- [Narrator] Live from your Public Media Studios, WVIA presents "Keystone Edition Arts".

A Public Affairs program that goes beyond the headlines to address issues in Northeastern and Central Pennsylvania.

This is "Keystone Edition Arts", and now, Erika Funke.

- Welcome to Keystone Edition Arts for an airing of quilts in the broadcast sense.

Sarah Santo prepares the way.

- [Sarah] When does a quilt become something more than pieces of fabric sewn together?

For some quilts can provide healing and comfort.

The "Quilts of Valor" Project is one example.

The idea came from Catherine Roberts, the mother of a soldier, deployed in Iraq.

She wanted to provide comfort and hope to those who served in the military.

Since the first Quilt of Valor was awarded in November, 2003, more than 375,000 quilts have been made and awarded to a service member or veteran.

One of the most famous quilts, the AIDS Memorial Quilt was conceived in 1985 by human rights activists Cleve Jones, as a way for families and friends to remember those who had died of AIDS.

Because as Jones said, "Auilts are warm, comforting, and a symbol of middle American traditional family values."

The quilts has become, in his words, the world's largest community arts project.

It was first displayed on the National Mall in Washington DC in 1987.

It covered a space larger than a football field and included more than 1900 panels.

Almost 40 years later, the quilt now includes nearly 50,000 panels from people worldwide and serves as a memorial and an HIV prevention education tool.

The women of Gee's Bend Alabama quilts they made from scraps of fabric became recognized as a form of modern art.

Allentown Art Museum associate curator Claire McRee explains more in this video from 2021.

When the museum held an exhibition featuring some of the quilts.

(bright music) - Hey, this is Claire at the Allentown Art Museum in the exhibition roots Sources for American Art and Design.

And today I wanted to look at some works by Mary Lee Bendolph, an artist from Gee's Bend, Alabama.

(bright music) Gee's Bend has this really unique quilting tradition where women create their own quilts based on improvisation.

You end up with these amazing compositions like this quilt here.

In Gee's Bend, the quilting tradition grew out of necessity and hardship.

Many families in this rural African American community were simply making quilts as a way to keep warm in the winter.

In the early two thousands, a dealer, William Arnett brought the artists of Gee's Bend to the attention of the art world.

They participated in nationally touring exhibitions and became famous and iconic for these quilts.

Some of the Gee's Bend quilters have gone to make fine art prints original works based on their quilts.

It's really exciting and interesting to think about the boundary between craft versus fine art and how do we define who gets to be an artist and what is art?

(bright music) - Claire McRee curator at the Allentown Art Museum, asking us to think about quilts, quilting, and quilters, and the discussion in recent times about quilting is craft, quilting his art, and about how, when, where, why, and who makes quilts.

We welcome our guests, who will help us explore these questions and some of the fine quilts in our region.

James Lansing is curator at the Everhart Museum in Scranton, where they have a distinctive American folk art collection.

The Everhart offers fiber art classes and workshops as well.

And James has brought two quilts to share with us on the set.

Artist Janet Gaglione is executive director of the Wayne County Arts Alliance.

She has a background in theater and costume design that influences the art quilts she creates.

And we'll get to see some of her work as well on the show.

Ricky Moler is a quilter, quilt historian at educator who's working with a team of volunteers at the Thomas T. Taber Museum in Williamsport to create a database cataloging the 100 or so quilts in the museum's collection.

She'll be telling us about an intriguing quaker quilt shortly.

Welcome James.

So good to have you with us and grateful that you've brought some of the treasures from the collection for us to see.

But first, tell us about that folk art collection at the Everhart.

- Well, our folk art collection's probably one of the most important collections in the United States.

It was a lot of it donated to us, but we purchased a lot of it from Reddit Church Robertson.

And she was collecting folk art at a time when people did not see it as a true art form.

So she, early in her career, started collecting it and amassed an incredible collection that we have so much of it that the Oppenheim Family Foundation gave us a grant to hold a new gallery.

So we'll always have a place for folk art in the Everhart Museum.

- Did that collection that you purchased have quilts in it?

Were they part of it or were they mostly paintings and sculptural objects?

