house, and two bathrooms\u2014we didn\u2019t have no indoor plumbing. I got running water in here in 1974. I got electricity in here before my husband passed, I believe about 1964. My first telephone was around 1976.\tI used to like to make some of everything. I made TV cabinets, made me a bed about fifteen years ago, a bookshelf, planters that I use outdoors. A man gave me a buoy out of the river, and I put a car wheel rim on it and made a flowerpot. I knew how to do things. When I was nine years old, I made my sister a dress and me a dress out of blue taffeta cloth. My mama saw those two dresses and thought they were bought made. She showed those dresses off to everybody. I just had a head for doing anything. It was just born in me to make things."},"primaryMedia":{"value":"https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/23252/full"},"names":{"label":"Names","value":"Arlonzia Pettway"},"displayDate":{"label":"Date","value":"(1923\u20132008)"},"id":{"label":"Id","value":"151496"}}]}