Traditionally on National Quilting Day at the International Quilt Museum, we line the Reception Hall railing with quilts made by members of our local quilt guilds and community.

For this year's virtual National Quilting Day celebration, we asked some of our volunteers and staff members to share quilts from their personal collections. Some of these quilts were made by the volunteer or staff member. Some are cherished keepsakes. 

Each has a story.

We hope you will enjoy this National Quilting Day Community Showcase Virtual Pop-Up.

Some of the most visually intriguing quilts are surprisingly simple. Such quilts may feature one basic shape, as in the Tumbling Block and Nine Patch quilts displayed nearby, or only two colors, as in the Oak Leaf variation and Log Cabin quilts. Rather than restricting design, these characteristics provide nearly unlimited license to create patterned surfaces, the illusion of a third dimension, and subtle shifts from light to dark. 

In this second annual collaboration with Lincoln’s NAACP Youth Council, the International Quilt Museum is featuring a virtual pop-up that pairs the work of African American quiltmakers with responses from local students in Lincoln Public Schools. The students examined quilts by Sarah Mary Taylor, Nora McKeown Ezell, Mary Maxtion, Yvonne Wells and Faith Ringgold, and crafted reaction statements that explore ideas of design, color and emotion, as well as connections to their own life experiences.

Amish quilts captured the interest of New York art dealers and collectors in the early 1970s because of their similarities to modern abstract painting. Soon, they were adorning the interiors of urban lofts and spread across the pages of home decorating magazines. Classic Amish styles are among the most recognizable and copied of American quilt styles.

"My involvement with the cyanotype process began in the summer of 2014 while I was teaching a collage workshop at Anderson Ranch in Snowmass Village, Colorado. A fellow instructor working in the next studio incorporated cyanotype into her experimental drawing curriculum. Her students placed objects and film negatives on photo sensitized paper for brief exposures to the Colorado sun. As I watched them work, it occurred to me that one could also make cyanotype prints with paper cutouts.

Immediately after Abstract Design in American Quilts closed in October 1971, venues around the world requested to borrow the exhibition from collector-curators Jonathan Holstein and Gail van der Hoof. The quilts’ most distant trip was to Japan in 1975-1976. It was a journey that would produce reverberations for the next several decades.

New York Nexus presents the work of eight artists directly influenced in their studio practice by the Abstract Design in American Quilts exhibition in its original Whitney Museum setting or in other venues during the early 1970s. Most of these artists were working in painting, printmaking, and collage at the time.

Since the early 1800s, the most common place to see quilts displayed—other than on beds—was in women’s exhibits at state and county agricultural fairs. For more than two centuries, quilts have remained objects intimately connected with women’s lives. By the 1970s, however, art museums opened exhibitions that recognized quilts as objects of art for their audiences.

Abstract Design in American Quilts, an exhibition presented in 1971 at New York City’s Whitney Museum of American Art, far exceeded the reach and impact its creators initially anticipated. In short, it became a cultural phenomenon.

A last-minute addition to the Whitney’s summer schedule, Abstract Design in American Quilts attracted unexpectedly large and enthusiastic audiences, quickly selling out its catalog and garnering outsized praise from eminent critics.

Textile artist Amy Meissner gathers cast-off and salvaged women’s handwork, household textiles, and found objects. In these artifacts, she sees the tracings of women’s knowledge, decisions, and intentions. Her quilted art made for vertical display, which incorporates these objects, emerges as an amalgam of traditional handwork and female points of view, of historic roles and contemporary complaints, which serve to expose women’s emotional, physical, and literal labor.