Reading the Material Evidence in American Quilts with Tara Miller | Opening Lecture

In this opening lecture, guest curator Tara Miller examines selected objects from the exhibition to reveal the commercial forces behind their fabric. A 1776 wool whole cloth becomes a story of boycotts and domestic industry. Chintz appliqué traces the path of enslaved labor’s cotton across the Atlantic to Britain and back. Arsenic greens expose how industrial chemistry transformed the quiltmaker’s palette. Depression-era newspaper quilting bees show how entrepreneurs and mass media reinvented quilt commerce in hard times. Feed sack cloth bears witness to the hardships of sharecroppers in rural Alabama. And a pictorial California quilt made by nineteen Orange County women in 1975 captures the spirit of the Great Quilt Revival, a movement that reclaimed quilt making as creative, communal.