"Housetop"

Two factors lift Qunnie Pettway's concentric-squares corduroy quilt from the ordinary to the exalted. First, she has made this quilt from a particular shade of pale peach—almost like white that has aged to cream—found among the corduroy lots available to her. She juxtaposes this with a true red, making an elementally simple design. Second, she creates a frail outer edge in the quilt's binding that introduces hints of other hues—pale green, cerise, yellow. Somehow the momentum of this deceptively geometric and ingenuous pattern is, by its eccentric and wholly contrived details, transformed into an immensely moving image.