For more than thirty years, Ludy Strauss built a collection defined by bold form, visual strength and a deep respect for creative labor. Based in Santa Monica, where she ran The Quilt Shop gallery from the early 1980s to 2000, she assembled two distinct but connected bodies of work. The first, Artist’s Quilts, was a project developed between 1976 and 1980 in which contemporary artists — including Tony Berlant, Peter Alexander and Charles Arnoldi — submitted designs to be stitched by professional quiltmakers, many of whom are named. Strauss viewed the quilters not as fabricators, but as collaborators, and worked with them as thoughtfully as she did with the artists themselves.

The second was a vernacular collection of more than forty quilts attributed to Black Southern quilters, acquired through a network of dealers and her own travel in the South. Strauss built this collection before there was widespread institutional interest in quilts made by Black makers. She sought out improvisation, asymmetry, and compositional clarity, with an approach rooted in an appreciation of American folk art.

The majority of Strauss's collection of Southern quilts is unattributed. She recorded what was offered and left the rest open. This exhibition does not attempt to resolve those absences. It keeps them visible, as part of a larger, unsettled history — one shaped as much by what was preserved as by what was never recorded.

West Gallery - now showing from Aug. 15 through Jan. 24.