Signature quilt

Last updated
Quilt, Tumbling Blocks with Signatures pattern, containing 350 signatures by Adeline Harris Sears Quilt, Tumbling Blocks with Signatures pattern MET DT3962.jpg
Quilt, Tumbling Blocks with Signatures pattern, containing 350 signatures by Adeline Harris Sears

A signature quilt is a quilt that has multiple names signed, stamped, or embroidered on it. [1] While examples exist prior to 1800, the tradition was popularized in the 19th century often as a means of fundraising or given as keepsakes to people moving west. [2] They were also used to commemorate and document historical and communal events, or to indicate affiliations with organizations or groups. [3] They would rarely include signatures of famous people with one unusual specimen created by Adeline Harris Sears containing 350 signatures including those of eight U.S. Presidents. [4] [5] [6]

Signature quilts are considered useful as primary source documents for genealogists and other researchers. [7] [8]

Related Research Articles

Quilt Bedcover made of multiple layers of fabric sewn together, usually stitched in decorative patterns

A quilt is a multi-layered textile, traditionally composed of two or more layers of fabric or fiber. Commonly three layers are used with a filler material. These layers traditionally include a woven cloth top, a layer of batting or wadding, and a woven back combined using the techniques of quilting. This is the process of sewing on the face of the fabric, and not just the edges, to combine the three layers together to reinforce the material. Stitching patterns can be a decorative element. A single piece of fabric can be used for the top of a quilt, but in many cases the top is created from smaller fabric pieces joined together, or patchwork. The pattern and color of these pieces creates the design.

NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt Memorial quilt project celebrating the lives of people having died of AIDS-related causes

The NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, often abbreviated to AIDS Memorial Quilt or AIDS Quilt, is an enormous memorial to celebrate the lives of people who have died of AIDS-related causes. Weighing an estimated 54 tons, it is the largest piece of community folk art in the world as of 2020.

Faith Ringgold American artist

Faith Ringgold is an American painter, writer, mixed media sculptor, and performance artist, best known for her narrative quilts.

Russell Lee (photographer)

Russell Werner Lee was an American photographer and photojournalist, best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) during the Great Depression. His images documented the ethnography of various American classes and cultures.

International Quilt Museum Textile museum in Lincoln, Nebraska U.S.

The International Quilt Museum at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln in Lincoln, Nebraska is the home of the largest known public collection of quilts in the world. Also known as Quilt House, the current facility opened in 2008.

Cuesta Benberry was an American historian and scholar. Considered to be one of the pioneers of research on quiltmaking in America, she was the pioneer of research on African-American quiltmaking. Her involvement in quilt research spans from founding and participating in various quilt groups to writing articles in renowned quilt magazines and journals. As a quilt scholar, Benberry acquired a collection of important quilts dating from the late 19th century up to the 21st century, as well as an extensive collection of paper documents supplementing quilting exhibitions, books, articles and her personal research.

The Quilt Index is a searchable database for scholars, quilters and educators featuring over 50,000 quilts from documentation projects, museums, libraries, and private collections. It also has quilt-related ephemera and curated essays and lesson plans for teachers.

The Quilt Treasures Project is an oral history project that documents the stories of a number of notable individuals who were instrumental in moving the 20th Century Quilt Revival forward in some significant way. These individuals include:

The Great Lakes Quilt Center is Michigan State University Museum’s center of quilt-related research, education, and exhibition activities. While the museum, established in 1855, has long held significant collections, its focus of activities on quilt scholarship and education began with the launch of the Michigan Quilt Project at the museum in 1984. The Michigan Quilt Project not only spearheaded the documentation of the state's quiltmaking history, but also stimulated interest in strengthening the museum's quilt collection, upgrading its care, and expanding its use. As of 2008, the Michigan Quilt Project has collected documentation on over 9000 quilts in the state and the collection of quilts numbers over 700 with significant examples from Michigan and the Great Lakes region, examples of quilts from numerous African countries, major ethnographic collections of Native American quilts and Michigan African American quilts, and special collections assembled by Kitty Clark Cole, Harriet Clarke, Merry and Albert Silber, Deborah Harding, and Betty Quarton Hoard. The MSU Museum also houses two important collections developed by pioneering American quilt historians Cuesta Benberry and Mary Schafer.

The New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC) consists of the research libraries of three leading art museums in New York City: The Brooklyn Museum, The Frick Collection, and The Museum of Modern Art. With funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, NYARC was formed in 2006 to facilitate collaboration that results in enhanced resources for research communities. Called a groundbreaking partnership, NYARC also provides a framework for collaboration among art research libraries.

William Sidney Arnett was an Atlanta-based writer, editor, curator and art collector who built internationally important collections of African, Asian, and African American art. Arnett was the founder and chairman of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, an organization dedicated to the preservation and documentation of African American art from the Deep South that works in coordination with leading museums and scholars to produce groundbreaking exhibitions and publications using its extensive holdings. His efforts produced 13 books with nearly 100 essays by 73 authors. 38 museums have hosted major exhibitions, and comprehensive archives are maintained at UNC Chapel Hill. The White House has shown the collection. Arnett exhibited works from these collections and delivered lectures at over 100 museums and educational institutions in the United States and abroad. He is perhaps best known for writing about and collecting the work of African American artists from the Deep South. Arnett was named one of the "100 Most Influential Georgians" by Georgia Trend Magazine in January 2015. He died on August 12, 2020.

