2008 Press Releases
CONTACT:
Amy E. Milne, Executive Director, The Alliance for American Quilts, (828) 251-7073, amy.milne@quiltalliance.org, www.centerforthequilt.org
Brenda Ohlschwager, Executive Director, The Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum, (303) 277-0377, brenda_o@rmqm.org, www.rmqm.orgMary Worrall, Assistant Curator, Michigan State University Museum, (517) 432-4118, worrall@msu.edu, www.museum.msu.edu
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum Collection Now Online at Quilt Index
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.
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.
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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CONTACT:
Amy E. Milne, Executive Director
The Alliance for American Quilts
(828) 251-7073
amy.milne@quiltalliance.org
www.centerforthequilt.org
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
KIMBERLY-CLARK SPONSORS ALLIANCE EVENTS IN KNOXVILLE, TENNESSEE
Asheville, North Carolina, Sept. 3, 2008-- Kimberly-Clark Corporation sponsored back-to-back events in Knoxville, Tennessee recently to benefit the national nonprofit Alliance for American Quilts (AAQ), which this year celebrates 15 years of documenting, preserving and sharing the stories of quilts and their makers.
On August 21, Kimberly-Clark sponsored a reception for notable Tennessean Bets Ramsey at the Knoxville Museum of Art. The event included a preview of an online portrait of Ramsey, a nationally recognized educator, curator, writer, organizer, historian and award-winning quilter. The portrait was produced as a part of Quilt Treasures, a joint project of the AAQ and Michigan State University. The multi-media portrait of Ramsey includes a mini-documentary, extensive biographical information and over forty interview clips on various topics. The project will debut publicly on the Alliance's website in mid September. To view the project visit www.centerforthequilt.com/treasures.
Also sponsored by Kimberly-Clark on August 21, was the first ever Quilt Train event in Knoxville. Board members of the AAQ from all parts of the US and a large contingent of quilt and train enthusiasts from the Knoxville area enjoyed a rolling wine and cheese party on the Three Rivers Rambler excursion train owned and operated by Gulf & Ohio Railways Inc. Vintage quilts from the collection of Knoxville resident and esteemed quilt historian Merikay Waldvogel were hung and draped around the train.
Also exhibited on the Quilt Train were small quilts from the AAQ contest, My Quilts/Our History, for which quilters around the country and abroad made quilts celebrating their personal quilt histories. (For more information about the contest and the upcoming auction, go to the Alliance website, www.centerforthequilt.org.)The Quilt Train evening continued with a dinner at Calhoun's by the River restaurant to honor nationally-recognized quilt historian, curator and author Merikay Waldvogel, who recently ended her term on the AAQ board after many years of dedicated service. Waldvogel and Ramsey were co-directors of Tennessee Quilt Survey, a major effort to document the state's quilts which produced a traveling exhibit and publications. The documented Tennessee quilts, along with thousands of quilts from other state and museum collections, are preserved permanently on the Quilt Index, a rapidly-expanding online repository of historical and contemporary quilts, a joint project of the Alliance and Michigan State University.
Kathy Metelica, Market Manager for Kimberly-Clark's southern region honored Merikay Waldvogel and Bets Ramsey for the important contribution both have made to the preservation of Tennessee's quilt history, and added "Kimberly-Clark would like to congratulate The Alliance for American Quilts for 15 years of preserving the rich history of American quilting. We are proud to sponsor these events."
"There's much to be learned from old quilts, but they can't speak for themselves," says Amy Milne, executive director of the Alliance for American Quilts. "Our website projects save not just the images of quilts, from the humble to the magnificent, but allow us to save and share the stories of how and why they were made. All the funds raised in Knoxville, with Kimberly-Clark's help, will enable us to preserve these stories online for all those who value these treasures."
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CONTACT:
Amy E. Milne, Executive Director
The Alliance for American Quilts
(828) 251-7073
amy.milne@quiltalliance.org
www.centerforthequilt.org
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
NEBRASKA QUILT PROJECT RECORDS LAUNCHED IN THE NATIONWIDE QUILT INDEX
LINCOLN, NEBRASKA and EAST LANSING, MICHIGAN, July 31, 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 nearly 5000 quilts and 3000 quiltmakers from Nebraska, documented in one of the early statewide quilt documentation projects completed in the United States.
The Nebraska Quilt Project was conceived in 1987 by members of the Lincoln Quilters Guild who recognized the state's vast resource of material culture information deserving of documentation and retention. They sought guidance from the Department of Textiles, Clothing and Design at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and formed a lasting relationship with professor Patricia Crews, now director of the International Quilt Study Center and Museum, and member of the board of directors of the Alliance for American Quilts.
Crews credits the documentation initiative and the resulting book, Nebraska Quilts and Quiltmakers, (Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1991) edited by Crews and Dr. Ronald Naugle (Nebraska Wesleyan University Professor of History), as one of the primary reasons for the founding of the International Quilt Study Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1997.
Major donors Robert and Ardis James were impressed by the award-winning book (it won the Smithsonian's Frost Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Crafts in 1993), as well as the commitment of the Lincoln Quilters Guild and the entire Nebraska quilting community that made it possible. Their subsequent decision to donate their own collection of nearly 950 quilts and continued support as lead donors to the building of the museum which opened on March 30, 2008, was strongly influenced by the vitality of the Nebraska tradition.
