Alliance for American Quilts Launches Streaming Video from Important Quilt Films
2004
The Alliance for American Quilts has just launched streaming video from three of the most important documentary films about quilts ever made:
- The Quilts of Gee's Bend, created to accompany the current traveling exhibition of the same name
- Two influential films by Pat Ferrero: Hearts and Hands and Quilts in Women's Lives
The films can be accessed at www.allianceforamericanquilts.org/projects/videos.php
The Alliance for American Quilts is dedicated to making high quality quilt research and information available to everyone. As part of that effort, The Alliance is working with scholars, curators, film makers, collectors, and institutions to bring important contributions to quilt study to the internet. The Alliance's Special Features pages present a variety of resources that significantly enhance understanding of the quilt's central place in American history, art, and society.
The Quilts of Gee's Bend
The Gee's Bend film takes viewers inside the isolated African-American community of Gee's Bend, Alabama, and introduces them to a remarkable group of quiltmakers whose work is taking the museum world by storm. Viewers see the women quilting together, and hear them singing gospel songs and talking about what quiltmaking means to them. What they say cuts to the heart of what quilts are all about-family, community, beauty, creativity, and artistic expression.
The Alliance is grateful to the Tinwood Alliance, organizers of the Quilts of Gee's Bend exhibition, for permitting use of their video on the Web.
Films by Pat Ferrero
Pat Ferrero's two classic quilt films, made in the 1980s, are still relevant today, and should be seen by everyone who cares about quilts. Hearts and Hands describes the roles women and quilts played in the great movements and events of the 19th-century-from the Civil War and the abolition of slavery to Temperance and Suffrage.
Quilts in Women's Lives was the first film to document living quiltmakers and what quilts mean to them.
The Alliance thanks Pat Ferrero for sharing clips from her award-winning films, and BERNINA® of America for sponsoring Quilts in Women's Lives.
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