AIC 53rd Annual Meeting

The Art Museums of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation display exquisite examples of needlework, but not every textile in the collection is expertly crafted and beautifully finished. A recent exhibition titled The Art of the Quilterpresented the opportunity to showcase three such pieces ambitious projects that ultimately entered the Foundations collection as UFOs (unfinished objects). The gallery in which large scale, flat textiles are generally displayed consists of large wall cases fitted with slanted boards of medium-density fiberboard (MDF) encapsulated with Marvelseal and covered in dark polyester show fabric. Textiles have previously been hung with headers of hook-side Velcro stitched along the top back edge of the object. The hook Velcro marries well with the coarse, napped show fabric, eliminating the need for custom loop-side Velcro hanging mechanisms. This allows for expedient rotation of objects and offers tremendous flexibility during installation but significantly limits mounting options beyond the traditional Velcro header, a system that is not suitable for all textiles.The three UFOs each required a different approach. A group of 25 appliqud quilt blocks, all square but varying in size, were mounted in the lab before installation. Individual padded boards were created for each block and the textiles were secured with entomological pins. Each padded board was fitted with Velcro tabs on the back, and installation required tiling the boards together on the slant board within the case. To mount 45 fragments of an unfinished pieced-over-paper hexagon quilt top, heavily modified Velcro headers marked with the corresponding accession number were secured with pins to 41 of the fragments. The four remaining fragments were pin-mounted to a single padded board. The fragments were positioned to imply the intended spacing if the quilt had been completed. The third UFO consists of 20th century printed tobacco pouches pieced into a quilt top, many of which retain fragments of paper tax stamps. The lightweight nature of the object and the fragility of the paper fragments limited options for stitching or pinning into the object, so rare earth magnets were used to secure the object to a custom header that included a ferrous metal bar. The magnets were covered and toned to match the textile, and the header was constructed to both facilitate mounting and provide protection and support to the object. These objects, never completed by their makers for whatever reason, provide valuable insight into the art of quilt making. Details that would have been removed or obscured in the final construction, like repurposed pieces of paper or differing bobbin and top thread colors, shed light on the context in which these objects were created and tell the story of their makers. Creative modifications to existing gallery casework and infrastructure allowed for these non-traditional quilts to be safely displayed and ethical considerations about the display of the fragments necessitated collaboration with curators and exhibition designers to strike a balance between honoring the original intent of the maker and expanding visitors' understanding of the art of quilting.