By KATHY MCKIMMIE
Antique Week Correpondent

This is the year of the quilt according to the American Folk Art Museum in New York. Quilts: Masterworks from the American Folk Art Museum is the name of the museum’s current exhibition and the book that accompanies it by Elizabeth V. Warren, Rizzoli International Publications, 2010.

Some 200 quilts from the museum’s collection are featured in the book spanning 300 years. Warren reviews the trends of the 20th century starting with Colonial Revival quilts. Next were the bright pastels and commercial quilt patterns of the early 1900s through 1940s that brought many of the best-known patterns and variations, including appliqués, Double Wedding ring and Dresden plate. Interest faded a bit until the craft movement in the 1960s recognized the value of handwork, and museums began showcasing quilts in the 1970s. The nation’s Bicentennial also resurrected quilt themes from our past — and stars and eagles were plentiful. The last trend noted by Warren is the growth of the art quilt in the late 20th century.

Quilts from patterns and kits
Marie Webster, Marion, Ind., took up quilting at 50, with her first quilt based on a traditional Rose of Sharon appliqué pattern. Soon she was designing appliqué quilts of her own that were shown in Ladies Home Journal in 1911, the same year she began selling mail-order patterns. Her book, Quilts: Their History and How to Make Them, 1915, increased demand and led to the establishment of her Practical Patchwork Company, which sold mail-order patterns as well as kits, tops and finished quilts.

In his 2009 book, American Quilts: The Democratic Art, 1780-2007, Sterling Publishing Co., Robert Shaw features Webster and her designs in his chapter on quilts from 1910-1940. “Webster was a classicist who brought a new sense of style to American quiltmaking,” he said, “effectively bringing mainstream quiltmakers out of the Victorian era and in line with more current design trends.” He describes her work as technically flawless and her pastel appliqué designs, which favored central medallions, as “straight forward,” “spare,” “restrained” and reflecting Arts and Crafts ideals.

Many of Marie Webster’s own quilts are in the collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

Marie and George Webster’s home in Marion was designated a National Historic Landmark by the National Park Service in 1993. Called the Marie Webster House, it is open to the public and since 2004 has served as headquarters for The Quilters Hall of Fame, which was established in 1979 during the Continental Quilting Congress in Arlington, Va., founded by Hazel Carter.

Following the success of Marie Webster’s efforts, hundreds of newspapers across the country began publishing quilt designs, and other pattern and kit companies formed. In 1929, quilt batting manufacturer Mountain Mist, part of Cincinnati-based Stearns & Foster, printed its first pattern on a batting wrapper. The ’30s and ’40s were hot decades for quilting and at one time more than 130 Mountain Mist patterns were in print.

Quilts as Art

The year 1971 was pivotal for raising the quilt to art status and for boosting the quilt market. The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, exhibited 60 quilts in Abstract Design in American Quilts, from the collection of Jonathan Holstein and Gail van der Hoof, made from the late 19th century into the 1950s.

The show is the reference point when folks speak of the quilt revival of the ’70s and ’80s. It caused people to think of quilts hanging on walls in a new way — as much modern art as some paintings, not just as bedcovers. Holstein and van der Hoof were inducted into The Quilters Hall of Fame in 1979 — its inaugural year.

The Whitney exhibited quilts are now part of the Jonathan Holstein Collection at The International Quilt Study Center & Museum at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

The center houses the largest publicly held quilt collection in the world — more than 3,500 from the early 1700s to the present. Its collection is just a computer keyboard away, with about 2,800 of its quilts fully searchable by date, pattern, region, exhibition (such as the Whitney Show) and by its donor collections. It was founded in 1997 with the donation of nearly 1,000 quilts from Ardis and Robert James, Nebraska natives living in New York who collected since the 1970s. Their additional financial assistance helped build the center’s Quilt House, opened in 2008. The couple will be inducted into The Quilters Hall of Fame in July.

There have been many museum exhibitions since 1971 that featured quilts as art. Those highlighting Amish quilts — that are particularly bold, graphic, colorful and ideal as wall hangings — helped create a decorating craze in the ’70s and ’80s and boosted their price into the thousands. A Gallery of Amish Quilts, by Robert Bishop and Elizabeth Safanda, Dutton, 1976, helped fuel the interest.

The Holstein Collection at The International Quilt Study Center & Museum includes 100 Amish quilts from Lancaster County, Pa., and the Midwest collected in the 1970s.

Quilts by African-American women of Alabama began to get notice in the late 1960s, and captured the attention of Robert Cargo, quilt collector and professor emeritus of the University of Alabama, around 1980. More than 150 African-American quilts were added to The International Quilt Study Center’s holdings in 2000, called the Robert and Helen Cargo Collection. Most of them are from the fourth quarter of the 20th century.

The Quilts of Gee’s Bend, first exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in 2002 before moving to the Whitney and several other museums, is a better-known collection of African-American quilts from Alabama. They were from The William Arnett Collection of the Tinwood Alliance. Two books accompanied the exhibit, published by Tinwood Media, detailing the lives and quilts of dozens of African-American women from the second half of the 20th century. Another round of exhibitions of Gee’s Bend quilts from the same source toured museums from 2006 to 2008.

It’s easy to imagine a driver on a rural Alabama road screeching to a halt when seeing a row of these wonderful quilts hanging on a line to dry. They have been described as abstract, bold, asymmetric, modernist, minimalist, exhilarating, stunning — and more.