Delia Bennet (1892–1976) was an American artist. She is associated with the Gee's Bend quilting collective, and is said to be "the matriarch of perhaps the largest family of quilt producers in Gee's Bend. Her work is included in the collection of the

Philadelphia Museum of Art The Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMoA) is an art museum originally chartered in 1876 for the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. The main museum building was completed in 1928 on Fairmount, a hill located at the northwest end of the Benjamin Fr ...

Early life

Born in 1892 to S.S. Pettway and Pleasant Pettway, Delia Bennett was raised on the Brown plantation in

Gee's Bend, Alabama Boykin, also known as Gee's Bend, is an African American majority community and census-designated place in a large bend of the Alabama River in Wilcox County, Alabama, Wilcox County, Alabama. As of the United States Census, 2020, 2020 census, its ...

. She married Eddie Bennett, and they raised seven girls and four boys together. Bennett and her husband were

subsistence farmer Subsistence agriculture occurs when farmers grow food crops to meet the needs of themselves and their families on smallholdings. Subsistence agriculturalists target farm output for survival and for mostly local requirements, with little or no su ...

s, growing food in their backyard. They were forced to grow cotton for free in exchange for living on the plantation grounds, which were owned by the Spurlin family in

Camden, Alabama Camden is a city in and the county seat of Wilcox County, Alabama, United States. The population was 2,020 at the 2010 census, down from 2,257 in 2000, at which time it was a town. History What is now Camden was established on property donate ...

Exhibitions

* 2019 - ''Souls Grown Deep: Artists of the African American South'', Philadelphia Museum of Art

References

1892 births 1976 deaths 20th-century American artists 20th-century American women artists Gee's Bend quilters African-American women artists 20th-century African-American women 20th-century African-American artists {{us-artist-stub