Mary Lee grew up watching her mother quilt, but it was her aunt Louella whose work she looked up to most. She tears old, worn-out clothes into strips and blocks and pieces them into bold, geometric quilts, and she’s said she never went by a pattern. One of her Housetop quilts was put on a U.S. postage stamp in 2006, and in 2015 she received a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work is in MoMA, the National Gallery of Art and Tate Modern. The quilt on our pieces is her Work-Clothes Quilt (2002).