QUILTS & FABRIC: PAST & PRESENT


Tuesday, December 5, 2023

Winter 2023-2024 in the International Quilt Museum

 

Went to Lincoln, Nebraska last week to see the quilts shows at
the International Quilt Museum.


Sue Reich has donated her collection of World War I & II quilts to the museum and they are showing the earlier quilts until April 13th, 2024.

Always amazed to see a lettered quilt, the perseverance, the patience.
I've tried it. It's slow going. This one a hymn.

Those are G's, not C's.

Many left-over woolen badges

Anglo-American friendship quilt



Janneken Smucker has been working on an exhibit of quilts from the Great Depression and the New Deal for several years. She's pulled together some from the museum collection and borrowed a few for A New Deal for Quilts, which will be up until April 20th.

Old friend Cuesta Benberry once owned this quilt of her mother-in-law's.
Minnie Benberry and friends made several in a pattern distributed
by a home economics employee of the Works Progress Administration in
1930s Kentucky. The quilters called it the W.P.A. Tulip.


Several quilts told of economic hard times and the politics of the 30s.



And the depression encouraged contests with cash prizes. The largest was held in conjunction with the 1933 World's Fair in Chicago. The museum owns Lillian Smith Fordyce's entry, Calendar. 

See the whole quilt here: https://www.internationalquiltmuseum.org/quilt/19970070915


The seasonal pictorials include apple-picking time
with many, many embroidered apples.

Order Janneken's catalog A New Deal for Quilts from the University of Nebraska Press:

Katie Pasquini Masopust has a show of her recent work up too.
Multifaceted is up till May 4, 2024.

Her textiles are quite painterly.

It's always fun to see the details the innovative Exhibits Department comes
up with. The labels in Katie's show are hexagons, the pillars are hexagons and so are the benches.





1 comment:

  1. Fascinating glimpse into the lives of these amazing quilts.I love the history of all of them.

    ReplyDelete