2007 Press Releases
10/25/2007
November Events Include Tess Harper Fundraiser and Auction of "Put a Roof" Contest Quilts
Asheville, North Carolina, October 25, 2007 – The nonprofit Alliance for American Quilts is holding two important events in November to raise funds.
Tess Harper, an actress and quilt collector who serves on the Advisory Council of the AAQ, will be lecturing about her life with quilts on November 12 at the Folk Art Center in Asheville, North Carolina. Her free public lecture at 10:00 a.m. will be followed by a fundraising luncheon at 11:30 a.m. Tickets are $25, with a $5 discount to members of any North Carolina guild.
The actress, whose roles include a lead in the movie Tender Mercies, grew up in the Ozark Mountains among many quiltmakers, including family members. She has lived surrounded by quilts ever since and will share photographs of some of the gorgeous quilts in her personal collection.
The Alliance also announced that it will auction off the quilts from its Put a Roof Over Our Head contest in November. These 74 house-shaped quilts, which are just completing a 13-city tour of the country, will be offered on eBay in three batches, with the first group of 24 quilts up for auction on November 12, for one week. Subsequent auctions will begin on November 19 and November 26. Bids begin at $50.
To view all 74 quilts to be auctioned, go to www.centerforthequilt.org/contest.php.
All the proceeds from the Tess Harper event and the quilt auction will help fund the AAQ's mission to preserve and share the stories of quilts and quiltmakers. This work is reflected primarily on our groundbreaking and fast-expanding website, www.centerforthequitl.org, which includes oral history projects, hundreds of interviews with today's quilters, and thousands of historic quilts. Come see where quilt history has been -- and where it's going.
For more information on the Tess Harper event, contact administrative assistant Sharon O'Neal, admin@quiltalliance.org or (828) 251-7073.
For questions about the auction or other aspects of the organization, call or e-mail Meg Cox at 609-924-9135, meg@megcox.com.
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Quilt Index Funded for Major Expansion
10/11/2008
Institute of Museum and Library Services Leadership Grant Awarded to Expand the Quilt Index
EAST LANSING, MI and ASHEVILLE, NC, October 11, 2007 - Thanks to a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), The Quilt Index will expand to include quilt ephemera records, new tools for educators, and social networking features that will increase its usefulness for quiltmakers, teachers and students. The Quilt Index (http://www.quiltindex.org) is a joint digital collections project of The Alliance for American Quilts and Michigan State University, through MATRIX: Center for Humane Arts, Letters, and Social Sciences Online and Michigan State University Museum.
This three-year grant totaling $911,809 catapults an already groundbreaking digital collection to a whole new level. The Quilt Index already features thousands of quilts and will soon contain images of 50,000 quilts, along with related historical information. These quilts come from 23 museums, libraries, universities and state documentation projects. The amassing of this unmatched virtual collection is of national importance because most valuable quilts spend most of their time in storage, unseen to both historians and interested citizens.
"The Quilt Index is a model for doing history and public outreach online," says Mark Kornbluh, Chair of History at MSU and Director of MATRIX, a digital library research and education center. "Digital library tools, paired with such a rich and extensive resource, will allow teachers, curators, researchers, and the general public to explore quilts in-depth and across time and geography. It allows us to see new things in the history and ask new questions of this quintessential American art form."
This new IMLS funding will let Michigan State University and The Alliance for American Quilts both broaden this invaluable collection and make it easier to explore in depth. The ephemera to be added will include such items as old diaries, quilt patterns from newspapers, photographs and quilt catalogs. Online access allows these items to be easily studied without harming the often-fragile originals.
"We are very excited that this grant will further our mission at The Alliance by allowing us to expand upon the rich stories of quilts and quiltmakers," said Linda Pumphrey, co-president of the Alliance for American Quilts, a national nonprofit whose website, www.centerforthequilt.org, offers free resources related to quilts and quiltmakers. "Through this funding The Quilt Index will be able to invite individual collectors to contribute their valuable and fascinating quilt finds to this virtual catalog, employing the same high standards of documentation for which this project is known."
The enhanced resources of the Quilt Index will also benefit from another aspect of this new project: the development of new high-tech tools that will allow students, teachers and other visitors to the site to do things like overlay multiple quilt images to compare them. These new funds will help MSU and The Alliance for American Quilts create user guides for the upgraded Quilt Index, help teachers tap into these resources to enrich their curriculum, and allow quiltmakers, scholars and quilt history buffs worldwide to interact in a social network.
