Awards

• Short-listed for Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art 2024 (United States)
• Winner of Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Book Award 2023 (United States)

Overview

Winner of the 2023 Horowitz Prize by the Bard Graduate Center Winner of the 2025 James A. Porter and David C. Driskell Award in African American Art History from the Driskell Center at the University of Maryland Shortlisted for the 2024 Charles C. Eldredge Prize by the Smithsonian American Art Museum Finalist for the 2024 Sterling Stuckey Book Prize by the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora A meditation on suffering, resilience, creativity, and grace In 1942 Missouri Pettway, newly suffering the loss of her husband, pieced together a quilt out of his old, worn work clothes. Nearly six decades later her daughter Arlonzia Pettway, approaching eighty at the time and a seasoned quiltmaker herself, readily recalled the cover made by her grieving mother within the small African American farming community of Gee's Bend, Alabama. At once a story of grief, a quilt, and a community, Stitching Love and Loss connects Missouri Pettway's cotton covering to the history of a place, its residents, and the work of mourning. Interpreting varied sources of history and memory, Lisa Gail Collins engages crucial and enduring questions, simultaneously singular and shared: What are the languages, practices, and processes of mourning? How is loss expressed and remembered? What are the roles for creativity in grief? And how might a closely crafted material object, in its conception, construction, use, and memory, serve the work of grieving a loved one? Placing this singular quilt within its historical and cultural context, Collins illuminates the perseverance and creativity of the African American women quilters in this rural Black Belt community.

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9780295753751

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Reviews

""Stitching Love and Loss is an interdisciplinary study as multilayered as the pieced-together quilt at its core. . . Collins's precise yet poetic prose evokes gut-wrenching images of a wife and mother tending to her wounds and feeling her husband’s presence through the material remnants of his life."" * Hyperallergic * ""[Collins] offers her readers a different sort of journey, an emotive contemplation—at times rumination—on the nature of grief as it may have been expressed in one rural, Black Alabama family through the creation of one utilitarian quilt."" * African Arts * ""Based on over a decade of research and three trips to Gee's Bend, Collins's book analyzes Pettway's quilt visually and materially from the stains on the knees of her husband Nathaniel's work clothes to her daughter Arlonzia's memories of the quilt. Together these stories weave the historical impact of slavery, poverty, spirituality, and community in Gee's Bend, providing a deeper understanding of the role of quilts within the Southern Black Belt of Alabama."" * CAA Reviews *

Author Information

Lisa Gail Collins is Professor of Art and Director of American Studies on the Sarah Gibson Blanding Chair at Vassar College. Her books include The Art of History: African American Women Artists Engage the Past and New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement (coedited with Margo Natalie Crawford).

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