Mary L. Bennett is part of a long tradition of Black women from slavery to the present who design quilts representative of the lived experiences of Blacks in the United States, the profound beauty found in Black art, and the socio-political purpose of Black art. Quilts developed during slavery chronicle the impact of American slavery on Black people and the journey to freedom using intricate patterns of the North Star, Jacob’s Ladder, The Underground Railroad, Flying Geese, and other symbols of Blacks escaping bondage. In the late nineteenth century Harriet Powers’s quilts Bible Quilt and Sermon in Patchwork pay homage to the Black sermon. In the 1930s, Ruth Clement Bond’s Black Power Quilt foregrounds the iconic symbol of a Black fist that recurs in art. During the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which called for racial justice centering contemporary Black culture and experience, the Freedom Quilting Bee Collective formed. Black quilters continue to foreground activism and community building, as found in the recent 56 panels in the AIDS Memorial Quilt or Melissa Blount’s Black Lives Matter Quilt focusing on the lives of Black girls and women.

Bennet’s Housetop illustrates the simplicity of the houses of Black sharecroppers. The rhythm and order found in Housetop is representative of the order Black people painstakingly try to achieve despite the chaos surrounding Black life in the United States as a result of systemic racism. Housetop provides a visual representation of the Black self-determination and cultural pride associated with Black American life and the fight for freedom.

Black folks in this country know that the preservation of our histories has never been a given. In fact, they have been actively destroyed. Much like quilts, we stitch together a patchwork of markers, records, stories, and artifacts to reveal and preserve our families’ lives.

Mary L. Bennett’s work exemplifies the power of quilting’s ability to save and uncover histories that are often cast to the wayside and, in turn, adds to a conversation generations in the making.

The nine sections of Bennett’s quilt start with a central solid cloth. Then Bennett stitches together cotton, denim, and other fabric scraps to complete the Housetop pattern. This pattern echoes the ways in which familial histories are compounded, layered, and overlapping and speaks to how the past interweaves with and resurfaces in the present.

In the wake of our fragmented histories, a key form of resistance and resilience can be found through the reconstruction of what remains. Black folks have done and continue to do the work of filling in the gaps in our histories by imagining new possibilities, and reframing, reseeing, and restitching what does exist around us to see the world anew. Through the creation of these quilts, Bennett does more than preserve the histories that could be found around her, she stitches together a new story.

As your eyes wander the quilt, notice the stains, marks, and blemishes scattered throughout. They’re beautiful, aren’t they? These quilts are living objects. Mediations on what has, is, and will, sustain our lives.