Stitching Stories: Making Memory and Meaning through Quilts

A guest blog post by Dr. Anne Franklin Lamar

Quilting lends us many metaphors. The piecing and stitching, the blocks and colors, the fabric and images, all bring memories and meaning together through textiles and thread in this uniquely feminine artform. For generations women and some men have turned to the art and domestic labor of quilting as a way to make meaning of their lives and transcend them at the same time. This creative and often useful work blurs the lines of art and craft and challenges us to see the mastery of skills mixing with artistic vision as the maker designs and constructions a quilt that brings both comfort and delight to those who use and view it.

Through this meaning-making and metaphor, every quilt tells a story: the stories of a home and a tornado, a family’s life in the hills of northwestern Iowa, the effects of the gender pay gap on the lives of Alabama women, the patterns found in rural Alabama, and a group of friends with a shared love of quilting. These stories and more can be seen through the quilts in “Stitching Stories” the current exhibit at Kentuck Art Center, featuring the works of Ana Schuber, Sarah Marshall, The March Quilts, Paula Barnett, Nanette Glaus, Mary Burke, Hallie H. O’Kelley, Becky Brown, Gee’s Bend Quilters, Rene Kastinas, and Martha Beadle. This exhibit brings together a collection of contemporary quilts by Alabama women whose quilts vary as much in style and technique as their stories do.

The artform and technology of quilting has grown and changed alongside the textile industry and the advent of mass production of inexpensive bedding. In this exhibit, you will see quilts that are handstitched and some that are machine quilted. You will see techniques that involve different modes of dyeing and printing on the fabric used in the quilts alongside scrappy quilts made from mixed fiber textiles. You’ll see nods to traditional blocks and appliques and layered stitch painting, applique, and embellishments found in pictorial quilts. You may also note the range of size from large bed-sized quilts that fill a wall to micro quilts that contain blocks measuring under a half-inch.

Hallie H. O'Kelley

The tradition of quilts in life of Kentuck began when Hallie O’Kelley, a current exhibitor, created the first pine tree quilt pattern image for a Kentuck Festival of the Arts over 40 years ago. Like the three quilts of O’Kelley’s in “Stitching Stories” and each yearly festival quilt, all begin from white cloth and are designed, hand dyed, screen printed, and hand stitched. In this current exhibit, she shares two quilts inspired by natural themes of sunsets and fall leaves and another quilt that reimagines her childhood with the crops her family grew featured in the borders and screen-printed scenes of farm life in the center of the quilt. 

Quilting is an art that is as much about the development and expression of self and identity as it is the expression of community and collaborative work. This collaborative work is something with which I am familiar. I grew up in my mother’s fabric store and saw every afternoon what a sewing community looked like and what it meant to the women who were a part of it. Cooperative quilting bees come in part from necessity as much as the creation of some quilts do, and like the quilts themselves, these groups offer the participants more than the surface level help on large time-consuming projects. These bees, circles, and guilds offer women a place to belong, a place to work together and share their lives and experiences, to talk about hard things while their hands are moving, to listen and learn, share wisdom, and care for each other. We see this important life affirming and community building work in the March Quilts, the Gee’s Bend quilters, and the West Alabama Quilters Guild. 

click to enlarge images

Two of the March Quilts are on display in “Stitching Stories.” These quilts are a part of an initiative begun by the Bib & Tucker Sew-Op and the UAB Art Department as a way to use the many metaphors of quilting to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the historic Selma March through the eyes and hands of a multi-generational group of community stitchers and quilters. In the years following the creation of the original March Quilt, the group chose a yearly theme to be the inspiration for the community quilt. The two quilts seen in the galleries are from the second year when the gender pay gap was the topic and another year when Alabama heroines were the focus. In these collaborative quilts you’ll see the stitches of many different participants each block standing as that person’s interpretation of theme sewn together with others to signify the whole.

These memories evoked by quilts are stitched together in our minds and build block by block as we view quilts and hear the stories from their makers. During the artists’ talk, I heard Ana Schuber explain why she started quilting and was happily reminded of a story theorist and social critic, bell hooks, tells her book Belonging (2009). hooks describes her grandmother, Baba, telling the stories of her mother’s childhood summers through a quilt top made from worn-out dresses, describing the quilt top as “a visual history of summer time pleasure.” She goes on to write about carrying it with her from move to move until finally she returns to Kentucky and finds a woman with the skill and care to hand-quilt Baba’s quilt top, completing the quilt that held hooks’s family stories by physically and metaphorically adding two more layers. Schuber too remembers being told her own family history through quilts that her grandmother made from clothing. These quilts and family histories are what go on to inspire her to learn to quilt. She also expanded upon it with what she called “trash quilting” that brings together the scraps of other quilters’ works to build a quilt that carried memories of all those quilters and their stories and projects. This preservation of family and community history through pieced textiles can be seen throughout American history. It’s a way to reuse fabric and scraps and preserve memories. We see another example of this style in “Gee’s Bend Workday” by Andrea Pettway Williams, where parts of blue jeans and work shirts are cut and pieced to make a striking quilt that gives a family a way to reuse and remember the person or people who wore those work clothes.

I too cherish family quilts with many memories. I can trace my hands along the quilts and remember the fabric and where it was used in the past, the blocks and their meanings, and the stitches and who they made them. These family histories are daily gifts. They are indeed soft covers for hard times, but what are these quilts to those who don’t know these stories or don’t recognize a block and its meaning? When I teach students about quilts we start with visual analysis. As a class we look at quilts in books, online, and a few in person, and I ask them to tell us what they see. What colors and patterns stands out? What do think the blocks might mean? How does the quilt make them feel? I want the students to see quilts as works of art, meticulously, precisely, and lovingly created with artistic vision and expertise of the maker/s. I want them to imagine the stories of these quilts before they read the oral histories and interviews of the quilters because for so many quilts, we do not have a written or recorded history. For the quilts in this exhibit, we are lucky enough to have both.

I hope you will walk through the exhibit as my mother and I did, delighting in the vibrancy, artistry, and depth of color and design, appreciating the skill and vision, and letting these quilts and their makers tell you their stories and evoke memories of your own.

Can't visit in person? See the exhibition here: https://www.kentuck.org/post/stitching-stories

About Dr. Anne Franklin Lamar

Dr. Anne Franklin Lamar earned her bachelor’s degree from the Mississippi University for Women & her master’s and Ph.D. from The University of Alabama. Her interests include women’s studies & storytelling, including non-traditional texts such as quilts, cookbooks, gardens & more. She is also a potter, & her work is inspired by quilting/textile traditions passed down from her mother & other generations of women. She draws inspiration from her work teaching her interdisciplinary courses in literature & women’s studies at the University of Alabama Honors College, mixing words, affirmations, and even oral history transcripts into her carving & design.