For “Sunshine Joe” Mallard, quilting is both a personal inheritance and a way of recording the world around him. He traces his earliest connection to the practice to his great-great-grandmother, Mandy Green, who was born into slavery. When he was a child, she encouraged him not to worry about what others said he could not do, but to focus instead on what he could create. Years later, a television segment featuring Roosevelt “Rosey” Grier of the Los Angeles Rams doing needlework to relieve stress gave Mallard the confidence to begin quilting himself.

Crown & Stage explores how quilts and other forms of material culture traveled beyond the playhouse and palace. This exhibition features quilts honoring British queens, Shakespeare’s words stitched in fabric, and contemporary objects that reinterpret these icons. Together, they trace how symbols of the monarchy and theater entered everyday life.

"REMNANT: Works by Cora Nimtz" presents recent work by Cora Nimtz, a third-generation quiltmaker from the American South. Drawing on inherited patterns and techniques, Nimtz works within traditional quiltmaking to explore themes of memory, repair, and renewal.

Using found and salvaged fabrics, she continues a lineage grounded in labor and resourcefulness, allowing each material to retain traces of its prior life. Her use of thread painting builds on earlier pictorial quilt traditions, merging representational imagery with established block designs.

Karen McTavish began working as a longarm quilter in 1997, a time when machine quilting was just beginning to be recognized as an alternative to time-consuming hand quilting. Almost three decades later, her unique machine quilting technique — known as McTavishing — creates a continuous, dense background design adding texture and motion to quilts. It is a popular option for the many customers at McTavish's Minnesota studio.

Whether original piecework designs or repurposed from quilts, patchwork is having a moment in contemporary fashion. An artform often associated with quilts, patchwork spans time, culture, and medium. This exhibition documents the evolution of patchwork and piecing in apparel, exploring themes of creativity, beauty, necessity, sustainability, nostalgia, and trendsetting.

"Boro" is a Japanese term associated with the cycle of use and reuse — of wearing something out and mending it, over and over. In rural communities across Japan, mainly before World War II, boro was a way of life. Everyday textiles such as bed covers and clothing were repeatedly repaired using scraps of fabric, placed over the worn areas and held down with simple running stitches. Over seasons and years, these patches, usually in various shades of indigo blue, would be layered upon each other, creating uneven and mottled surfaces.

French fiber artist Anne Bellas reimagines Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations through a collection of thirty-two textile paintings, each corresponding to a single variation of the celebrated score. Using fabrics inherited from her great-grandmother — transformed through her own processes of dyeing and printing — Bellas creates works that merge personal memory with the universal language of music.

Quiltmaking has long been an important form of artistic expression in American life, shaped by personal creativity, cultural heritage, and community traditions. This exhibition features quilts from the collection of author and collector Roderick Kiracofe, whose work has brought national attention to makers and styles that fall outside conventional quilt history.

For the first time since 2022, select quilts from the Joanna Rose Collection are on display at the International Quilt Museum. The brief, pop-up exhibition is now showing through July 12. Don't miss your chance to see these quilts in person!