Tonight, where would you go to find safety if you were forced to flee your home? How would displacement and the impossibility of returning home change the course of your life?

“Nothing has taken a stronger hold on the women —
Crazy quilts have engulfed us.”
- Dorcas magazine, 1884

Arising in the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century, the high-style crazy quilt trend incorporated motifs from Japanese art and decor, English embroidery, and fairyland, among others. Like many textiles, however, the legacy of the crazy quilt is complicated. Women were urged by magazines to create crazy quilts, the more elaborate the better, yet they were mocked in newspapers and periodicals for doing so.  

Amish Quilts from the 1970s & '80s

This group of Amish quilts adhere to the established standards of Amish quilts: solid-colored fabrics, hand-quilted in familiar designs, such as feather and cable borders, and sober austerity. All of the quilts conform to a nearly identical format: repeated patchwork designs surrounded by two contrasting borders, with a binding that matches the interior border. 

In collaboration with Lincoln's NAACP Youth chapter, the International Quilt Museum will hold a pop-up exhibit "Celebrating Black Quiltmakers" on February 28-29, 2020, in the Byron & Sara Rhodes Dillow Conservation Work Room.

Visitors will see several works from our collection as well as a special display of new paper pieces made by NAACP Youth members.

Sewing is ageless. The act of using a needle and thread to join two pieces of cloth together stretches back centuries. For some, sewing will always be associated with enforced tedium and drudgery, but for many, stitching has provided space for entertainment and friendship or time for meditation, reflection, and consolation. Quilting offers makers a chance to share happy times with others and to come together as an act of friendship or through a common cause. Some find refuge in their solitary sewing releasing them for a few hours from other tasks. 

DRAWINGS: MONOPRINTS and RIFFS showcases two types of contemporary quiltmaking created by artist Nancy Crow in the period of 2011-2020. During this time, Crow focused on monoprints and machine-pieced quilts. All are explorations of color and balance, form and texture, visual tension and meaning. Crow considers these works to be quilted drawings.

We are a group of artists who feel our hearts beating to the rhythm of the Earth.
 
As the environment deteriorates due to climate change and global pollution, some may deny or look away, but we are seeking to express the pain in our hearts for what we see is being destroyed and perhaps lost forever. For our families, our communities, the planet Earth and all her inhabitants, we have something to say. We listen to the sacred stories of indigenous people, and we celebrate the beauty of our world.
 

“Politics makes for strange bedfellows,” wrote Charles Warner, editor of the Hartford Courant in 1850. By extension, politics makes for sometimes strange, and always interesting, bedcovers. The quilts of Partisan Pieces made in the 1800s and 1900s illuminate the progress of U. S. political development from the perspective, and from the needles, of well-informed and patriotic women. 

Barbara Caron began making these small-scale quilts before she relocated to Lincoln to serve as the assistant director of the International Quilt Museum (2007-2012). Her work as an educator and her early years as a librarian are evident in the quilts. As small teaching tools, they are “… like the pages of a book,” says Caron—each one telling a story distinct from, yet connected with, each of the others.

Blue images in each of these quilts were created through the cyanotype process discovered in 1842 by English scientist Sir John Hershel. The process involves treating cloth or paper with a solution of two chemicals (ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide) that, when exposed to ultra-violet light, develop an intense blue color, also called Prussian blue. To create images, one places either objects or film positives/negatives on the treated material. These prevent light from activating the chemicals and thereby produce negative images of themselves.