I was excited to be included in Eve Khan's article about the exciting things happening with quilts this year. Her article, "Celebrating American Quilts in Shows and Books," highlights a variety of projects that are expanding the contemporary scholarship of American quiltmaking.
“People think of quilts as nostalgia, and we have to get beyond that,” the textiles historian and dealer Laura Fisher, who runs the Fisher Heritage gallery in New York, said while leafing through a coffee table book by one of her customers, the collector Roderick Kiracofe. The book, “Unconventional & Unexpected: American Quilts Below the Radar 1950-2000” (Stewart, Tabori & Chang/Abrams), is full of bedcovers that she describes as “funky, maverick kind of quilts.”
Mr. Kiracofe has also heard his 300 pieces called “the ugly quilts,” he said in an interview. He started looking for unusual quilts in 2004, after decades of focusing on more traditional pre-1940s patchworks. Loud colors and asymmetrical stripes attract him, as do scraps of synthetic prints, perhaps recycled from 1950s upholstery and 1970s disco shirts.
Quilt from Unconventional & Unexpected