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Advisory Council

Pre-dating the present Advisory Council was a National Support Committee whose members provided key funding and assistance to The Alliance in a variety of ways. They made monetary contributions, hosted and attended fund-raising events, and lent their names as visible backers of The Alliance and its work. Members included Phyllis George, crafts advocate and television personality; Alan Jabbour, Former Director of the Library of Congress American Folklife Center; Allison Ledes, editor of Antiques magazine; Eleanor Bingham Miller, philanthropist; Marsha Norman, playwright; Sally Jessy Raphael, television and radio talk show personality; Miriam Schapiro, internationally known fiber artist; and Gerard Wertkin, former Director of the American Folk Art Museum.

The current Advisory Council for The Alliance for American Quilts is a group of dedicated individuals around the country who also share the vision of The Alliance, provide advice and counsel in their areas of expertise, and help with networking and sources of financial support for The Alliance and its projects. Advisory Council members are ambassadors for The Alliance's mission.

Current Members of the Advisory Council

Biographies of Advisory Council Members

Tess Harper hails from Arkansas and attended Arkansas State University at Beebe where she had leading roles in musicals. She began acting in theater production and theme parks and was discovered while doing theater work in Dallas, Texas. She was also involved with Southwest Missouri State University's Tent Theatre in Springfield, Missouri. Tess Harper was nominated for both the Academy Award and two Golden Gloves. In addition to a distinguished list of film credits, she is an avid collector of quilts.

Bernard L. Herman is the Edward and Elizabeth Rosenberg Professor of Art and Art History and former Director of the Center for American Material Culture Studies at the University of Delaware.  He also serves on the faculty of the School of Urban Affairs, Department of History, and Winterthur Program in Early American Culture.  His books include Architecture and Rural Life in Central Delaware, 7100-1900 (1987) and The Stolen House (1992) both winners of the Abbott Lowell Cummings Award for the best published work on North American Vernacular architecture.  Other books include A Land and Life Remembered: American Liberian Folk Architecture (1989) with Svend Holsoe and Max Belcher, Everyday Architecture of the Mid Atlantic (1997) with Gabrielle M. Lanier, and the forthcoming Town House.  Recognized for Excellence in Teaching, he offers courses in traditional architecture and landscapes, historic preservation, and folk and outsider arts.

Alan Jabbour served from 1976 through 1999 as the founding director of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. Previously, he was founding director of the new grant-giving program in folk arts for the National Endowment for the Arts (1974-76), and head of the Archive of Folk Song (now the Archive of Folk Culture) at the Library of Congress (1969-74). He has published widely on the subject of folklore and is a frequent lecturer on topics relating to folklife, folk music, and cultural policy. He received an M.A. and a Ph.D. from Duke University. He has now retired from federal service and spends his time writing, lecturing, concertizing, and consulting on programs related to folklore, folk music, and cultural policy.

Deener Matthews has always had a love of art and crafts. Originally from Highland Park, Illinois and early life in Washington, D.C., she graduated from Rollins College with a degree in General Human Relations. She and her husband, Daniel Paul Matthews, an Episcopal priest, served two missions in the Cumberland Plateau where they were fascinated with and collected art by Fannie Mennon of Plum Nelly, Tennessee, and other regional craftspeople. They began to gather quilts and woven and carved pieces by local artists and continue a fascination with crafts of people of the world where they have traveled. In 1969, she and her husband acquired 250 acres of high mountain meadow land on the edge of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, built a road, brought up five hand-hewn log buildings, and constructed the main building at The Swag which they converted into The Swag Country Inn in 1982. Each room is decorated with hand-made quilts and original art by crafts people from the area. This is Deener Matthew's 25th season as innkeeper.

Yvonne Porcella has been teaching quilt techniques since the early 1970s. She is founder and past president of Studio Art Quilt Associates, and currently serves on the Advisory Board of the International Quilt Study Center, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, as well as the Board of Directors of The Alliance. She is the author of nine books, a member of the Quilters Hall of Fame, and a Silver Star honoree of the International Quilt Association. Her art quilts have been acquired by major museums in the U.S. including The Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution.

Arturo Alonzo Sandoval is a Full Professor at the University of Kentucky Department of Art. Known internationally for his innovative weavings and mixed media art quilts. Sandoval combines pattern, text, and symbolic forms into unique graphic and colorful art expressions. He pursues the cutting edge, transforming recycled industrial high tech pliable materials employing either a floor loom, sewing machine, interlacing or collage processes. His teaching and creative efforts have been awarded two NEA Visual Arts Fellowships, two Kentucky Arts Council Al Smith Visual Arts Fellowships, two Kentucky Arts Council Al Smith Visual Arts Professional grants, the RUDE OSOLNIK Craftsman Award, and the 2003 Governor's Award in the Arts: Artist Award. His fiber art is collected in such major museums as the Museum of Modern Art, NYC, Smithsonian Institute-Renwick Gallery, and the J.B. Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY, and numerous corporations, banks, public and private collections. During the past 33 years his fiber art has been published in several books including: Beyond Weaving, Fiber Soft Sculpture, Vietnam: Reflexes and Reflections, Interlacing, Celebrating the Stitch, International CRAFTS, The Art Quilt, The Quilt, Imagery on Fabric, The Surface Designers Art, Arturo Alonzo Sandoval: A Retrospective, many fiber art and craft exhibition catalogs, and journals including American Craft Magazine, Fiberarts Magazine, and Surface Design Journal.

Merikay Waldvogel is a researcher, writer, and curator of quilt-related history and has lectured extensively on quilts, especially those from the Depression era. She was the co-director of Quilts of Tennessee, a state documentation project, which resulted in a traveling exhibition and publication. She has curated exhibitions for museums, as well as traveling companies, and has written numerous articles on quilt research. She was a founding member of the American Quilt Defense Fund and served on the Board of Directors of the American Quilt Study Group. She received her B.A. in French from Monmouth College and an M.A. in Linguistics from the University of Michigan.

Shelly Zegart was a founding director of The Kentucky Quilt Project Inc. (1981) and The Alliance for American Quilts (1993). She has curated exhibitions here and abroad, lectured on all aspects of quilt history and aesthetics, and written numerous articles. She was an organizer of "Louisville Celebrates the American Quilt" a group of events, exhibitions and publications planned to illustrate and further the developments in the field over the twenty years between 1971-1991. Her book, American Quilt Collections: Antique Quilt Masterpieces was published in 1997. Most recent exhibitions, publications and consulting projects include Kentucky Quilts: Roots and Wings, Morehead College, Kentucky (1998); A Heritage of Genius: American Master Quilts Past and Present, The Durst Corporation, NYC (2001); The Quilts of Gee's Bend publications (2002); and Mosaic Textiles: In Search of the Hexagon, Rouen, France (2003). The Art Institute of Chicago has recently acquired her private quilt collection. Zegart holds a B.A. in Education from the University of Michigan.