"This project has grown from thousands of hours of important work," says Marsha MacDowell, professor of art and art history and curator of folk arts at Michigan State University Museum. "From documentation work on the grassroots level, to collection and organization on the museum level, to inter-disciplinary collaboration with computer scientists, we are developing new ways to present and preserve cultural heritage work in a virtual world."
The lead applicants on the grant are Michigan State University's MATRIX: The Center for Humane Arts, Letters and Social Sciences Online and the Michigan State University Museum. Formal institutional partners on the project are The Alliance for American Quilts; the University of Texas at Austin, Center for American History, Winedale division; and the American Folk Art Museum. In addition, many scholars, teachers and curators (including individuals from current Quilt Index contributing institutions) will be developing essays, lesson plans, and online galleries which will expand the website. Anne-Imelda M. Radice, PhD, IMLS Director, describes the impact of the Leadership Grant Award Program. "Cultural institutions energize their communities by not just preserving culture, heritage, and knowledge, but by supporting life-long learning and engagement. National Leadership Grants harness the work of the best of these institutions. By promoting innovation and partnerships, they allow these institutions to create national models that address the challenges of the broader library and museum communities, and help strengthen their impact.
National Leadership Grants help libraries and museums collaborate, build digital resources, and conduct research and demonstration projects. The selected projects are national models that will help foster individual achievement, community responsibility, and life-long learning. This year over $78 million in requests were received and $18,661,716 in awards were granted and over $24 million will be provided as matching funds by recipients.
The Institute of Museum and Library Services is the primary source of federal support for the nation's 122,000 libraries and 17,500 museums. Its mission is to grow and sustain a "Nation of Learners" because life-long learning is essential to a democratic society and individual success. Through its grant making, convenings, research and publications, the Institute empowers museums and libraries nationwide to provide leadership and services to enhance learning in families and communities, sustain cultural heritage, build twenty-first-century skills, and increase civic participation. To learn more about the Institute, please visit: http://www.imls.gov.
CONTACTS:
Marsha MacDowell
Michigan State University Museum
517-355-6511
macdowel@msu.edu
Mark Kornbluh
MATRIX
517-355-9300
Mark.Kornbluh@matrix.msu.edu
Meg Cox
The Alliance for American Quilts
609-924-9135
meg@megcox.com
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9/28/2007
New Leadership for Nonprofit Alliance for American Quilts
Asheville, North Carolina, September 28, 2007– The nonprofit Alliance for American Quilts announced new leadership, voted in at a board meeting in San Francisco in August.
Amy Milne continues as the executive director of this national nonprofit, operating from its Asheville, N.C. office. Replacing the outgoing president, Alan Jabbour, are co-presidents Linda Pumphrey of Cincinnatti, Ohio and Le Rowell of Washington, D.C. The new vice president is Meg Cox of Princeton, N.J. and the new secretary is Janneken Smucker of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
As well as being geographically diverse, these four women represent very different aspects of American quilting today, which is fitting for this organization and typical of its board. The mission of the Alliance is to preserve, document and share the stories of quilts and quiltmakers and that covers a broad range, including both historic and modern quilts, and showcasing not just the efforts of quiltmakers but celebrating the contributions of scholars, curators, collectors and others who figure in today's vibrant, sophisticated quilt culture.
Co-president Linda Pumphrey comes from a family with five generations of quilters, and she is national sales manager for Leggett & Platt, where she's in charge of Mountain Mist batting.
Her co-president Le Rowell is an independent curator and lecturer who has produced numerous exhibitions in the U.S. and abroad and introduced American-style quiltmaking in Bolivia, Portugal, Luxembourg and Kyrgyzstan. Le serves on the AAQ task force that runs its Quilters' S.O.S. – Save Our Stories oral history project. Vice president Meg Cox is a veteran journalist and author who was a staff writer at the Wall Street Journal for many years. She has been quilting for 20 years and is the author of the soon-to-be-published book The Quilter's Catalog: A Comprehensive Resource Guide (Workman Publishing).
