Did someone say "Quilt Road Trip"?

Your car is gassed up and ready for a road trip.  Your GPS is ready to go.  Do you know where you’re headed? Do you have planned stops along the way? If the heat radiating off the pavement into the horizon is calling to you and you have no planned stops along the way, you may want to consider visiting a quilt museum. 

Many states have quilt museums.  A Moda Fabrics recent blog post lists many of the familiar ones.  I’ve had the fortune to visit Paducah, Lowell, Golden and Shelburne, but I sure hope to visit others in my future trips.  I’d love to organize a bus trip across country with my quilty BFF’s visiting many of the others, and perhaps a quilt shop or two along the way.  Naturally!

For those that still prefer a paper road atlas, grab the yellow highlighter and get busy planning your stops.  The rest of you log on, map your route on google earth.  If your traveling with ‘hubs’, be sure to find a ‘guy stop’ to keep him busy, maybe a Cabela’s or a golf course, or some other stop that can fill his afternoon so you can enjoy the rich history these museums have to offer.

http://www.quiltstudy.org

University of Nebraska

Lincoln, Nebraska 

http://www.texasquiltmuseum.org/index.html

Textile Quilt Museum

La Grange, Texas

http://dairybarn.org

The Dairy Barn Arts Center

Athens, Ohio

http://quiltmuseum.org

National Quilt Museum

Paducah, Kentucky

http://www.sjquiltmuseum.org

San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles
San Jose, California

http://www.laconnerquilts.org

La Conner Quilt and Textile Museum
La Conner, Washington

http://www.nequiltmuseum.org

New England Quilt Museum

Lowell, Massachusetts 

http://www.museum.msu.edu/glqc/about_glqc.html

Great Lakes Quilt Center/MSU
East Lansing, Michigan

http://wiquiltmuseum.com

Wisconsin Museum of Quilts and Fiber Arts

Cedarburg, Wisconsin 

https://rmqm.org

Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum

Golden, CO

http://www.quiltershalloffame.net

Quilters Hall of Fame

Marion, Indiana

There are many museums that feature exquisite quilts in their collections, but may not be exclusively quilt focused.  However, they are still very quilt worthy in terms of our time, and important to the history and promotion of quilt making.  There are many more across our great land so check the states you plan to visit to see what may be showing.  Check these websites to learn more about their exhibits, dates and times:

http://www.thehenryford.org/museum/index.aspx

The Henry Ford Museum

Quilts of Henry Ford

Detroit, Michigan

http://www.auburn.edu/academic/other/geesbend/about/index.html

The Quilts of Gees Bend

Auburn University

Auburn, Alabama

http://shelburnemuseum.org/collections/quilts/

Shelburne Museum

Shelburne, Vermont

http://www.dar.org/museum/exhibitions/current-exhibition

DAR-Constitution Hall

Washington, DC

http://folkartmuseum.org/exhibitions/

American Folk Art Museum
New York, New York

Here’s an additional site that lists exhibitions by state, so give this a look too:

http://www.quiltersresources.net/museums_usa.html

And if all that doesn’t yield enough, simply google/bing/yahoo search “quilt exhibits or museums” and the area you are visiting.

Happy Quilty Summer!

Honoring Craft.....the 2015 National Heritage Fellowship Award

First, I apologize for my absence, while my mother passed away at 95.

But today I honor her history in my love of the art of quilting.   Recently three quilters from Gee’s Bend Alabama were awarded the National Heritage Fellowship Award, our nation’s highest honor for folk and traditional arts.…….Mary Lee Bendolph, Loretta Pettway, and Lucy Mingo.

The Quilts of Gee’s Bends are a collection of quilts created by a group of African American women and their ancestors who lived in the rural isolated area of Gee’s Bend, southeast of Selma along the Alabama River.  These works of arts are considered to be one of the most unique and important African American contribution to the history of art within the United States.

Gee’s Bend, officially called Boykin, is named after Joseph Gee, a landowner that moved from North Carolina in 1816 to establish a cotton plantation with his seventeen slaves.  Mark H. Pettway bought the plantation from Gee in 1845, and Pettway remains a prominent name throughout the community today.  After emancipation many of the freed slaves stayed as sharecroppers.  Their quilts were made out of necessity, using scrap fabrics to make bed-coverings to keep their families warm in unheated shacks, without running water, electricity or phones.

Most quilters came to know of Gee’s Bend after well-known African American textile collector-historian-curator William Arnett introduced their bold, abstract and improvisational style in museums throughout the US, including The Whitney, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Art Houston to name a few.  After stumbling across these amazingly simple quilts in the late 1960’s, Arnett introduced them to the NYC art community and as they say, the rest is history.  Their simple, intuitive style laid the foundation inspiring art quilters today to create many wonderful abstract quilts, all rooted in the wonderful traditions of Gee’s Bend Quilts. To learn more about Arnett’s foundation, or the NEA and its award, or see many of the wonderful Gee's Bend quilts visit:

http://soulsgrowndeep.org/

http://arts.gov/

http://www.auburn.edu/academic/other/geesbend/explore/catalog/slideshow/