For “Sunshine Joe” Mallard, quilting is both a personal inheritance and a way of recording the world around him. He traces his earliest connection to the practice to his great-great-grandmother, Mandy Green, who was born into slavery. When he was a child, she encouraged him not to worry about what others said he could not do, but to focus instead on what he could create. Years later, a television segment featuring Roosevelt “Rosey” Grier of the Los Angeles Rams doing needlework to relieve stress gave Mallard the confidence to begin quilting himself.

"REMNANT: Works by Cora Nimtz" presents recent work by Cora Nimtz, a third-generation quiltmaker from the American South. Drawing on inherited patterns and techniques, Nimtz works within traditional quiltmaking to explore themes of memory, repair, and renewal.

Using found and salvaged fabrics, she continues a lineage grounded in labor and resourcefulness, allowing each material to retain traces of its prior life. Her use of thread painting builds on earlier pictorial quilt traditions, merging representational imagery with established block designs.

Karen McTavish began working as a longarm quilter in 1997, a time when machine quilting was just beginning to be recognized as an alternative to time-consuming hand quilting. Almost three decades later, her unique machine quilting technique — known as McTavishing — creates a continuous, dense background design adding texture and motion to quilts. It is a popular option for the many customers at McTavish's Minnesota studio.

Whether original piecework designs or repurposed from quilts, patchwork is having a moment in contemporary fashion. An artform often associated with quilts, patchwork spans time, culture, and medium. This exhibition documents the evolution of patchwork and piecing in apparel, exploring themes of creativity, beauty, necessity, sustainability, nostalgia, and trendsetting.

"Boro" is a Japanese term associated with the cycle of use and reuse — of wearing something out and mending it, over and over. In rural communities across Japan, mainly before World War II, boro was a way of life. Everyday textiles such as bed covers and clothing were repeatedly repaired using scraps of fabric, placed over the worn areas and held down with simple running stitches. Over seasons and years, these patches, usually in various shades of indigo blue, would be layered upon each other, creating uneven and mottled surfaces.

The International Quilt Museum is located on the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's East Campus. The building and its garden were all designed with quilts and quiltmaking in mind.

In the tabs below, you can learn more about the design of the building and garden.