New online exhibition at Shelburne Museum binds twenty works of art spanning two centuries
Caroline Carpenter Smith Persons (Northfield, Vermont, 1835-1902), Appliqué and Pieced Sunflower Quilt, 1860-80. Cotton, 77 3/4 x 85 1/2 in. Gift of Ethel Smith Washburn. 1987-19.
SHELBURNE, VT
.-Shelburne Museum presents 20 textile masterpieces dating from the first decades of the 1800s to the turn of the 21st century in the newest online exhibition, Pattern & Purpose: American Quilts from Shelburne Museum. The online exhibition opened Thursday, January 28.
Pattern & Purpose explores objects that expand our sense of what art can be, and recognize how invention and discovery can be found in the most familiar of places, said Associate Curator Katie Wood Kirchhoff who organized the exhibition. Today, quilt-making is recognized as an art form in its own right, revealing makers skills and personal visions from complex geometric designs that would feel at home in a gallery of pop art
AAHD Professor and Museum Curator Honored by American Folklore Society
MacDowell is the Curator of Folk Arts and Quilt Studies at the MSU Museum. Her research interests include South African quiltmaking; traditions of patchwork covers in China; quilts and health; the history and meaning of lau hala in Hawaiian cultural history; folk arts, social justice, and education; and the intersection of ethnography and museums in a digital age. She is the Director of the award-winning Quilt Index, a digital repository of stories, images, and other data related to quilts around the world, a project of MSU’s Matrix: Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences.