Kiracofe - Unconventional and Unexpected: American Quilts

Four Patch, variation (double-sided)

c.19501975
Full caption on .

Unknown String
(unfinished top)

(Back on )
c.19501975
Found in Missouri
COTTON, BLENDS. FOUNDATION-PIECED BY MACHINE AND BY HAND
82 x 67 inches (208 x 170 cm)

Original Design (back)

c.19251965
Full caption on .

With deep gratitude, this book is dedicated to Jennifer, Jack, Jason & Raymond

String with Grid

c.19501975
Found in Alabama
COTTON. PIECED
84 x 64 inches (213 x 162.5 cm)

Original Design

c.19251965
(Detail, full caption on )

At age twenty-one, my girlfriend and I found our way to Los Angeles. We didnt have many things from home but she brought a quilt an aunt in Wisconsin had made and placed it on our bed. While I grew up in the Midwest, this was the first quilt I had ever seen. It was a sweet quilt with pastel colors, plain and printed cotton butterflies appliqud on a white background, and outline-embroidered with black yarn and a yellow binding. It wasnt an outstanding quilt but I remember being enamored by the idea that it had been handmade by a woman. In some ways, it was a daily reminder of my maternal grandmother and the time I had spent watching her sew as a child and young adult. My girlfriend and I slept under the quilt her aunt had made; it decorated our bed and room; we put it in the washer and dryer; it became worn and ragged and finally began to fall apart. Essentially, we used it up.

The following year I was in the home of a teacher I would be assisting at Pacific Oaks College in Pasadena, California, and was surprised to see a textile hanging on her wall. It wasnt one of the hippie bedspreads I had often seen adorning the beds or dorm room walls of fellow students back in Bloomington, Indiana. Instead, my instructor had chosen to make an unfinished Log Cabin quilt top she had found at a yard sale for five or ten dollars the focal point of her living room wall. Her quilt top was sewn of silks and satins and probably velvet and cotton in dark colorsblack, brown, maroonwith some lighter colors sprinkled throughout. At the time, I didnt know the pattern or the materials or that it was unfinished, but what I could appreciate subconsciously was that what she was doing was in some ways subversive. She had taken something destined for a bed and used for warmth and comfort and reimagined it as a piece of art for her wall. Moving the quilt from the surface of a bed to the wall allowed me to consider this art form in a radically new way and the act effectively disrupted my understanding of how I could think about, and interact with, this curious and beautiful object.

Two years later, another quilt, in a different home, caught my interest. This time, it was at my boyfriend Michael Kiles house in Yellow Springs, Ohio. I had moved back to the Midwest to work as a social worker but my passion for the field quickly dissipated. After visiting country auctions and having long and exciting conversations about quilts and antiques, I noticed that a much more sustainable fire was burning within me and it was for the world of the handmade, the quilt.

A year later, realizing that a quilt business might be a viable enterprise, Michael and I stumbled upon Doug and Jacqueline Eichhorns space in Centerville, Indiana. Centerville was one of those quintessential nineteenth-century American towns with dozens of small, independently owned shops lining the street. Although these shops and towns pepper the American landscape, the Eichhorns 150-year-old stone building was different. Inside those stone walls were stark white, gallery walls and lighting one would normally find in a much larger city gallery. The Eichhorns had an eye for the unique and different and they created a serene space where visitors were held in a state of reverence for the treasures they had displayed. Ill never forget their display of tied comforters and quilt tops; these quilts were not perfect but had found a state of perfection in their quirkiness. Michael and I spent hours in their space looking at and examining what they had for sale and eventually the quilts from their walls, channeled through us, found their way to a contemporary art gallery in Los Angeles and to various corporate art collections around the country.

Needless to say, our curiosity went into overdrive and Michael and I drove the four corners of Ohio seeking out dealers and pickers who specialized in finding quilts. We began to establish a network and then extended our search into Indiana. During that time, we went to every farm auction we could find that listed quilts for sale. We touched and unfolded thousands of quilts from a variety of time periods. While we were looking for workmanship and form and construction, we relied on our senses, too. If feelings of joy and excitement rose up within us when a quilt was turned multiple times, we knew we had found something unique and very special.

As our inventory grew and our network expanded, our journey moved from Indiana into Pennsylvania, New York, the rest of New England, and finally a relocation to San Francisco in 1978. Our lives at the time were not organized by a traditional nine-to-five schedule. Instead, we followed our gut and would move between the worlds of the best dealers in New York City one morning to a pickers home in Pennsylvania later that night, always searching for those perfect pieces.

Once established in California, we began intersecting with the many quilt guilds surrounding the Bay Area, antique quilt collectors across the country, quilt history groups like the American Quilt Study Group, and contemporary quiltmakers. Michael and I began to realize that the conversations happening in the worlds of antique quilts and the contemporary quiltmakers needed to be organized, documented, and published in a single, accessible space. In 1983 we created and published the first edition of The Quilt Digest, an annual publication featuring thoroughly researched and well-written articles on quilt history alongside beautifully reproduced images of contemporary and antique quilts.

In each edition of The Quilt Digest, I curated a section called Showcase that juxtaposed spectacular antique quilts with traditionally made contemporary quilts and quilts created by their makers to be viewed as art objects. Shortly after presenting my first Showcase, I began receiving letters and phone calls from quilt collectors all over America sharing how surprised and delighted they were to see these juxtapositions and confiding in me that, while they loved antique quilts, theyd never spent much time considering the contemporary quilt movement. Made with the intention to hang on the wall as art, the works of the Art Quilt movement were being made by artists who had left traditional fine art practices and had turned to quilting techniques as their main medium, while other makers were self-taught. It goes without saying that this was an exciting time in the quilt world and I was honored to not only be creating the platform where these two distinct spheres intersected but also participating in and contributing to the dialogue happening all across the country.