Michael Francis James is an American artist, educator, author, and lecturer. He is best known as a leader of the art quilt movement that began in the 1970s. He currently lives and maintains a studio in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Roland L. Freeman is a photographer and award-winning documenter of Southern folk culture and African-American quilters. He is the president of The Group for Cultural Documentation based in Washington, D.C.

Gladys-Marie Fry American art historian and educator

Gladys-Marie Fry was Professor Emerita of Folklore and English at the University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, and a leading authority on African American textiles. Fry earned her bachelor's and master's degrees from Howard University and her Ph.D. from Indiana University. She is the author of Stitched From the Soul: Slave Quilting in the Ante-Bellum South and Night Riders in Black Folk History. A contributor or author to 8 museum catalogs, Fry is also the author of a number of articles and book chapters. Fry has also served as the curator for 11 museum exhibitions and consultant to exhibits and television programs around the nation.

Metropolitan New York Library Council Consortium of libraries in the New York Metropolitan area

The Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO) is a non-profit organization that specializes in providing research, programming, and organizational tools for New York City libraries, archives, and museums. The council was founded in 1964 under the Education Law of the State of New York.

Souls Grown Deep Foundation

Souls Grown Deep Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to documenting, preserving, and promoting the work of leading contemporary African American artists from the Southeastern United States. Its mission is to include their contributions in the canon of American art history through acquisitions from its collection by major museums, as well as through exhibitions, programs, and publications. The foundation derives its name from a 1921 poem by Langston Hughes (1902–1967) titled "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," the last line of which is "My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Lucy Mingo American quilt maker

Lucy Marie (Young) Mingo is an American quilt maker and member of the Gee's Bend Collective from Gee's Bend (Boykin), Alabama. She was an early member of the Freedom Quilting Bee, which was an alternative economic organization created in 1966 to raise the socio-economic status of African-American communities in Alabama. She was also among the group of citizens who accompanied Martin Luther King Jr. on his 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.

Heidelberg Historical Society is a museum and research organisation devoted to the local and community history of Heidelberg and surrounding areas in the north-eastern suburbs of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

NedRa Bonds

NedRa Bonds is an American quilter, activist, and retired teacher, born and raised in the historic Quindaro neighborhood in Kansas City, Kansas. Bonds creates quilts and mixed media fiber dolls using fabric, beads, and symbolism to explore issues dealing with human rights, race, women, politics, and the environment. She is best known for her Quindaro Quilt, a quilt measuring 4 by 6 feet, detailing the important history of the Quindaro neighborhood and its role as part of the National Underground Railroad System of Historic Trails. As a community activist and educator, Bonds advocates for legislation, taught workshops locally and internationally, and attended the Earth Summit Conference on Environment and Development of the United Nations as a delegate in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992. Bonds is a practicing artist and retired teacher in Kansas City, Kansas. Her recent projects include her Common Threads quilt, commissioned by the Kansas City Chiefs for their Arrowhead Arts Collection, the Wak’ó Mujeres Phụ nữ Women Mural collaboration, sponsored by the Charlotte Street Foundation's Rocket Grant Program, in Lawrence, Kansas, and her recent cancer project. Bonds was appointed to the Kansas Arts Commission by Kansas Governor Joan Finney in 1992.

Adeline Harris Sears was an American quilter. Her work now titled "Quilt, Tumbling Blocks with Signatures pattern" by t is featured in the 2021-22 Anna Wintour Costume Center exhibition "In America: Lexicon of Fashion" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and provides the inspiration for its interior architectural display design. This quilt begun in 1856 when she was seventeen includes the autographs on top of the blocks of many known celebrities and politicians of the day including the writers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Dickens, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Julia Ward Howe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Cullen Bryant, and eight United States Presidents; Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, Martin Van Buren, John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, and Ulysses S. Grant. Other figures represented on the quilt include U.S. Congressmen Elihu B. Washburne and John Sherman of Ohio.

References

  1. Sikarskie, Amanda; MacDowell, Marsha; Alexander, Karen; Hornback, Nancy. "The Signature Quilt Project". The Quilt Index. Retrieved 14 June 2018.
  2. Bryant, Gilda. "Clues in the Quilting" (PDF). Retrieved 14 June 2018.
  3. "Faculty of Agricultural, Life & Environmental Sciences". Department of Human Ecology Signature Quilt. University of Alberta. Retrieved 14 June 2018.
  4. "Quilt, Tumbling Blocks with Signatures pattern". The Met: Browse The Collection. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Retrieved 14 June 2018.
  5. "Adeline Harris' masterpiece signature quilt". The History Blog. Retrieved 14 June 2018.
  6. Peck, Amelia (1998). ""A Marvel of Woman's Ingenious and Intellectual Industry":The Adeline HarrisSearsAutograph Quilt" (PDF). Metropolitan Museum Journal. 33: 263–290. Retrieved 14 June 2018.
  7. ""Signature Quilts and Genealogy"". Signature Quilt Pilot Project Wiki. Retrieved 14 June 2018.
  8. Walsh, Roxy. "The Signature Quilt. [Art Object]". Research Online. University of London. Retrieved 14 June 2018.