'DAR' Museum quilts Launched in the Nationwide Quilt Index

March 15, 2007

Asheville, NORTH CAROLINA and EAST LANSING, MICHIGAN, March 15, 2007 - The Quilt Index (www.quiltindex.org), a national partnership of The Alliance for American Quilts and Michigan State University, announces the public launch of an online resource cataloging 292 historically significant quilts from the Daughters of the American Revolution Museum in Washington, D.C.

Over one hundred of the DAR examples date before 1850, yielding an astonishing level of insight into the origins of the quilt as a sophisticated art form. For example, a masterful circa 1835 counterpane, Mariner's Compass and Chips and Whetstones,(www.quiltindex.org/basicdisplay.php?pbd=DARMuseum-a0a1g7-a). Was made by Mary Tayloe Lloyd Key. Commonly called the "Francis Scott Key Family Quilt," after her famous husband, who wrote "The Star Spangled Banner," this masterwork shows that Mary was clearly an artist in her own right.

Supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services through a National Leadership Grant for Library-Museum Collaborations, this new Quilt Index launch represents a major leap forward in the institutionalization of nationwide cultural heritage resources.

"The addition of the DAR quilt collection to the Quilt Indexdramatically expands the research potential of this extraordinary online resource," notes Art Historian Bernard Herman of the University of Delaware. "The DAR quilt collection, one of the oldest and best documented in the United States, provides an unusually coherent overview of the nation's earliest "best" quilting practices. Explored in concert with the other Quilt Indexofferings, the DAR quilt collection enables us to ask new questions about the history of the quilt in the United States in frameworks that engage histories of art, society, family, design, and material culture."

Also coming soon in this phase will be quilts from the Museum of the American Quilter's Society; the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum; the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries; and the Winedale Center for the Quilt at the Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin. This phase will expand the Quilt Index to more than 15,000 quilts and the associated documentation available for searches across the collections for patterns, individual quiltmakers, themes, techniques, and many other characteristics. Moreover, it will result in a model for repositories--of any size and anywhere in the world--to make thematic collections of any kind more accessible and useful for education and research.

Tradition meets technology The Quilt Index idea (www.allianceforamericanquilts.org/projects/quiltindex.php)was incubated by The Alliance for American Quilts, a nonprofit organization comprised of a broad range of key scholars, curators, librarians, and quilt artists in the U.S. dedicated to the study, preservation, and sharing of American quilt history. With funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Index was developed and piloted by MATRIX and the Michigan State University Museum, in partnership with The Alliance and three national partners with significant repositories of state quilt documentation data.

The Quilt Index merges tradition with technology and springs from the work of a unique team of researchers and experts who are committed to making significant, quilt-related data accessible for research and teaching as well as developing replicable applications of technology in the humanities. Already the pilot phase of the Quilt Index has resulted in material that services the collection management needs of individual repositories and, at the same time, makes their collections accessible to users worldwide.

Principal Quilt Index partners

The Alliance for American Quilts, a national nonprofit organization founded in 1993 and now headquartered in Asheville, North Carolina supports and develops projects to document, preserve, and share the history and stories of quilts and quiltmakers. The Alliance brings together institutions and individuals from the creative, scholarly and business worlds of quiltmaking to advance the recognition of quilts in American culture. For more information, visit www.centerforthequilt.org or contact Amy Milne at 828-251-7073. Michigan State University Museum, the state's natural and cultural history museum, is home of the Great Lakes Quilt Center. The museum has a long history of engagement in research, education, exhibitions and service projects related to quilts, and holds a collection of more than 500 quilts, quilt-related ephemera and documentation. For more information, visit museum.msu.edu or contact Marsha Macdowell, (517) 355-2370 (tel); macdowel@msu.edu

MATRIX - The Center for Humane Arts, Letters and Social Sciences at Michigan State University is devoted to the application of new technologies in humanities and social science teaching and research. It creates and maintains online resources, provides training in computing and new teaching technologies and creates forums for the exchange of ideas and expertise in new teaching technologies. For more information, visit
(www.matrix.msu.edu Or contact Professor Mark Kornbluh, (517) 355-9300 (tel); (517) 355-8363 (fax); mark@maiil.matrix.msu.edu

The DAR Museum was founded in 1890, concurrent with its parent organization, the National Society Daughters of the Revolution. The DAR was one of many historical and genealogical societies founded in the years following the nation's centennial in 1876. The DAR Museum collects quilts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The collection is particularly strong in early quilts and counterpanes, including wholecloth, framed medallion, and whitework bedcoverings dating from the late eighteenth century through the first decades of the 1800s.

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