Brief History of Contemporary Art Quilts

How Quilting Went from Homespun Craft to Museum-Worthy Fine Art

Oct 6, 2009

Art quilts are quite a recent development in the centuries-long history of quilting. Here is the story of how quilts went from bed tops to gallery and museum walls.

Early quilters thought of themselves as crafters, not artists. After all, quilts were made for just one purpose: to keep people warm while they slept.

While the women who created quilts in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries clearly loved beauty and went to great efforts to make their quilts beautiful, the idea of making quilts purely for show instead of comfort didn’t take root until the late Victorian era, when making crazy quilts became a fashionable hobby for well-to-do women.

Crazy Quilts, the First Art Quilts

Crazy quilts consist of irregular pieces of fabric, often scraps from an important piece of clothing such as a wedding dress, christening gown, or military uniform. The scraps were sewn in a seemingly haphazard collage to a foundation paper or fabric, then heavily embellished with embroidery, painting, buttons, photographs, beads, and other trinkets. Photo 4 at the bottom of the page shows a typical crazy quilt from the Victorian era.

Like contemporary art quilts, crazy quilts were made primarily to look at, not to keep someone warm. Most crazy quilts were made without a middle layer of batting because they were intended to be displayed on a piano top or over the back of a chair. But the typical Victorian crazy quilter had no formal training in art or design. And no one thought of crazy quilts as serious art. When crazy quilting fell out of fashion in the 1920s, quilting returned to its practical obscurity until the great American quilting revival that began in the years leading to the American bicentennial in 1976.

Formally Trained Artists Discover Art Quilting

The flowering of interest in America’s craft heritage introduced a generation of women (and a few men) who had been formally trained in the fine arts to the craft of quilting. Some of those quilters noticed that fabric made a wonderful medium for the techniques they had learned in art school.

Pioneer art quilters like Jean Ray Laury and Radka Donnell began making quilts as art and introducing other quilters to the idea that it was possible to make quilts whose whole purpose was to create an esthetic experience.

Rejection by Fine Arts and Quilting Worlds

The early art quilters met with stiff resistance from both the quilting and arts communities. Art galleries refused to show art quilts because quilting was viewed as a lowly craft, “women’s work,” not worthy of serious artistic consideration.

Quilt shows refused to accept art quilts because they didn’t limit themselves to traditional styles of piecing, appliqué, and stitchery.

First Quilt National Art Quilt Show in 1978

Quilt artist Nancy Crow was asked to teach a quilting class at a new cultural arts center in Athens, Ohio, in the United States. Knowing how hard it had been for her and other art quilters to find venues to show their work, she suggested an art quilt exhibit instead. The first Quilt National exhibit of art quilts was held in an abandoned barn in 1978, and showed 56 innovative quilts that took traditional quilt materials and techniques in some startling new directions.

While art quilts still faced a long uphill battle for acceptance after that first exhibit, the movement to create quilts as fine art proved unstoppable. Interest in textile art spread around the world, particularly to Australia, Canada, Germany, and Japan. The most recent Quilt National exhibit in 2009 featured art quilts from 25 American states and 13 countries.

Art Quilting Reaches the Big Time in Twenty-First Century

Today, art quilts have definitely hit the mainstream. American art museums drew large crowds for an exhibit of quilt art by women from Gee’s Bend, Alabama. Major quilt shows such as the International Quilt Festival in the United States or the Tokyo International Great Quilt Festival award major prizes to art quilts. Artists such as Ruth B. McDowell, Nancy Crow, Paula Nadelstern, and Ricky Tims exhibit art quilts in museums and galleries around the world. In 2009, Paula Nadelstern became the first contemporary quilt artist to have her work featured in a solo show exhibit at the American Folk Art Museum in New York City.

Today, more and more quilters are proud to call themselves art quilters, and art quilting has become a large and growing part of the quilting universe.

The copyright of the article Brief History of Contemporary Art Quilts in Quilting is owned by Christine Mann. Permission to republish Brief History of Contemporary Art Quilts in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.