We are a group of artists who feel our hearts beating to the rhythm of the Earth.
 
As the environment deteriorates due to climate change and global pollution, some may deny or look away, but we are seeking to express the pain in our hearts for what we see is being destroyed and perhaps lost forever. For our families, our communities, the planet Earth and all her inhabitants, we have something to say. We listen to the sacred stories of indigenous people, and we celebrate the beauty of our world.
 

“Politics makes for strange bedfellows,” wrote Charles Warner, editor of the Hartford Courant in 1850. By extension, politics makes for sometimes strange, and always interesting, bedcovers. The quilts of Partisan Pieces made in the 1800s and 1900s illuminate the progress of U. S. political development from the perspective, and from the needles, of well-informed and patriotic women. 

Barbara Caron began making these small-scale quilts before she relocated to Lincoln to serve as the assistant director of the International Quilt Museum (2007-2012). Her work as an educator and her early years as a librarian are evident in the quilts. As small teaching tools, they are “… like the pages of a book,” says Caron—each one telling a story distinct from, yet connected with, each of the others.

Blue images in each of these quilts were created through the cyanotype process discovered in 1842 by English scientist Sir John Hershel. The process involves treating cloth or paper with a solution of two chemicals (ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide) that, when exposed to ultra-violet light, develop an intense blue color, also called Prussian blue. To create images, one places either objects or film positives/negatives on the treated material. These prevent light from activating the chemicals and thereby produce negative images of themselves.

Helen Claire Vlasin (1932 - 2012) was born in Spalding, Nebraska, and was a graduate of St. Elizabeth Hospital School of Nursing in Lincoln, Nebraska; Central Michigan University; and Michigan State University. Claire’s initial educational experiences led her into nursing, but she later switched paths, turning to educational administration. Her family, including her beloved husband Ray and her children Theresa, Celia, Ilene, John, and Marie, as well as her large extended family, were another strong focus of her life.  

The International Quilt Museum is pleased to showcase the important work of Mourning Hope Grief Center, a Lincoln-based organization that supports and comforts youth and their families in times of grief. Since 1994, Mourning Hope has provided free support groups, community education, grief resources, and referrals to grieving children, teens, young adults, and families who have lost someone. 

The quilts of Nancy Crow: Cloth, Culture & Context represent the artist’s exploration of the quilt medium over the last thirty years. From early pieces that draw upon classic American quilt patterns to her later freeform, abstract compositions, Crow has developed a body of work that continues to confront, expand, and redefine her vision. She constantly seeks visual inspiration, using her discriminating eye to draw influence from the natural world, the built environment, and textiles and various handicraft traditions from cultures worldwide.

The quilts in this exhibition celebrate the eye-catching visual effects that makers create using stripes. The quilts illustrate the dynamic, appealing nature of the stripe. Medieval history scholar, Michel Pastoureau suggests that the striped surface calls for attention in a way that other surfaces don’t. Referring to the ambiguous relationship between foreground and background that stripes create, he asks, “Does the eye see that which fools it more clearly?” Are eyes attracted to striped surfaces because they are more complex?

The star is an important symbol in traditional Lakota mythology and art. The story of the morning star describes how an old medicine man became the morning star after his death. The morning star was considered to have more power than the sun or moon because of the experience the medicine man gained from living on earth. Consequently, the morning star was a symbol for wisdom and understanding.

Growing up on a Minnesota farm and living in New York City for the past two decades has given Victoria Findlay Wolfe a unique perspective in her art. Indeed, her work often moves cyclically between references to her rural familial roots and her current cosmopolitan locale. She is both a woman with strong Midwestern sensibilities and a leader of the now-global Modern Quilt movement. Combined, these attributes result in a body of work she aptly describes as “traditions made modern.”