Stitched In Time

The most prolific yet undervalued folk artists in American history have been women. As wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters, it was historically their role to beautify the home through the work of their own hands: drawing, painting, knitting and netting, embroidering, and, of course, sewing. 

A quintessential form of women’s art was the making of patchwork quilts. The understanding of quilting as a communal activity was popularized through descriptions of festive 19th-century quilting bees. In fact, quilt-making was often the creative process of one woman, an expression of her own artistic sensibility in cloth. 

The quilts in this exhibition were passed down within the donor’s family and represent the work of more than half a dozen women in 19th-century Oxford, New York: an intergenerational inheritance of textile treasures.