Sue Willie Seltzer’s “Blocks" quilt, featuring strips of fabric of turkeys, chickens, teddy bears and geese designed to be cut out and made into pillows, represents both the freewheeling style of the quilts from her neighborhood and the increased freedom of expression that women felt alter the Civil Rights Movement. Quilts were still made out of necessity, but slightly increased economic stability allowed some to pick out new fabric, rather than relying an leftover scraps. Seltzer was part of a group of quiltmakers who lived on a dirt road in a community called Rehoboth in Gee‘s Bend, a community on the margins of the larger settlement, and one with a much more unpredictable and wild style of pattern-mixing and color-play. —Laura Bickford
