Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum Collection Now Online at Quilt Index
September 5, 2008
Asheville, North Carolina, Golden, Colorado and East Lansing, Michigan, September 5, 2008 -- Nearly 400 quilts from the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum collection have just been posted to the Quilt Index the nation's biggest online showcase for vintage and significant quilts. Visit www.quiltindex.org/rmqmcollection.php to see the collection.
Eugenia Mitchell's historic cabin quilt
These two quilts show the broad range of quilts owned by the Colorado museum, which opened its doors in 1990. The newer quilt (at left) was made by museum founder Eugenia Mitchell and features at its center a historic cabin in Evergreen, Colorado called Hiwan Homestead. Mitchell began dreaming up a national museum for quilts when she was 80, and got the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum started with 100 quilts from her own collection. The second quilt (below) is a Nine Patch with an unusual flag border dated 1895.
The museum's collection covers a wide range of styles and periods, from traditional bed-coverings made in the 1800s to contemporary art quilts made by such major quiltmakers as Caryl Bryer Fallert, Judith Trager and Laura Wasilowski.
Nine Patch with flag border
This launch was funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services through a national Leadership Grant for Library-Museum collaboration. This phase will expand the Quilt Index to more than 18,000 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.centerforthequilt.org/quiltindex.html) 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; amy.milne@quiltalliance.org.
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 Mary Worrall, (517) 432-4118 (tel), worrall@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@mail.matrix.msu.edu.
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| Amy E. Milne, Executive Director The Alliance for American Quilts (828) 251-7073 amy.milne@quiltalliance.org http://www.centerforthequilt.org | Brenda Ohlschwager, Executive Director The Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum (303) 277-0377 brenda_o@rmqm.org http://www.rmqm.org |