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.

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!

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.

The year 2020 was a turning point — but not a starting point. The COVID-19 pandemic, protests against police violence, and economic instability made headlines across the world. But these events were not isolated. They were the result of deeper structural issues — systemic racism, unequal access to healthcare, and political division — that had been building for generations.

These paintings honor the common threads between quilting and painting, using elements of still-life, abstraction, and figuration. Quilts are used both as a visual source and a narrative element, creating scenes that echo domestic spaces, religious influence, and family dynamics. These paintings attempt to engage with the rich visual language of quilting as a folk tradition and as a family practice. 

Beavers Gallery 5/14/25 - 9/13/25

Every year, students from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Japan’s Saitama University collaborate to create an International Quilt Museum exhibit based on what they have learned together about global quilt traditions. This year, students will focus on traditional Chinese textiles made to celebrate marriages and crafted to care for babies and children.

“America is now wholly given over to a damn mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash- and should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed.”

- Nathaniel Hawthorne, private letter to William D. Ticknor (January 19, 1855)