By: Susan Price Miller 

Lucile and Ben Taylor filled their two-story brick house in Fairfield, Iowa, with numerous collections and saved letters, photographs, and clippings on many subjects. After their deaths, the ephemera that Lucile assembled pertaining to quilts and the two special friends who shared her interest in the subject came into the author’s possession. This study surveys the Taylor archives to uncover information about how Lillian Walker, Maxine Teele and Lucile Taylor influenced each other’s quilt activities after the late 1950s.

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The Threads of a Friendship: Lillian Walker, Maxine Teele and Lucile Taylor  »

By: Melanie McKay and Maaja Stewart 

The exhibit of Gee’s Bend quilts has brought into focus a number of attitudes held by African American quilters in the Deep South toward cloth-wealth. Everyday textile works are valued because they “materialize memory”: they transmit skills, family history, and palpable reminders of individuals whose clothes are recycled into “covers.” These attitudes, we argue, create a complex relationship with commodity value in the dominant culture – value that is always part of museum display of objects designated “art.”

We examine the meaning of such cloth-wealth by placing Gee’s Bend quilts in the context of memories of slave quilts in the Deep South frontier communities.

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“The Tradition of Old People’s Ways”: Gee’s Bend Quilts and Slave Quilts of the Deep South  »

By: Heather Cadogan 

This paper examines the way in which artistic value is assigned to objects, specifically focusing on Amish quilts made between the years 1890 and 1940. Created as utilitarian objects and made almost exclusively by women, they are now viewed as artistic creations and have been compared with abstract paintings of the twentieth century, to which they are visually similar.

This paper compares the two and finds that while Amish quilts and abstract art share many aesthetic similarities and some similarities in philosophical origin,

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Artistic Creation: Amish Quilts and Abstract Art  »

By: Colleen Hall-Patton 

Jean Ray Laury, a designer and author since the early 1960s, contributed to the creation and evolution of the current quilt revival which involves twenty million people in the U.S. and many more worldwide. Laury’s work and writings questioned the assumed relationship between gender and art and valorized everyday life. She offered alternatives to mass consumption and commercialization, and legitimized women’s creative choices through an art form considered both quintessentially female and American.

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Jean Ray Laury in the 1960s: Foremother of a Quilt Revival  »

By: Claire Somersille Nolan

The Star of Bethlehem Variation Quilt at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City was made by Aunt Ellen and Aunt Margaret, slaves of Marmaduke Beckwith Morton at “The Knob” in Russellville, Logan County, Kentucky. Very few quilts identified as being made by slaves exist. Even fewer of these quilts possess documentation identifying the slave by name as is the case with this quilt. The data regarding this rare quilt and its makers adds valuable information to the body of facts concerning antebellum quilt history.

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The Star of Bethlehem Variation Quilt at The Metropolitan Museum of Art  »

By: Anita B. Loscalzo 

Inventors developed the first sewing machines for commercial use, but quickly marketed them to the public-at-large in the early 1850s. Women took advantage of the time saved from the use of sewing machines for the production of household items to produce more quilts. Some utilized sewing machines for appliqué, some for piecing, and some for quilting. Women took great pride in their sewing machines at first, but by the late nineteenth century the machines’

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The History of the Sewing Machine and Its Use in Quilting in the United States  »

By: Marian Ann J. Montgomery and A. Charlene Orr 

The Lawrence farmstead in Mesquite, Texas, provides a microcosm of the lives of Texas women and the environment in which they made quilts from 1890-1955. This study of 27 surviving quilts of the Lawrence women is unique because so much is known about these women and their quilting from family letters, photographs, household goods, quilts, and fabric scraps which survive intact on their farmstead.

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Quilted Gems by the Jewels of the Lawrence Family  »