Secretary Janneken Smucker is a PhD student in the History of American Civilization at University of Delaware. She has a Masters of Arts degree in Textile History/Quilt Studies with a minor in Museum Studies from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
The new leadership at the Alliance looks forward to an exciting year, including imminent announcements about the auction of quilts from its "Put A Roof Over Our Head" contest and exhibition, which is finishing up a year-long tour. The AAQ will also be unveiling a revamped website in coming months, and some exciting new projects. To keep up with all these developments and more, sign up for a free e-newsletter at the homepage of the Alliance website, www.centerforthequilt.org.
The Alliance for American Quilts is a national nonprofit organization committed to preserving and sharing the rich stories that quilts tell about our nation's diverse people and communities. We share our wealth of resources principally through a remarkable and accessible website, centerforthequilt.org. For any further information, call or e-mail Meg Cox. meg@megcox.com or 609-924-9135.
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9/27/2007
Alliance Memory Quilt Squares Honor Ovarian Cancer Victims
Asheville, North Carolina, September 27, 2007 — Under the auspices and sponsorship of Blank Quilting, The Alliance for American Quilts has posted the photos and stories of seven remarkable women whose lives have been touched by ovarian cancer. The pictures and biographies of the women are now a permanent part of the virtual Star Memory Quilt at the AAQ's website, www.centerforthequilt.org.
Blank Quilting, a New York-based fabric company, has been working to heighten awareness of ovarian cancer and help fund research through its Inspiration Guild. Participants in the Inspiration Guild program make a quilt square in honor of someone whose life has been affected by ovarian cancer. Eighty-one of these blocks are assembled into a quilt and the completed quilts are auctioned off to raise money for the cause.
As each quilt is completed, it is named for someone whose life was touched by ovarian cancer, whether as a victim, caregiver or survivor, and that is the case with the seven women honored here. Some, like Melanie Normann, founder of the State Guild of New Jersey, died of ovarian cancer, while others are still living with the disease. Joyce Jensen, who continues to make quilts for her 20 grandchildren, is battling ovarian cancer for the third time.
At www.centerforthequilt.org/memoryquilt.php you can read about these brave women and see the finished quilt that was dedicated to each. The Alliance is proud to help Blank Quilting publicize the stories of these women, because our mission is to preserve and share the stories of quilts and quiltmakers, and it's very clear that quilts helped these women make beauty and meaning in their lives. Judith DeSiro of Sharon, Pennsylvania, one of the women on the Star Memory Quilt, survived breast cancer in the 1980s, only to learn she had ovarian cancer in 1993. Her successful treatment then was followed by recurrences of ovarian cancer in 2003 and 2005. How does she cope? Quilt therapy helps. In both those years, Judith ran off to the Houston International Quilt Festival with her sisters for an inspiring diversion.
The Alliance's two Memory Quilts, the Star and the Chinese Coins quilt, are available to anybody who wants to honor a beloved quilter or quilt lover. The celebrated person can be living or deceased. These permanent tributes are a personal way to pay public tribute to people, and the power of quilts as inspiration. All of the funds from these Memory Quilt squares go to support the projects of the AAQ.
For more information on Blank Quilting's Inspiration Guild, go to the company's website, www.blankquilting.com. The Alliance for American Quilts is a national nonprofit organization committed to documenting, preserving and sharing the rich stories that quilts tell about our nation's diverse people and communities. The AAQ's website, www.centerforthequilt.org offers a wealth of free resources related to quilts and quiltmakers.
If you have any trouble reading this press release or have any questions, call or e-mail Meg Cox, a journalist who is vice president of The Alliance for American Quilts. meg@megcox.com or 609-924-9135.
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5/2/2007
"Quilts 2008" Wall Calendar
Asheville, North Carolina, May 2, 2007- The Alliance for American Quilts has joined for the third year with Pomegranate Communications, Inc. to produce a one-of-a-kind calendar. "Quilts 2008" is a high quality wall calendar (opens to 12" x 26") that showcases full-color reproductions of twelve quilts representing the traditional, the antique and the contemporary. The calendar was curated by Shelly Zegert and Karen Musgrave. The contemporary quiltmakers selected for the calendar are Lisa Binkley, Robbie Joy Eklow, Linda Gass and Judy Rush. Two Alliance projects are also featured—the 2006 raffle quilt "The Voice of You and Me 2006" made by Karen Musgrave and Yvonne Porcella and quilted by Karen Watts, and four quilts made by Pamela Allen, Nanette Fleischman, Del Thomas and Patsy Thompson from "Put a Roof Over Our Head" contest and traveling exhibition. In addition, you may read interviews of the contemporary quiltmakers featured in the "Quilts 2008" calendar, as well more than 600 interviews of quiltmakers, at Quilters' S.O.S. - Save Our Stories (www.centerforthequilt.org), The Alliance's extensive oral history project.
The calendar retails for $13.99. However, The Alliance is offering its members a special offer on the calendar. This special offer allows members to buy one calendar and get one free (plus shipping and handling, plus sales tax for NC residents- limit 1 offer per member). For information concerning membership or purchasing the calendar, visit www.centerforthequilt.org.
Pomegranate works in association with the world's great museums, galleries and art resources to achieve the highest possible quality in reproduction and presentation.
The Alliance for American Quilts is a national nonprofit member organization, committed to preserving and sharing the rich stories that quilts tell about our nation's diverse people and communities. The Alliance's Center for the Quilt Online, www.centerforthequilt.org, offers a wealth of free resources related to quilts and quiltmakers.
For information on The Alliance for American Quilts, www.centerforthequilt.org, contact Amy Milne, Executive Director (amy.milne@yahoo.com or 828-251-7073 Mon- Fri 9-5 Eastern).
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4/27/2007
Quilters' S.O.S. – Save Our Stories Surpasses 600 Interviews
Asheville, North Carolina, April 27, 2007- In less than 10 months, Quilters' S.O.S. - Save Our Stories, a project of The Alliance for American Quilts, has added more than 100 interviews at the Center for the Quilt Online (www.centerforthequilt.org). The project began in 1999 and has been steadily growing and expanding. There are now more than 600 transcribed interviews of quiltmakers with photographs of their quilts online. The interviewees include quiltmakers of every type, from those who simply dabble to those who are professionals. "These stories are important for they encapsulate, into one compact package, information, knowledge, context and emotion about quiltmaking today," said Karen Musgrave, chair of the project.
In 2005, to ensure that all aspects of those involved in quiltmaking are represented the Quilters' S.O.S. - Save Our Stories volunteer Task Force conducted a study of the interviews to identify any gaps. Filling those gaps has been the main focus of the Task Force for the last two years. This year a modest grant from the Salser Family Foundation enabled 40 interviews of the mostly Latina cooperative quilt group Los hilos de las vida to be documented and included in the project. Interviews that are currently in process include interviews with a Polynesian-American quiltmaker, a Palestinian-American quiltmaker, Nancy Crow, David Walker and other involved in Ohio's art quilt movement. The Daughters of the American Revolution also continue to add interviews. In addition, The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. recently became the permanent archive for Quilters' S.O.S. – Save Our Stories interview materials.
This extensive online resource consists not only of the transcribed interviews but a newsletter, an extensive manual on how to conduct a Quilters' S.O.S. – Save Our Stores project of one's own and a place to ask questions. All of the work is done by dedicated volunteers. The goal of the project is to create, through recorded interviews, a broadly accessible body of information concerning quiltmaking and make it available through the Internet.
The Alliance for American Quilts is a national nonprofit member organization, committed to preserving and sharing the rich stories that quilts tell about our nation's diverse people and communities. The Alliance's Center for the Quilt Online, www.centerforthequilt.org, offers a wealth of free resources related to quilts and quiltmakers.
For information on The Alliance for American Quilts, www.centerforthequilt.org, contact Amy Milne, Executive Director (amy.milne@yahoo.com or 828-251-7073 Mon- Fri 9-5 Eastern). For more information on Quilters' S.O.S. – Save Our Stories, contact Karen Musgrave (karenmusgrave@sbcglobal.net or 630.579.1024).
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4/16/2007
Library of Congress New Archive for Quilters' S.O.S. – Save Our Stories
Asheville, North Carolina, April 16, 2007 –The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. will be the new permanent archive for Quilters' S.O.S. – Save Our Stories , a project of The Alliance for American Quilts. Nearly 600 quiltmakers, from the dabbler to the professional, have been interviewed as part of this oral history project. All of the transcribed interviews with photographs of the quilts can be accessed at the Center for the Quilt Online (www.centerforthequilt.org). These inspirational interviews help quiltmakers, collectors, historians, students and others see and appreciate the incredible artistry and diversity of today's quiltmakers and their quilts.