- It's sculpture, painting, quilts.

There's all, you name it was part of that collection and the exhibit that just opened in December.

There's pieces of all of that.

- All of that.

And coming out.

And you're gonna keep that up for a while, that folk art collection.

- Yes.

This exhibit will run probably eight, nine months and then I'll change it out.

And our next part of it will be quilts and fabrics, 'cause we have so much.

That's why it'll be a semi-permanent gallery.

- Semi gallery.

Yeah.

Now we want to know sort of like "Antiques Roadshow".

Tell us what you've brought with you.

- Well, I brought one quilt here from 1903.

Okay.

And you can see in the quilt itself, it's a patchwork quilt.

And you can see the year right here.

And this, we think there's no maker.

We didn't have a maker of this.

So we think that this is probably Lancaster area because of the geometrics of it and the embroidery with inside of the geometric shapes throughout the whole quilt itself.

- Janet, you are a quilter.

And we had it out and hanging before.

Tell us what you noticed quickly as a quilter yourself.

- I love the variety of fabrics.

Some other traditional quilts are all cottons.

These look like silks and velvets, actually, I can't even describe all of them, but there's so many different textures of fabric in this particular quilt in addition to all the beautiful colors that have been put together and then embroidered over that.

So the detail of the workmanship, and this is just beautiful.

- Wow and the range of colors is exquisite, isn't it?

From a kind of a peachy to a teal to lavender, purples and blues.

And it's, would we think trend wise, Janet, do you think that this is something we might say, I'm not holding you to about this one, but 1903, this might have been something that might have been characteristic of an era.

Have there been trends, in other words, where geometrics dominate what people are doing?

- Well, certainly traditional quilts are geometric and sometimes they're very regular patterns like this with the diamonds that are all the same size and shape as opposed to the Gee's Bend quilt pictures that we saw earlier that were not as consistent with the same shape.

Both are beautiful, but both are certainly different.

I'm not a quilt historian.

Show me this.

And I wouldn't be able to guess the date.

I'm glad you have the date on it.

(Erika laughing) So we know.

But what amazes me, I mean, I'm into color.

I do my work based on colors and just looking at the variety.

Like there's a blue diamond and here's a blue diamond is different fabrics.

There's hundreds of different fabrics in this particular quilt, which makes it so rich and very beautiful.

- Yes, yes.

And we might not think that some of the colors go together, but somehow, whoever did this or whatever group might have done this, have that sense.

Of course, these two can be juxtaposed and be beautiful as well.

- Yes, I agree.

That's where quilting is an art.

Just like painters choose their paint palette and paint colors for their artwork.

Quilters choose from a selection of fabrics.

And it was certainly a very rich selection that this particular quilter or this group of quilters, you say it might be.

- [James] Yeah, definitely.

- A group of quilts that created this particular piece.

So some of them probably bought fabric together from different places to make this, - Make this quilt.

And as you mentioned, the embroidery on top of, and they're, each one is different.

And that's like a little gargoyle type figure.

And that's floral.

And that's like a fleur de lis and that's like a.

- Flower of some type.

- Yeah, a flower of some type and a leaf.

Beautiful range of things.

And Janet, what's that little like a Ferris wheel or like a sun spiral?

- This is a spiral.

- [Erika] Spiral.

- This looks like a star pattern, but each of these embroideries is all hand done.

It's the detail.

It's just beautiful.

- Wow, that's wonderful.

And that's just one from the collection?

- That's just one.

Yeah, that's just one from our collection.

We have many of these, and that's why we want to do just an exhibit of the quilt we have.

- [Erika] Of the quilts that you have.

- Yeah - Yes.

And you also brought another one.

- Yes, I brought one, crazy.

I don't have that here with me.

That is a crazy quilt.

And that one we don't know.

We know pretty much you see the.

- [Erika] There it is, yeah.

- Each of the squares is made separately by the materials they had.

They didn't waste any materials whatsoever, so they just put them all together.

And this one is not as big as this one here, but you can see all the individual panes in the quilt itself.

And the crazy quilts actually, these type of quilts actually go back to Egyptian times.

