Linda Ulrich Memorial Quilt Show

"Although the idea of sewing an insulating layer between two pieces of cloth is an ancient one, it was in the new and unrestricted society fo nineteenth-century America that the possibilities inherent in the idea of quilting took hold and flourished.

After visiting the United States in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville observed in his still definitive study Democracy in America, "Democratic nations...will therefore cultivate the arts that serve to render life easy in preference to those whose object is to adorn it. They will habitually prefer the useful to the beautiful, and they will require that the beautiful should be useful." He might well have been writing about quilts. No other American art form so inextricably intertwines usefulness and beauty...

Quilts belong to American women. Although some men have been quiltmakers, the medium has traditionally been associated with and dominated by women. Women have defined quiltmaking, set its standards, outlined its parameters, and judged its accomplishments. For women, quilts have offered a means of expression and empowerment in a medium of their own making, to be shared almost exclusively with other women.

For a substantial part of this country's history, quilts were virtually the only means of personal and artistic expression readily available to the average woman...Because women have invested so much of themselves in their quilts, quilts are often personal or family treasures, carefully and even ceremoniously passed down from generation to generation (usually by female members of a family), and lovingly cared for and brought out for special occasions.

Quilts serve as documents of the history of women in America, attesting to both personal and shared concerns, and expressing a full range of emotions and experiences. Social historians and students of the relatively new science of material culture now study quilts alongside diaries, letters, and other primary documents, including them among the most important sources of information about women's lives in earlier times.

Every quilt is different; each reveals something of its maker's personality and individuality as well as her place within her community and society...They can be especially revealing about women's feeling and perceptions of themselves, sometimes telling stories and carrying emotions that cannot be as effectively expressed by more literal means."

Robert Shaw, