ten samples

Friendship Quilts

1840-6

c. 1840

Album Quilts

1842-3

1840-5

Baltimore Album Quilts

1851

1847-50

Crazy Quilts

c. 1890

1880

Mourning or Memorial Quilts

c. 1877

c. 1898

Sources:

Women in Pacific Northwest History

Edited by Karen J. Blair

"Quilts in the Lives of Women who Migrated to the Northwest, 1850-1990: A Visual Record"

Mary Bywater Cross

University of Washington Press: Seattle and London, 2001

p. 258-266

Artstor Database (first eight images)

Metropolitan Museum of Art

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/1983.349

Betsey Telford-Goodwin's Rocky Mountain Quilts

http://www.rockymountainquilts.com/files/antique_quilts_quilttops.php

memory quilts

Project Description

I will research different types of quilts made for the purpose of commemoration, including Friendship, Album, and Mourning Quilts. I am interested in finding out how different quiltmakers have used their craft towards remembering, in terms of both the images and text that the quilt contains as well as its actual construction (especially concerning materials choices and piecing techniques). I will draw on my research to make a small quilt that is not only commemorative but that, like the rest of my artwork, questions the role, function, and process of memory.

Questions

What is memory?

Which types of quilts were made for the purpose of commemoration?

What materials were used or reused to make memory quilts? What is their significance?

Whom were memory quilts usually made for?

How is the commemoration of a person, place, event, or object represented in different quilts?

When were Friendship or commemorative quilts most popular (or, what is the time period I should focus my research on most)?

How can I represent the issues around memory in a quilt - what materials, subject matter and piecing techniques are appropriate?

four genres

This week I have been reading The American Quilt, by Roderick Kiracofe. The bulk of this book consists of American history, but it is interlaced with the history of quilts. Kiracofe provides a general overview of many quilting genres, and through reading it, I have been able to narrow down the types of quilts I will continue to research to four. Here is some information about each of them:

Friendship or Album Quilts were made to commemorate a special event (for example, marriage, birth, leaving a community, or death). A mixture of old and new fabrics was often used, including scraps from old clothing. In Friendship Quilts, the blocks are all of the same design:

This design features colored bands of fabric crossing each block diagonally from corner to corner, with a square at the center for an inscription; in some quilts the areas between the bands were also filled with signatures or inscriptions. (81)

In Album Quilts (also referred to as Presentation Quilts, Bride's Quilts, and Freedom Quilts), each block is different both in design and construction (some may be pieced while others are appliqued). Like a Friendship Quilt, it is also signed (although not necessarily in every block). Both Friendship and Album Quilts were popular in the 1840s and '50s, partly because of westward expansion - the quilts were inscribed with messages from friends and family and given as gifts to the traveler(s). Blocks were sometimes sent by mail to the recipient to then be made into a quilt.

Quilts that the pioneers took with them had other uses besides as bedcovers: they were used to cover windows and doors; to line wagons against wind and weather, and to protect fragile things such as china while in transit. They were also hung across the open ends of wagons to protect against Indian attacks. Quilts were sometimes used in lieu of coffins on the journey, especially if wood was scarce.

Crazy Quilts often contained swatches of cloth from wedding dresses, gowns, cloaks, or other articles of clothing, as well as commemorative ribbons from military campaigns or reunions, horse shows or fairs, and political campaigns.

Mourning or Memorial Quilts were sometimes made from garments of the dead (usually large swatches instead of small ones), but more often they were made as memorials. These quilts seem to show their significance in the images, words and colors they contain. The Kentucky Graveyard Quilt is a well-known example of this genre.

Sources:

The American Quilt: A History of Cloth and Comfort 1750-1950

Roderick Kiracofe

Clarkson Potter: New York, 1993

p. 80-2, 86-90, 118-120, 146-9, 170-1

Kentucky Historical Society

Graveyard Quilt

http://205.204.134.47:2005/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/quilts&CISOPTR=24

questions

Over the past week I have been asking myself what memory is. It seems like a logical starting point for this project - if I am to examine how quilters have used their craft towards commemoration (and, at the same, to make my own artifact), I will need to have a working definition of what it means to remember. It is a difficult question. The process of remembering is so changeable, so dependent on circumstances and context, that it seems impossible to generalize. Memories can surface from a particular scent; a quality of light; a specific site (or a place that is a reminder of somewhere else); a photograph or sound recording; language or speech; an emotion, or a physical feeling - there are an innumerable number of causes. But memories often seem random as well, unrelated to physical or psychological conditions.

In the exploration of this question, other related questions have come about:

Why are some events, figures, and feelings remembered while others are lost?

What marks something as worthy of remembrance (i.e. what distinguishes one moment from another)?

These questions are not new - I have constantly asked myself them in the past, and continue to do so. But, like memory itself, my answers are also changeable. What applies to one memory doesn't necessarily relate to the next.

This week, I consulted two sources: Sans Soleil, a 1983 film by Chris Marker, and The Mechanism of Mind by Edward de Bono. Sans Soleil is the film that first sparked my interest in the nature of memory, so I went back to it to look (or listen) for relevant information. This is what I found:

I'll have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember. We rewrite memory much as history is rewritten.

Since my work constantly questions the process of remembering and examines forgetfulness or a loss of memory, I was interested in this quote from the mechanism of mind:

A memory does not have to be particularly informative about what has caused it. The interpretation, or readback, of the memory may be difficult, misleading or even impossible. (39)

These two quotes form the basis for what I hope to achieve conceptually with the quilt that I make. I am most interested in the 'holes,' the places where there is no such thing as an accurate memory and one is forced to use one's imagination to fill in the gaps.

Sources:

The Mechanism of Mind

Edward de Bono

Simon and Schuster: New York, 1969

p. 38-56

Sans Soleil (film)

Chris Marker

1983