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  • Mary Black's Family Quilts: Memory and Meaning in Everyday Life
  • Suzanne P. MacAulay
Mary Black's Family Quilts: Memory and Meaning in Everyday Life. By Laurel Horton. (Columbia: The University of South Carolina Press, 2005. Pp. xv + 184, 32 color plates, 67 black-and-white photographs, notes, index.)

In material-culture research, scholars reconstruct the cultural behavior and aesthetic orientation implicit in creative events and verbalize the trajectories of dynamic actions and tangible objects resulting from creative acts. In Mary Black's Family Quilts: Memory and Meaning in Everyday Life, Laurel Horton offers a microstudy of several generations of a particular family in order to illuminate the significance of quilting traditions occurring in a specific place through different time periods, thus transmuting familial and material lineage into a larger story. Her research method, which links quilt making to a detailed investigation of historical sources, oral-history interviews, family letters and journals, and public documents such as wills, inventories, newspaper articles, and census reports, provides a productive model for material-culture scholarship. Horton's approach is further enhanced by using behavioral analysis to examine the relationship between makers and object—in this instance, family members and quilts. Michael Owen Jones's concept of "material behavior," behavior in relation to the created objects, resonates with Horton's approach and offers a means for situating the mysteries of the creative process in the physical realm of objects and visionary outcomes.

The Mary Black Foundation commissioned Laurel Horton, a well-recognized quilt researcher and scholar, to investigate and write about a group of nineteenth- and twentieth-century family quilts originally collected by Mary Black, for whom the foundation was named. Horton's text is organized around these sixteen quilts. Unlike the often-unpredictable circumstances normally associated with quilt scholarship (quilts are often unidentified and their creators are frequently unknown), Horton had the advantage of working with a labeled and well-documented collection. She was [End Page 113] drawn to this project with its promise of a rare opportunity to understand "the meaning of quilts in the daily lives of people who made or inherited them" (p. xix) through the creativity of generations of women from the same family within the context of a particular community bounded by time and space.

Mary Black's collection of quilts comprises a series of visual texts representing a blend of family, social, and economic histories. As a delimited or finite collection created from the work of just a couple generations of women, it is ideal for examining the notion of quilting "fluency" through aesthetic analysis and such concepts as virtuosity and artistry, mastery of the medium and the creative ability to innovate and transform. In this way, Horton is able to interpret these quilts as embodying a family's sense of aesthetics and value system (religiosity, charity, and modesty) as well as to detect anomalies when deviations from the prevalent aesthetic system occur. For instance, this framework allows Horton to question the creative and emotional motivations behind a couple of artistically ambiguous crazy quilts handcrafted by Mary Black's sister. The relative distinctiveness of these quilts in contrast with the rest of the collection could be attributed to the results of experimentation and the choice of a more inventive style. Or, as Horton suggests, the quilt's dissonant combinations of color and shape subvert prescribed aesthetic expectations and could indicate a degree of hostility felt by the quilt maker toward her siblings. As family gifts, however, their possible negative impact was tempered somewhat by the overriding rules of gift giving and reciprocity as practiced by family members.

In Mary Black's Family Quilts, gift giving and exchange are important themes. Exchanges often revolve around events such as marriages, housewarmings, departures, and holidays. Folklorists have long been interested in gift exchange, and Horton contributes to theoretical work on this topic and others (such as the symbolic value of the quilts, memory, and meaning) in the work's final chapter. Had she integrated theory and analysis with her descriptions throughout the book, the resulting synthesis might have offered a more complex, nuanced, and more subtle reading of these quilts.

Nevertheless, Laurel Horton's book will be important...

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