Quilts documented in the Nebraska Quilt Project date back to the early 1800s, but the majority were made between 1870 and 1940, the period of settlement and development of the state. Some of the quilts are now part of the collections of the International Quilt Study Center & Museum (www.quiltstudy.org).
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries is pleased to have had the opportunity to partner with Michigan State University, The Alliance for American Quilts and the Institute for Museum and Library Services on the Quilt Index project, says Crews. "The Nebraska Quilt Project records are now much more accessible to researchers to further the knowledge base of quiltmaking traditions nationwide." The Quilt Index records may be supplemented with additional research aides provided by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries which includes a special section on quilts, quiltmakers and quilt history in its Archives and Special Collections (www.unl.edu/libr/libs/spec/quilt.shtml)
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 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.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 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@mail.matrix.msu.edu.
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CONTACT:
Amy E. Milne, Executive Director
The Alliance for American Quilts
(828) 251-7073
amy.milne@quiltalliance.org
www.centerforthequilt.org
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
MOUNTAIN HERITAGE CENTER QUILTS LAUNCHED IN THE NATIONWIDE QUILT INDEX
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.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.
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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CONTACT:
Amy Milne, Executive Director, amy.milne@quiltalliance.org
828-251-7073
Meg Cox, vice president AAQ, meg@megcox.com
609-924-9135
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Quilters' S.O.S. - Save Our Stories Surpasses 700 Interviews
Asheville, North Carolina, March 27, 2007- Quilters' S.O.S. - Save Our Stories, a project of The Alliance for American Quilts, now has more than 700 interviews of quiltmakers with photos of their quilts at the Center for the Quilt Online (www.centerforthequilt.org). More than 150 volunteers from across the country have conducted the interviews. The project began in 1999 and has been steadily growing and expanding. 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 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 three years. A modest grant from the Salser Family Foundation enabled interviews of the mostly Latina cooperative quilt group Los hilos de las vida to be documented and included in the project. Another modest grant from the now defunct organization IRQN enabled interviews of the quiltmakers in the exhibit "Alzheimer's: Forgetting Piece by Piece" to be added to the project. In 2007, The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. became the permanent archive for Quilters' S.O.S. - Save Our Stories 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 website, 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@quiltalliance.org or 828-251-7073 Mon- Fri 9-5 Eastern). For more information on Quilters' S.O.S. - Save Our Stories, or to obtain photos and text from one of the new interviews to publish, contact Karen Musgrave (karenmusgrave@sbcglobal.net or 630.579.1024).
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January 16, 2008
My Quilts/Our History Contest to Celebrate 15th Anniversary
CONTACT:
Meg Cox
Vice president, Alliance for American Quilts
609-924-9135
meg@megcox.com
www.centerforthequilt.org
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Asheville, North Carolina - The nonprofit Alliance for American Quilts announced a contest closely tied to its mission of preserving and sharing the stories of quilts and their makers.
The AAQ is turning 15 this year, so quilts entered into the My Quilts/Our History contest must measure 15 inches square. Quilters can choose whatever techniques and materials they like, as long as the contest quilt evokes some aspect of the maker's personal quilt history. "These quilts could showcase a quilter's trademark designs and techniques or serve as a tribute to a special teacher or other mentor," said Amy Milne, executive director of the Alliance for American Quilts. "We hope people will interpret the contest theme as creatively as possible."
Finished quilts must be postmarked no later than July 15, along with an entry fee ($10 for AAQ members, $25 for non-members). All the My Quilts/Our History quilts will be displayed at the organization's website, www.centerforthequilt.org, and are expected to travel to several national venues for exhibition, including the Virginia Quilt Museum in Harrisonburg, Virginia.
Alliance members will vote to pick the contest winners, with top prizes including a Pfaff sewing machine, a year's supply of Mountain Mist batting, and a package of quilt-design software from The Electric Quilt Company. All quilts become the property of the AAQ, which will auction them off next fall to support the nonprofit's quilt history projects.
To obtain the complete contest rules and an entry form, go to the homepage of the Alliance, www.centerforthequilt.org. (If the rules haven't yet been posted, contact Meg below or e-mail information@quiltalliance.org. )
The contest is one piece of a year-long celebration that will include the announcement of new projects; a revamping of the Alliance website; a membership drive and other new initiatives to raise the AAQ's profile. In 2007, the Alliance ran a well-regarded contest and show called Put a Roof Over Our Heads to mark the transition from a founder's home to a freestanding office. The 74 house-shaped quilts made for the contest were auctioned off recently, and earned more than $10,000 for the organization.
This national nonprofit is notable for showcasing both vintage and modern quilts through its online projects. These include the Quilt Index, a vast and growing database displaying thousands of historic quilts, and Quilters' S.O.S. - Save Our Stories, an oral history project containing interviews with more than 650 distinctive quilters, from top prizewinners to dabblers with fascinating tales to share. Other Alliance projects include the multimedia Quilt Treasures, portraits of pioneers in the quilt renaissance, and Boxes Under the Bed, which helps people document quilt ephemera.
A great way to follow all the developments in this anniversary year is through the free e-mail newsletter now available by going to the AAQ's homepage, www.centerforthequilt.org.
(This press release is accompanied by a downloadable version of the contest rules and entry form. Feel free to publish the contest logo from this file.)
Any questions? call or e-mail Meg Cox. meg@megcox.com or 609-924-9135
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