They have actually seen quilts like this on ivory castings of important people.

And that's where they think it originally came from in Egypt in like the 35th BC century.

Yeah.

- [Erika] That's.

- So they've been with us forever.

- And that gives you the chills in a certain sense.

Now, you brought these in, they were in bags and in a box.

How do you have to store them like you would any textile art?

Well, we have to store them in boxes.

We have to worry about them in our storage unit.

And that is all archival boxes in archival bags.

And this hasn't been out for a while.

It'll go back in and then when we're ready to hang it, we'll take it out.

- You'll take it out again.

- Yeah.

Wow, that's wonderful.

And it's what we're so fortunate to be able to touch it.

- [James] Yeah.

- I don't you wanna touch it.

It's so lovely.

And again, the different textures and the velvets.

Beautiful.

Beautiful.

And you also have provided us with a photo of the current exhibition.

- [James] Yes.

- In the gallery.

- [James] Yes.

- And there's a big, is it a coverlet?

- [James] It's a coverlet, yes.

- And we have a photo of that.

And maybe you can tell us a little bit of it.

There it is.

- There's the coverlet, and that is the current folk art exhibit.

And the coverlet was placed on top of the quilts on a bed.

And only well to do families could afford to have a coverlet made for them.

And we know that this one comes from New York in Orange County.

James Alexander is the company owner that made these quilts.

And on this, you can actually see the name in the corner, you can actually see who it was made for in 1825.

- Wow.

- And he was around till roughly 1828.

And there are a lot of quilts by this maker.

- Wow.

Wow.

Well, thank you, James.

This is leave this sweet, leave this up for us so we can, but we wanna see yours too.

We'll fold it back when it comes to yours, Janet, we're gonna go to Williamsport.

And Ricki Moler is a quilter and a quilt historian who is coordinating a special project at the Thomas T. Tabor Museum in Williamsport, working with their collection of over a hundred quilts.

And we had a chance to visit with her by Zoom to learn more about that project.

- We started in September, and we've been here every Monday that it's not a holiday or it's not snowing.

(gentle music) It's a Turkey red and muslin nine patch.

And there are 144 names on it.

And drawings, little fountains and flowers and all kinds of flourishes around people's names, dates, and places are also on that quilt, which is wonderful for a quilt historian.

It's from the 1840s, and it was brought to Williamsport by Harold Taylor and his family.

He was the museum treasurer at the time, and he brought it from Kenneth Square.

It's kind of a, the signature quilt was a kind of a fad in the 1840s, especially Philadelphia, Baltimore, Wilmington, Delaware, down in that area, the eastern seaboard.

And then it sort of filtered west.

But we're lucky this quilt and its life traveled to us, and now we take care of it.

(gentle music) The engagement quilt is from 1882, and it is a beautiful quilt with luscious fabrics.

The blocks were made by friends of Cecilia Stuber when she got engaged to Dr. Richter in Williamsport.

And Cecilia put the quilt together herself.

So the blocks were her gift from her friends.

And this is a log cabin quilt that's in the barn raisings setting the concentric diamond shapes and its foundation piece, which is another technique that we don't really use nowadays.

But that's how log cabin quilts were made in the 19th century.

It's all silks, satins ribbons, and the border is the most beautiful burgundy velvet that you can imagine.

So it's really a beautiful quilt.

(gentle music) That'll be the focus of our quilt study day in March.

But the thing that was interesting about this quilt, not only that it's English paper piece, but it has a centennial fabric in it.

And there were fabrics that were printed to commemorate the founding of this country.

So 1876, we have a fabric in this quilt that instantly gives us a date to work from.

So we know that it couldn't have been made before 1876.

The fabric actually has the words of a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem called "O Ship of State".

So that's kind of nice when we find something like that, that we can use that fabric to help date the other fabrics in the quilt and give us a timeframe.

We don't know exactly who made the hexagon quilt, probably called a honeycomb in its day or a mosaic nowadays we would say grandmother's flower garden.

But it wasn't called that back then.

(gentle music) We think this was made about 1990.

It's called a Walk in the Park.

And it is an homage to Brandon Park, the park in the center of Williamsport.

