Mountain Heritage Center Quilts Launched in National Quilt Index

May 14, 2008

ASHEVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA and EAST LANSING, MICHIGAN, May 14, 2008 - 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 over forty historically significant quilts from the Mountain Heritage Center (MHC), a regional museum located on the campus of Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, NC.

MHC Curator Suzanne Hill McDowell describes one of the outstanding quilts in the collection (pictured at left) a hand-pieced and hand-quilted state block quilt called "Massachusetts": "The quiltmaker lived in Buncombe County in the farming community of Leicester. I think it is skillfully rendered and beautiful to look at...but what has set me on another research project is the backing known as "Alamance Plaid" ... I am on a quest to see if I can pull together an easier way to track the plaid patterns/colors, etc."

Established in 1975, the Mountain Heritage Center www.wcu.edu/mhc
interprets current studies of Appalachia for the public. The Center's programs highlight traditional music and craft along with the culture and natural history of Appalachia. Major research exhibits have examined the migration of the Scotch-Irish people, handicraft traditions, and the travel of early naturalists. Through exhibitions, publications, educational programs and demonstrations, visitors discover the rich tradition of the mountains, see the Appalachian area from new perspectives, and come away with an enhanced understanding of its land and people. Materials included in the Quilt Index project emphasize the Mountain Heritage Center's textile collection. They are representative of the types of quilts produced by families who lived and worked in western North Carolina from the 1830s to 1975.

"The Mountain Heritage Center at Western Carolina University is pleased to have had the opportunity to partner with Michigan State University, The Alliance for American Quilts and the National Endowment for the Humanities on the Quilt Index project, says McDowell. "Quilts from our collection now have a 'world wide web' audience and are available to researchers to further the knowledge base of women's work and women's lives."

This launch was funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services through a national Leadership Grant for Library-Museum collaboration. Also included in this public launch will be quilts from the Museum of the American Quilter's Society and the Texas Quilt Search and the Winedale Center for the Quilt at The Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin. Coming soon will be collections of the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries. 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 (http://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. The Quilt Index was conceived and developed by The Alliance for American Quilts in partnership with Michigan State University's MATRIX: Center for Humane Arts, Letters and Social Sciences Online and the Michigan State University Museum. The project has been supported in part by major grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute for Museum and Library Services.

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, Michigan's largest public museum of natural history and culture and the state's only land-grant university museum, is home to 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 600 quilts, quilt-related ephemera and documentation. For more information, visit http://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 http://www.matrix.msu.edu or contact Professor Mark Kornbluh, (517) 355-9300 (tel); (517) 355-8363 (fax); mark@mail.matrix.msu.edu.

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