Exhibition Review: What That Quilt Knows About Me
Written by Olivia K. Hall
American Folk Art Museum, New York, NY
March 17, 2023- October 29, 2023
In an exhibition titled What That Quilts Know About Me, the American Folk Art Museum in New York has filled three of its four galleries with thirty-five American quilts from its permanent collection spanning the late eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. The introduction text to the exhibition begins with an anonymous quotation— contributing the exhibition’s namesake— from a needleworker and carries on to cast quilts as “history keepers” and “collections of intimate stories.” It is clear that the mission of the exhibition is grounded in empowering the quilts as objects through a framework of biography, archive, and the personal. In pursuing this methodology, I found the exhibition to be quite successful. The diversity of the types of quilts, their techniques, and materials on display is provocative, and as a sampler of the unconventional history and possibilities of quiltmaking, strikes down many pejorative connotations around and assumptions of the form, enabling a freshened scholarship and perspective for museum visitors. It is unfortunate that we cannot know the quilter behind the namesake of the exhibition, who once said, “My whole life is in that quilt… I tremble sometimes when I remember what that quilt knows about me,” for her words have imprinted a deeply personal association and catalyzed a profound interpretation of the lives of our material culture as it is made and lives with us.
The three galleries are organized into thematic sections: Narrative Threads, Reinventing Tradition, and The Personal and The Political, as well as the entry hall, which is composed of six American quilts supporting the introduction text. These quilts have been well selected for inaugurating the exhibition; there is a geometric Amish quilt, a quilt composed of hundreds of miniature hexagons, a narrative quilt with nods to contemporaneous popular culture such as horse racing, and another depicting scenes from the “sacret bible” (intended to be sacred, or secret, we cannot know) and a quilt covered with hand embroidered personal names in gratitude for charitable donations. This introduction charts the time consuming and laborious nature of quilt making, the literal and enigmatic personal affects of its materiality, and a formal possibility expanded beyond brutalist geometry and unorthodox narrative.
Each quilt in the exhibition has its own interpretive label which shares aspects of its maker, the culture and location it came from, and the technique used to produce it. Such diverse topics and histories are broached as African American slavery in the United States, Japanese kimono and origami, quilts made in wartime by male soldiers, and contemporary works made of unconventional materials like condoms and everyday trash. The labels are succinct, revealing, and invite the challenging of perspectives. By attributing short form interpretive labels to each quilt, the exhibition encourages discovery and autonomous visitor pathways that do not negate the intentions of the exhibition or the power of the objects. The uninhibited flowpath upholds the ideological goal of the curatorial arrangement and voice. The more your movement is randomized, the greater depth of interrelatedness and connectivity between quilts is reached.
The exhibition presents a dual focus on what the formal and visual elements of the quilt– color, shape, material, narrative motif, abstraction– and the individuals whose labor has been embedded into the material can share, ultimately proving the strength of the symbiosis between the making and the made. The quilts on display, and the way they have been written about and arranged, is a testament to material culture, what our objects “know” about us as they have been made or used in progression with our own lives. Above all, the curatorial intention is concerned with the singular individuality of each quilt over what the quilt may contribute to a larger discourse, theme, or narrative which is always at risk of obscuring the inherent truth of the biography in and of the object.
The first thematic arrangement, coalesced together through the heading ‘Narrative Threads,’ investigates picture-making and storytelling in quilts, in nonlinear and literal formats. The accompanying text also acknowledges the biographies that the fibers and materials of the quilts can share with us, and asserts that the physical preservation and lasting of the quilts is an important story of its own– asking us to question who has cared for the quilt, and how? A quilt of pieced silk by tailor Carl Klewicke made for his adopted daughter is put in dialogue with a Noah’s Ark Quilt from the same time period vested with the individuality of its maker in its playfulness of scale and texture of the depicted animals. The second segmentation of the exhibition ‘Reinventing Tradition’ appreciates the legacy of quiltmaking by placing the tradition in conversation with twentieth and twenty-first century contemporary works, and in tandem challenges the characterization of utilitarian function or domestic necessity of quilts. The quilts in this section have been made from unexpected materials, such as leftover takeaway containers, ticket stubs, plastic bags, and decorative materials such as sequins, feathers, and metallic threads. Two miniature figurative works by Ray Materson, completed during a prison sentence served in the 1990s and made with the threads of unraveled socks, are flanked, on one side, by a 1937 crochet quilt by Kate Clayton “Granny” Donaldson that interrogates artistic creation through utilitarian technique, and on the other side, by a large kaleidoscope quilt made within the spatial constraints of a small New York City apartment by Paula Nadelstern in 1996. These works prove the quiltmaking techniques as shipshafters, adaptable, and expressive, and write a shift away from traditional thinking about quilts, craft, and artistry. The final room, home to the thematic ‘The Personal and The Political’ acknowledges many of the untold, unheard, or unrecorded histories of the quilters— who were historically predominantly women— and the contexts in which they were made. The quilts in this section recognize the power of the makers and in many cases, the power of the perseverance of a craft, skill, and labor through conditions of hardship, injustice, and uncertainty. The label of a quilt made in 1850 reckons with the realities of misattributed quiltmakers, asking how often the labor of Black seamstresses has been overlooked, and shares what little is known about the quilt’s possible makers, Ellen Morton LittleJohn and Margaret Morton, who lived and worked on a Kentucky plantation.
The impact of the exhibition is formidable, and influential, as the particular success of the exhibition is in announcing, and proving, the power of the makers of the quilts and the power of the quilts themselves as material objects. It is also exciting, as it does not enmesh its visitors in a rigid narrative flowpath. Rather, exploration is demanded. By allowing the quilts to be veritable biographers, to speak for themselves as emotionally charged and intellectually commanding histories capable of capturing the delicate, intimate, nuances of their makers and owners, the conceptual framework for exhibiting such species of works has been revitalized through a personal and experiential lens.