The residents of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, are direct descendants of the enslaved people who worked the cotton plantations established in 1816 by Joseph Gee. After the Civil War, their ancestors remained on the plantations working as sharecroppers. In the 1930s, the price of cotton fell, and the community faced ruin. As part of its Depression-era intervention, the Federal Government purchased ten thousand acres of the former plantation and provided loans enabling residents to acquire and farm the land formerly worked by their ancestors.

Nettie Young (1916 Boykin – 2010 Boykin, Alabama) was a Gee’s Bend quilter whose work is widely recognized for its bold geometry, improvisation, and deep connection to the aesthetics of African American quilting traditions. The context of southern rural life, the Gee's Bend tradition of generational transmission of knowledge, resilience to create under limited resources within a segregated community are all important factors in how Nettie Young worked.

Nettie learned quilting from her mother, Annie May Young, and other women in the Gee’s Bend community. She was raised at a place called Young’s, the old Young plantation. Her grandfather and father had both been slaves on the Pettway plantation, but her father was later freed and went to work at the Young plantation. Nettie Young married Clint Young and they had 11 children.

Nettie Young was an original member of the Freedom Quilting Bee (FQB), a collective of African American women quilters formed during the Civil Rights era to create economic independence, provide dignified work for Black women in the rural South, preserve and advance quilting traditions
and support community empowerment. It became one of the most influential craft cooperatives in U.S. history.

Nettie Young gained international recognition when Gee’s Bend quilts were exhibited and collected by major museums. Her quilts are included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Philadelphia Museum of Art and New Orleans Museum of Art.

This particular work is from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation whom Alison Jacques works in partnership with. 'Star' - ten-block variation, relates to pattern and geometry. Star motifs in Gee’s Bend quilts don’t always match “block-by-block” construction; they can be fractured or composed of strips rather than precise triangles. The hand quilting stitches themselves are often uneven, flowing, and large. Nettie Young made a pair of "Star" quilts in the mid 1930s. In the six-pointed star, she saw a latent arrowhead shape and reassembled it into some of the most compelling "Star" blocks in Gee's Bend.