In Quilts of Emotion, objects from the International Quilt Museum's permanent collection provide examples of the many kinds of sewing techniques and skills women have mastered from the 1700s to the present. These objects of plain and fancy sewing allow visitors to imagine the solitary and social sewing communities of past times in which these objects were made and that provided sources of emotional support to countless women.

Simple, large, geometric patterns. Deep, rich colors. Undecorated wool fabrics. Wide quilted borders. These characteristics define the classic Lancaster County, Pennsylvania Amish quilts made between the late 1800s and the mid 1900s. The quilts exemplify many qualities of traditional Amish life: conservative, plain, and rule-bound. On the other hand, Amish quilts from the Midwest often are more visually complex, with repeating, block-style patterns and vibrant, bright colored cottons surrounded by contrasting black grounds.

Drawings: Monoprints and Riffs

Nancy Crow, a leader in contemporary quiltmaking since the 1970s, will showcase work from the past
nine years (2011-2020). 

The topic of climate change infiltrates our news daily as changing weather patterns, rising sea levels, and catastrophic natural disasters impact the world. Guest curator Luana Rubin draws attention to this current issue through quilts that focus on humankind’s impact on the earth.

Artists in the exhibition include Betty Busby, Hollis Chatelain, Sheila Frampton Cooper, Caryl Bryer Fallert-Gentry, Ihor Gawdan, Galla Grotto, Cas Holmes, Katalin Horvath, MJ Kinman, Susan Brubaker Knapp, Shizuko Kuroha, Kathy Nida, Luana Rubin and Susan de Vanny.

“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. 

Guest curator David Hornung has selected eleven artists who embrace a spirit of experimentation that reflects prevailing trends in textile construction. These artists’ work honors tradition while pointing to the future. Hornung’s interest in handmade textile crafts dates to a youthful affinity with the aesthetic philosophy of the Bauhaus, which collapsed the hierarchy between “high” and “low” art. For six years in the early 1980s, Hornung made and exhibited work that integrated the vocabularies of Modernist surface organization and traditional patchwork.

David Hornung is an artist, author, and teacher. Over the last 45 years, he has taught at Rhode Island School of Design, Brooklyn College, Pratt Institute, Parsons School of Design, Skidmore College, and Indiana University. Hornung is currently a full professor at Adelphi University on Long Island.

How can the ephemeral, short-lived experience of a musical performance be expressed in a tangible, enduring artform? Musician and quiltmaker Eliza Hardy Jones explores this question in her Song Quilts project.

Jones traveled across the U.S. and Northwest Russia recording folk songs sung by women, which she then transcribed into written music. Next, she developed a notation method that translates pitch—the highness or lowness of a sound—into color, and rhythm into shape. The resulting quilts are “read” from top left to bottom right.