Quilts in Common, and: Nancy Crow: Cloth, Culture, and Context (review)

Two recent folklore exhibits, Quilts in Common and Nancy Crow: Cloth, Culture, and Context, were created as the centerpiece of a group of activities to celebrate the March 30, 2008, grand opening of the International Quilt Study Center's new museum building. The event drew an overflow crowd of more than 1,500 visitors to the three-story, 37,000–square-foot, glass-and-brick structure designed by Robert A. M. Stern Architects of New York. The building itself is notable for a number of reasons, including its imposing bowed façade of glass panels, which are "stitched together" to create a large-scale pattern reminiscent of those used in quilts; its status as a certified green-built structure; and the fact that the $12 million required for its construction was raised entirely from private donations. The museum contains public galleries, complete with appropriate lighting and other protective measures, that can safely display fifty to sixty quilts at once in exhibits that change several times a year. It also houses space for classes, offices, and meetings, a museum gift shop, a conservation and research laboratory, and a state-of-the-art, climate controlled storage area for the center's expanding collection.

The center's mission is to collect, preserve, study, interpret, and exhibit quilts from all times and all cultures. It was established in 1997 after Ardis and Robert James, noted collectors who are originally from Nebraska, donated nearly 950 antique and contemporary quilts to the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. The James Collection became the core of the new center's holdings. However, both the Jameses and Dr. Patricia Cox Crews, director of the center and Willa Cather Professor of Textiles at the University, realized that many more examples of quilting traditions from around the world were necessary before the center could fully live up to its name and mission. With encouragement and support from the Jameses, the center began an active acquisition program in 2005. Thanks to that program and other major gifts from artists and collectors, today its holdings have grown to more than 2,300 quilts. The collection is thought to be the largest of its kind held in public trust.

The first of the two exhibits, Quilts in Common, was drawn from the center's permanent collections and organized with an unusual perspective. Designing the exhibit, curators Carolyn Ducey and Marin F. Hanson created groupings of quilts not normally associated with one another but that showed strong visual or conceptual relationships. Instead of displaying the quilts by standard categories such as geographical or historical origins, the curators connected them by analyzing commonalties in design elements, construction techniques, and symbolic and thematic content. They divided the twenty-four works into eight groupings of three quilts each. Five groupings spotlighted visual relationships. In one group, for example, the three quilts emphasized the quilting stitch. In another, all three works employed squares in unusual ways. My favorite was the group labeled "Novel Technique." It consisted of three mostly dissimilar, appliquéd quilts made in three different time periods and three very different cultures, Pennsylvania German, Native Hawaiian, and Pakistani. All three quilts were made by creating the appliqué patterns with a fold-and-cut paper pattern technique similar to scherenschnitte, the traditional Swiss and German paper-cutting craft. A paper example of scherenschnitte was displayed with this group of quilts, further emphasizing the visual similarities between them. Some of the other groupings also contained works in other media with the same dominant visual characteristics as the quilts.

The three remaining groups emphasized conceptual relationships. The most eye catching was "Expressions of Identity," which included one of the stars of the museum's collection, the famous Reconciliation Quilt by Lucinda Ward Honstain of...