And this was made by Marjorie Rosser, who was a quilter that I knew and my teammate Patty knew.

We were all in the Quilt Guild together in the nineties.

And it's a beautiful quilt, a lot of photo transfer on this one scenes of the park in different seasons.

And she's written all the names of the different trees that are in the park.

There are trinkets like squirrels and tennis rackets and clothes lines with quilts hanging on them.

It's a beautiful quilt.

And we're very happy to have one of Mar's quilts here.

She was a great quilter.

- Thanks Ricki.

And thanks to the folks at the Thomas T. Tabor Museum in Williamsport.

And now, greetings formally Janet.

We're so grateful that you're with us, and we've just been speaking about quilts that might have had utilitarian origins, but that because of the way they are constructed and designed really have aesthetic qualities.

But you are an artist who went straight to the arts.

You didn't make quilts with grandma, or you didn't learn from grandma.

you are someone with a theater background.

Tell us about how you came to quilts from theater and costuming and so forth.

- I learned to sew from my mother, 4-H clubs, clothing, things like that.

I started making costumes for the drama club when I was in high school.

So I knew how to sew.

And when I was a teenager, I had no interest in quilts because they seemed to be all made out of those little calico prints.

That didn't entice me at all at age 16.

But later on, when I was living in New York City, when I was working as a lighting supervisor and production manager for the Joffrey Ballet Company, I went past a storefront that was selling clothing, but had part of its display, a quilt that I found very dramatic.

And so I decided I can do that.

And I wanted to try to do that.

So my first quilt was very simple.

It actually was.

- Oh, show us.

- This pattern.

I made a pillow out of some of the pieces.

It was actually a full queen size quilt.

And I did it all the wrong ways.

I didn't know quite how to hold a needle to do hand quilting yet, because I was coming from a stitching and a sewing background, and it has lots of little French knots in it.

And this is just plain muslin, which meant after a number of years on the bed, it fell apart.

So I don't recommend plain muslin, from there, I went nuts.

I have a collection of fabric at home that could go on for miles.

But my next quilt, this wasn't my next quilt, but my next quilt, I was inspired with three dimensional quilt designs.

And this is called a tumbling block quilt.

I was in love with the artist Escher at the time.

So anything three dimensional was fun and different.

And then some of my next quilts weren't traditional quilt blocks either.

They were based on photographs of mosaic tiles that I had taken.

I had the opportunity to travel in Barcelona again, the Joffrey Ballet got me around the world.

I was an avid outdoor photographer.

I was working with lighting design.

So those kinds of experiences with color has strongly influenced what I do with my quilting and my fabric.

I do still do stitching work.

I work as a tailor and a stitcher on Broadway tours and movies mostly that have been filmed in Buffalo.

I'm part of the wardrobe union there.

And so I keep up with sewing in different ways, not just quilting.

And then some of the most fun things I've done recently have been making quilts or quilted art that aren't bed quilts.

I mean, I've made bed quilts.

I've made love lots of quilts for other people, for family members.

But on the screen there now is a quilted bird house.

It was a series of art projects.

The quilted deer started it.

It was actually a dear form that was a project with the Wayne County Arts Alliance many years ago.

This is the quilted key.

That was a project with the Frederick Arts Council.

It was a giant six foot fiberglass key.

And then a couple of years later, again in Frederick, this is a giant ribbon, and it was done for breast cancer.

And that one was actually purchased by one of the hospitals in Frederick.

And it's on display there now.

So my quilts have gone to a variety of different places and the three dimensional things that you saw there, the birdhouse and the deer and the bear.

I've done a couple of little bears, which are fun for the Milford Black Bear Film Festival and the something in Clark Summit.

Anyway, I've done several of those things.

And what's most fun about that is it's taking quilting and sometimes traditional squares of quilting and putting it in a place where people don't expect to find it.

You don't expect to find quilt squares on a fiberglass bear in the middle of Clark Summit, but it's there.

And it's a fun way to translate a traditional art into other expressions of art.

I've done other kinds of quilted wall hangings that are made specifically as an art piece as opposed to as a bed quilt, which is great.

I've done those too.

