{"id":67642,"date":"2025-12-11T09:29:06","date_gmt":"2025-12-11T09:29:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/67642\/"},"modified":"2025-12-11T09:29:06","modified_gmt":"2025-12-11T09:29:06","slug":"exhibit-explores-the-stories-behind-the-quilts-in-the-uws-american-folk-art-museums-collection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/67642\/","title":{"rendered":"Exhibit Explores the Stories Behind the Quilts in the UWS American Folk Art Museum’s Collection"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>\u201cAn Ecology of Quilts\u201d is on display at the American Folk Art Museum through March 1. Photos by Olya Vysotskaya, courtesy of the American Folk Art Museum.<\/p>\n

By Tracy Zwick<\/p>\n

On a recent Monday at the American Folk Art Museum \u2014 currently wedged between construction scaffolding and the holiday bustle of Lincoln Center \u2014\u00a0 the handful of galleries that house \u201cAn Ecology of Quilts: The Natural History of American Textiles<\/a>\u201d were quiet. The museum\u2019s closed to the public on Mondays, but the show\u2019s co-curator, Austin Losada, was there, standing before a blue-and-white \u201cPillar Print Wholecloth<\/a>\u201d quilt.<\/p>\n

From a distance, this early 19th-century quilt seemed modest compared with the more obviously ambitious patchwork on display nearby. In just two principal colors, it features stacked architectural columns in vertical stripes surrounded by flowering vines and leaves. The design is rendered in indigo, against a soft cream background. Losada explained that the indigo was likely exotic, perhaps imported from India, and would\u2019ve been expensive \u2013 even if it came from South Carolina, where the indigo crop was referred to as \u201cblue gold.\u201d<\/p>\n

The soft, celestial blue of the floral lattice and grand architectural elements visitors see belies the grueling, dangerous labor that was required to harvest, process and render indigo usable for quilting. \u201cThe blue wouldn\u2019t exist without the often brutal labor it took to cultivate indigo,\u201d said Losada, nor would the cloth itself exist without cotton, a cash crop that built American wealth while obscuring the human cost behind it.<\/p>\n

That juxtaposition \u2014 beauty that rests on a painful past \u2014 is the point of this show, which gathers just 30 quilts from the museum\u2019s more than 600-piece collection. Losada and co-curator Emilie Gevalt hope visitors will see the exhibition as not just a collection of beautiful and useful objects, but as the products of global trade, land use, and the often uncredited hands that made them.<\/p>\n

But this isn\u2019t a lecture of a show. It\u2019s a seductively edifying and quietly eye-popping exhibition. The quilts are like portals, transporting viewers into the imagined historical worlds from which they came.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Gee\u2019s Bend quilts, such as the Pinwheel Variation (center), were stitched by Black quilters whose work was rooted in the legacy of slavery.<\/p>\n

Visitors familiar with quilting might recognize a black-and-yellow \u201cPinwheel Variation Quilt<\/a>\u201d by Malissia Pettway in a gallery dedicated to \u201cEconomy and Excess.\u201d Pettway, a mid-20th century artist from Gee\u2019s Bend, Alabama, belonged to a community of mostly Black quilters whose work, rooted in the legacy of slavery, transformed a local craft into celebrated American art. Losada explained that Pettway may not have had access to enough fabric in the same shade of yellow to keep the design uniform. Look closely and you\u2019ll see what Losada said were probably salvaged scraps in subtly variegated yellows, some of which he suggested could\u2019ve come from a family member\u2019s athletic garment.<\/p>\n

Gee\u2019s Bend quilters, including several in the Pettway family, often worked in the fields, walking to and from their labors with pencil and paper, jotting down things that caught their eye. They quilted with what was available, and that resourcefulness produced some of the most contemporary, innovative art of\u00a0 the last century. \u201cAn Ecology of Quilts\u201d is the rare show that draws attention as much to the materials of production as the creators, and historical framing of the objects on view.<\/p>\n

While the show includes mostly American artists, it weaves in a few international designs. \u201cAjjiro-Moyo<\/a>\u201d (1995), a herringbone-motif patchwork quilt in dark browns and blues, is a contemporary work by the Japanese artist Tomie Nagano \u2013 the only living artist represented in the show. The curators included it because it reinforces the \u201cintense association between quilters and reusing scrap fabric to create something brilliant and new,\u201d according to Losada. Nagano, who works in Massachusetts, scavenges and rescues antique Japanese fabrics, linking them to create a \u201csort of record of Japanese textile production in the 19th and 20th centuries,\u201d Losada explained.<\/p>\n

Though not a quilter himself, Losada, 28, speaks about these objects with the attention and zeal of an aficionado. His own favorite object in the show, and the one he\u2019d take home if he could, is one a visitor could easily miss: the 19th-century \u201cTied Patchwork Quilt and Overshot Coverlet<\/a>\u201d from Virginia or Maryland, which looks \u2014 at first glance \u2014 like it might\u2019ve been made from men\u2019s flannel pajamas.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s so me,\u201d Losada smiled, pointing to the quilt\u2019s humble jumble of squares and stripes, plaids and earth-toned solids. The quilt is reversible, patched on one side and backed with a woven coverlet on the other, a kind of 19th-century two-for-one. \u201cIt\u2019s not perfect, and it\u2019s not meant to be a show-stopper,\u201d he said. He suspects it may have been made in the aftermath of the Civil War, when families repurposed whatever remained intact, \u201cre-using family clothing and blankets \u2013 anything to create another patch.\u201d<\/p>\n

If you\u2019d prefer a show-stopper, there\u2019s one hanging a few steps away from Losada\u2019s quilt: \u201cAdam and Eve in the Garden of Eden<\/a>,\u201d a mid-19th-century quilt attributed to a member of the Sinclair family of Vermont. In it, Eve encounters a serpent, finds the apple, and hands it to Adam under a moonlit sky stitched with stars, the Garden rendered in folk-art florals. It appears simple enough from afar, classic yet folksy. But look closely at the off-white background to see white-on-white stitched hearts above the figures\u2019 heads, and elaborate stitching throughout. Notice the slight pink outlining on the red central figures, and the reused bits of patterned fabric.<\/p>\n

Returning to the \u201cPillar Print\u201d quilt on the way out, Losada noted why columns made sense as a design motif in the early 1800s. \u201cWe were still a nascent republic,\u201d he explained, \u201cfounding ourselves on progressive ideals oriented in the classical world.\u201d The column is a \u201cvisual foundation\u201d for such ideals. And yet the materials used to make most of these quilts had ecological and social consequences that aren\u2019t often considered in museum settings.<\/p>\n

According to Losada, An Ecology of Quilts is simply a \u201csampler platter\u201d meant to encourage visitors to \u201cthink beyond dazzling surface pattern and the maker.\u201d You can enjoy a taste of the show through March 1st. The American Folk Art Museum is always free.<\/p>\n

Subscribe to West Side Rag\u2019s FREE email newsletter\u00a0here<\/a>. And you can Support the Rag\u00a0here.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cAn Ecology of Quilts\u201d is on display at the American Folk Art Museum through March 1. Photos by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":67643,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[35145,35146,75,84,83,1298,9,24,63],"class_list":{"0":"post-67642","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-manhattan","8":"tag-american-folk-art-museum","9":"tag-art-exhibits","10":"tag-manhattan","11":"tag-manhattan-headlines","12":"tag-manhattan-news","13":"tag-museum","14":"tag-new-york","15":"tag-new-york-city","16":"tag-nyc"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67642"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67642\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/67643"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}