The artists featured in this exhibition are members of Studio Art Quilt Associates (SAQA), an organization whose mission is to promote the art quilt through exhibitions, publications, and professional-development opportunities. The IQM is pleased to partner with SAQA in this collaborative exhibition project.

Derived from several different plants in the indigofera family, indigo dye produces a multitude of colorfast blues, from pale sky blue to deep midnight blue. Its range of long-lasting colors made it wildly popular and highly valued when it was first imported from India to Europe in the late 1400s, resulting in the nickname “Blue Gold.”

Antique American textiles of all kinds bear the mark of indigo.

As the United States evolved into a modern, industrialized, and urbanized society in the late 1800s, Americans gazed with nostalgia toward the pre-industrial colonial era. For many Americans, the colonial era was the nation’s Golden Age, a period that experienced the fullest flowering of distinctive American culture and virtues. “Colonial” was defined loosely, encompassing anything pre-Victorian (pre-1840). Americans romanticized the past, imagining it held a simpler way of life and a more perfect society.

“Posing with Patchwork: Quilts in Photographs, 1855-1955” presents a group of antique and vintage photographs in which quilts are part of the scene. The quilts in these photographs are one element in a larger, human story; maybe it’s a story about family relationships, about remembering, about identity, about community. Sometimes we can pull the stories from the shadows by looking for clues: inscriptions on the photograph itself, elements of costume and fashion, or the way in which the quilt is used as a prop—from acting as a decorative backdrop to blanketing a deceased loved one.

“In many of the blocks, the corners of the pieces didn’t fit too well. I had to mention it, and she came right back with, ‘Well, if you can do better, prove it!! If not, keep still.’ Soooooo- What else could I do?”

Over the next fifty years he made more than 300 quilts! For the first 25 years his quilts were family projects because his father, mother, and wife hand quilted them.

Quilts tell stories. Materials, techniques, and designs illuminate trade routes, technology, regional traits, and connections between quiltmakers. A quilt speaks for a silent and anonymous maker from the past. 

The quilting stitches themselves are an important part of a quilt’s story, yet that story may be hidden because stitching patterns are not easily “read.” For whole cloth quilts, the stitches whisper the story, as the subtle, tone-on-tone stitching veils the intricate patterns.

Collecting is one of the most popular American pastimes. People love to acquire groups of related items, searching out rare and mint examples in pursuit of the elusive goal of assembling a comprehensive and premier collection.

Almost every type of object has its devotees. An Internet search for “collecting in America” reveals websites dedicated to candy containers, beer cans, road maps, and spark plugs, as well as traditional domains of fine art, stamps, and coins. Quilts, too, are another popular collecting area.

In the 1920s and 1930s, quilt kits—ready-made sets of fabric components—were new on the market and were seen as a modern, time-saving way to make a well-designed bedcovering. Kits of die-cut pieces for appliqué and pieced quilts sold for as little as $2.85 – at a time when a gallon of milk cost about 50 cents and a loaf of bread about 10 cents. Kits saved the maker the time needed for tracing around templates and cutting out each design unit. Show-stopping Lone Star and Broken Star quilts, so common in the 1930s, even came packaged with all the diamond pieces sorted by color.

Log Cabin quilt blocks are visually dynamic for a very simple reason: CONTRAST. In the three Log Cabin block designs, contrasting light and dark areas fall on either side of diagonal lines. 

And when many blocks are set together in a quilt, these lines move, quiver, ripple, dart, or spin across the surfaces. They are Dynamic! Dynamite! 

Reflections of the Exotic East in American Quilts presents an historical overview of the influence of Japanese, Chinese, Indian, and Middle Eastern design on American quiltmaking. It illustrates this influence through the Eastern motifs and materials used in quilts made between 1800 and 1950. Quilts from this period reflect the ongoing Western fascination with the "Orient," and also reveal the inaccurate and incomplete European and American vision of the mysterious and alluring “exotic” East.