I've done lots of kids quilts for nieces and nephews and kids that, and the family.

Many of my quilts have been gifts.

And so this is an example of very detailed hand quilting.

I don't have a whole lot of time for that anymore.

But this one, I chose to use solid colored fabrics because it shows off the quilting stitching more than a printed fabric.

And if you're gonna do all that work to do hand quilting, you might as well have someone appreciate it or see the stitches at least.

And the kinds of quilts I do are wonderful, but there's no limit to the kinds of art quilts that different artists have made.

We have a number of members of the Wayne County Arts Alliance that are quilters, are art quilters.

I have pictures from two of them.

Do you have the picture of the elephant?

- The elephants?

Yes, they're.

- The elephants are wonderful.

They'll catch up.

Yes.

This is an art quilt that was made by Andrea Schwank, who was originally from Germany, lives in Wayne County now.

These fabrics are all indigo dyed by her.

She dyed the fabrics and layered them together.

These are some hand dyed fabrics and some purchase fabrics also by Andrea.

And she does just a variety of things.

And what she does is completely different than what I do.

- Yes, exactly.

It's completely different what other people do.

We have another artist named Linda Kraus, and I think I sent a couple of pictures of her work.

She's originally from Australia, and her colors just go wild.

And she combines pieced fabrics as well as applique fabric bits.

I would never imagine to do that.

But that's what's fun.

Different people do different things.

This was an exhibition of Linda's quilts at Bodie Tree Gallery in Honesdale a number of years ago.

And they're just huge and wonderful and beautiful.

The Arts Alliance is actually doing a specific exhibit in June featuring on the art quilts by two other artists, a Buff McAllister and Catherine Lynchman.

So we love being able to showcase the variety of quilts.

There's all the history and all the wonderful history that you're preserving in your museum, which is so important.

And then there's more and more that other artists are doing now that are varied, that you can put fabric and fiber together in so many different ways.

And as I mentioned, you know, quilters choose fabrics like a pink palette.

You get to pick and choose, which is why I have a basement full of fabric right now.

(Erika laughing) Too many, too many things.

But putting that together, I mean, choosing the fabrics for a quilt interests me just as much as sewing it together.

- Isn't that right?

- It is, the selecting, just like- - Do you make it like a palette when you're working?

- Mm hmm.

- You do.

- Most of the quilt I've made, I have a little card with all the fabrics stuck together, some of the more colorful quilts like this, there's quite a few fabrics in this.

And this is just a small wall hanging.

- [Erika] Yeah.

- And this is a very geometric, this is called a bar jello style quilt.

And again, sometimes you use traditional patterns, sometimes you just put the fabrics together and make an elephant.

It's the possibilities are endless for doing quilts.

And I find that very exciting because there is such a variety.

- Yeah.

- I mean, unfortunately, some people think quilts are just what grandma used to make, but grandma didn't just make this, all that velvet and everything.

- [Erika] Yes.

- The variety is wonderful.

And we enjoy being able to share that and see all the different, different things.

- And James, does the museum have your eye open sometimes for some of those art quilts?

Will you be scouting around to sort of give us a juxtaposition between these beauties that you have?

- I think from getting ready to talk more about quilts and doing research, I see more and more different types of quilts out there.

And it already has my mind going that when I put together the quilt show, I want to have a modern section to show that it's not just this old style people did, but it's also something that continues.

- Wow.

That's wonderful.

Well, we'll close with a closeup of a detail from the Brandon Park Quilt from the collection of the Thomas T. Tabor Museum in Williamsport.

And it reads, as you'll see, airing and sharing of quilts because that's what we've done on this show.

We've had an airing and sharing of quilts, and we'd like to thank our guests, James and Ricki, and Janet and you for watching.

For more information on this topic, including links to our guests and resources, please visit wvia.org/keystone and click on Keystone Edition Arts.

And remember, you can watch this episode or any episode on demand anytime.

And that's online or on the WVIA app.

And so for "Keystone Edition", I'm Erika Funke.

Thank you for watching.

And thank you for an interest in this remarkable array of quilts that we've had here with us and on the screen.

Thank you all.

(bright music)