This quilt exists in a lineage of extraordinary women whose creative labor, beauty, and genius made it possible.
Designed Jackie's wedding dress — fifty yards of ivory silk taffeta with hand-sewn fabric roses and leaves. Ann Lowe's studio flooded ten days before the wedding. She remade everything, absorbed the cost, and told no one. Lowe's name appeared in none of the press coverage. When she delivered the dress to the Auchincloss estate, the butler directed her to the service entrance. She refused, and walked in through the front door. The Saturday Evening Post called her "Society's Best Kept Secret."
For five decades, Ann Lowe dressed the Rockefellers, du Ponts, Roosevelts, and Auchinclosses. She was the first African American to own a fashion salon on Madison Avenue. Christian Dior admired her work and invited her to collaborate — she declined, choosing to work on her own terms in America. She died largely penniless. Her clients routinely underpaid her, and she never charged enough for her extraordinary handwork.
Before she dressed First Ladies, Ann Lowe dressed Gasparilla Queens — the most coveted social appointment in Tampa, the city where this quilt's artist was born and raised. Three of Lowe's Gasparilla gowns are held at the Henry B. Plant Museum in Tampa. Her 1957 Gasparilla gown — cream silk satin with silver bugle beads, ivory seed beads, blue tulle flowers, and strands of pearls — anticipates every material in this quilt.
Ann Lowe was born in Clayton, Alabama. The women of Gee's Bend are from Boykin, Alabama. Different cities, the same state, the same unbreakable creative force — their work, beauty, and genius inspire every stitch of this quilt.
In 2024, Sony's TriStar announced "The Dress" — a biopic about Ann Lowe produced by Serena Williams and Ruth E. Carter, focused on her experience making the Kennedy wedding dress. Her story is finally reaching the audience it deserves.
"When Lowe was a child, she loved to play with the scraps left over from her mother's work, sewing and shaping them to transform them into flowers."
— Smithsonian National Museum of American History
"All the pleasure I have had, I owe to my sewing."
— Ann Lowe, Ebony magazine, 1966
Agnes Helen Zuzek — known as Suzie — served in the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps during World War II. Afterwards she attended the Pratt Institute in New York on the G.I. Bill, graduating top of her class in textile design in 1949. She found work in New York designing prints for fashion and home fabrics. Marriage brought her to Key West in 1955. When former New Yorkers Jim Russell and Peter Pell opened Key West Hand Print Fabrics in 1961, they hired her as their designer. Almost instantly, everything changed.
In 1962, Lilly Pulitzer — a Palm Beach socialite who had started a small dress business — traveled to Key West to track down the source of some extraordinary fabric she had discovered. She walked into Key West Hand Print Fabrics, fell in love with Zuzek's designs on the spot, and placed the largest order the company had ever received. When she returned to Palm Beach, she doubled it. For the next twenty-three years, every print that defined the Lilly Pulitzer look came from one woman sitting at a drawing table on the second floor of a Key West building — Suzie Zuzek. One of her very first designs for Pulitzer was the print photographed on Jackie Kennedy at Hyannis Port in July 1962. The fabric in this quilt is from that same era.
Zuzek copyrighted every design she created. Her name appears on over 1,500 copyright cards at the Library of Congress — quietly, persistently claiming her work, even when no one was looking.
When Lilly Pulitzer filed for bankruptcy in 1984, Key West Hand Print Fabrics closed and Zuzek's entire archive disappeared. She believed her life's work was lost forever. She died in 2011 at the age of 91, thinking it gone. Five years later, Becky Smith found it under the floorboards of a Key West warehouse — crammed into dusty cardboard boxes, largely intact. When Pulitzer died in 2013, her obituary in the New York Times described the famous prints in detail. Suzie Zuzek's name did not appear.
After retirement, Zuzek never stopped creating. She turned to sculpture, painted tiles, and wood panels — a lifelong artist to the very end.
In 2021, the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum presented "Suzie Zuzek for Lilly Pulitzer: The Prints That Made the Fashion Brand" — the first museum exhibition to reveal the full scope of her artistic contribution. Organized by curator Susan Brown, it featured more than 35 original watercolor and gouache drawings alongside the finished textiles and fashions they inspired. Long overdue recognition for a woman who powered an era.
"The fabulous success of the 'Lilly Look' would not have been possible without Suzie's whimsical and magical creations. I simply couldn't have done it without her."
— Lilly Pulitzer
Generations of women in the remote Alabama community of Boykin — surrounded on three sides by a bend in the Alabama River — have made quilts of extraordinary beauty from scraps of worn clothing since before the Civil War. Their ancestors arrived enslaved, forced to walk from North Carolina in 1847. They stayed, and they stitched. The housetop and strip patterns they developed — improvisational, bold, structurally fearless — have been called by art historians some of the most significant works of American abstract art of the twentieth century.
In 1966, during the Civil Rights Movement, the women founded the Freedom Quilting Bee — a cooperative to sell their work collectively and build economic independence. In 2002, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and the Whitney Museum of American Art presented the first major exhibition of their quilts. Ten of their designs became United States postage stamps.
Their 2002 debut exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston was hailed by the New York Times — during its run at the Whitney Museum of American Art — as "some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced." The exhibition traveled to fourteen museums nationwide. Today their quilts are held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the High Museum of Art, and more than forty museums worldwide. In 2015, Mary Lee Bendolph, Loretta Pettway, and Lucy Mingo received National Heritage Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts — the United States government's highest honor in the folk and traditional arts.
Each October, the community hosts the Airing of the Quilts Festival — a beloved annual tradition rooted in the seasonal practice of hanging quilts outdoors to air from storage. Families display quilts along County Road 29, the rural highway that runs through Wilcox County to the bend in the river. The festival draws visitors from across the country for quilt sales, workshops, guided tours, and live music. It was this festival — attended by this quilt's artist in October 2025 — that sparked the making of this quilt.
Their housetop pattern is the structural foundation of this quilt's Zuzek patchwork field.
"I thank God that people want me to make quilts. I feel proud and happy. The Lord give me strength to make this quilt with love and peace and happiness so somebody would enjoy it. I'm doing something with my life."
— Loretta Pettway, Gee's Bend