The Center for Material Culture Studies at the University of Delaware partnered with The Alliance for American Quilts in the creation and implementation of Quilters' S.O.S. - Save Our Stories. "We truly appreciate the years of support that the Center at the University of Delaware has given the project," says Karen Musgrave, Alliance board member and chairperson of the project.
The new procedures for submitting interviews can be found on the Quilters' S.O.S. – Save Our Stories section of The Alliance's website (www.centerforthequilt.org/qsos/qsos.html). In addition to the extensive online resource of transcribed interviews of nearly 600 quiltmakers and photographs of their quilts, you will also find a downloadable how-to manual. Quilters' S.O.S. – Save Our Stories is always looking for individuals and groups to join this preservation effort.
The Alliance for American Quilts is a national nonprofit member organization, committed to preserving and sharing the rich stories that quilts tell about our nation's diverse people and communities. The Alliance's Center for the Quilt Online, www.centerforthequilt.org, offers a wealth of free resources related to quilts and quiltmakers.
For information on The Alliance for American Quilts, www.centerforthequilt.org, contact Amy Milne, Executive Director (amy.milne@yahoo.com or 828-251-7073 Mon- Fri 9-5 Eastern). For more information on Quilters' S.O.S. - Save Our Stories contact Karen Musgrave (karenmusgrave@sbcglobal.net or 630.579.1024).
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4/2/2007
"Put a Roof Over Our Head" at San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles
Asheville, North Carolina, April 2, 2007 – The "Put a Roof Over Our Head" exhibition will be displayed at the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, 520 S. First St, San Jose, California, from April 10- July 8. SJMQT Curator Deborah Corsini says, "These small house shaped quilts are inventive, humorous, romantic and political.Each isimbued witha uniquepersonality and style of their makers. They offer charming variations on the theme that home is truly a place where the heart lies. This wall of quiltsprovides a visual delightand a force of creative energy."
Artists from around the U.S. and three foreign countries created 74 quilts for the "Put a Roof Over Our Head" contest and traveling exhibit for The Alliance for American Quilts. The quilts, all of which were donated to The Alliance by the artists, will travel around the country until December 2007 when they will be auctioned off. All proceeds will benefit the organization. A CD catalog of the exhibition will also be for sale in the museum's gift shop. Details on the CD and future venues can be found on The Alliance's website (www.centerforthequilt.org/contest.php).
The Alliance for American Quilts announced the winners of the "Put a Roof Over Our Head" contest on August 3, 2006. The announcement made by Karen Musgrave, curator and Alliance board member, was part of the celebrations around The Alliance's move to Asheville, North Carolina. Alliance members voted for the three winners from the 74 quilts entered into the contest. Third place winner Ellen Levine of Asheville won a Quilters' S.O.S. - Save Our Stories interview. Quilters' S.O.S. - Save Our Stories is one of The Alliance's oral history projects. Second place winner Ann Holmes, also of Asheville, won a complete software package donated by The Electric Quilt Company. The first place quilt was a group quilt made by Keti Kasrashvili, Irina Lavrinenko and Nino Chargeishvili of the Republic of Georgia. Their prize is a Bernina Aurora 440 QE sewing machine donated by Bernina USA.
The Alliance for American Quilts is a national nonprofit member organization, committed to preserving and sharing the rich stories that quilts tell about our nation's diverse people and communities. The Alliance's Center for the Quilt Online, www.centerforthequilt.org, offers a wealth of free resources related to quilts and quiltmakers.
For information on The Alliance for American Quilts, www.centerforthequilt.org, contact Amy Milne, Executive Director (amy.milne@yahoo.com or 828-251-7073 Mon- Fri 9-5 Eastern). For more information on "Put a Roof Over Our Head," contact Karen Musgrave, Curator, at karenmusgrave@sbcglobal.net or 630.579.1024.
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3/15/2007
'DAR' Museum quilts Launched in the Nationwide Quilt Index
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, (http://www.quiltindex.org/fulldisplay.php?Pbd=dar-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 (http://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. 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 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.
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.