Bard Graduate Center is pleased to announce that the Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Book Prize for the best book on the decorative arts, design history, or material culture of the Americas published in 2023 has been awarded to Stitching Love and Loss: A Gee’s Bend Quilt by Lisa Gail Collins.

Stitching Love and Loss tells a deeply researched story of the small African American farming community of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, during the early twentieth century by way of a handmade cotton quilt made while its maker, Missouri Pettway, was newly experiencing the loss of her husband. The book’s publisher, the University of Washington Press, calls it “a meditation on suffering, resilience, creativity, and grace.”

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: 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.

In making the award, the members of the selection committee for the Horowitz Book Prize wrote, “The quilts of Gee’s Bend are rightly renowned. They were the subject of wildly popular exhibits in the early 2000s and have more recently been distributed into major museum collections. But Collins is intentional in locating the story not in the value put on Gee’s Bend quilts by those outside the community, which she does address in the book’s coda. Rather she embeds the quilts in the community life in Gee’s Bend, Alabama. With sincerity and empathy, Collins has crafted a book which will help readers appreciate local, Black vernacular culture in rich and nuanced ways.”

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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). In recognition of her outstanding contributions to the field, Bard Graduate Center will host an event with Collins on the subject of the book in fall 2025.

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The Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Book Prize rewards scholarly excellence and commitment to cross-disciplinary conversation in books about decorative arts, design history, or material culture of the Americas.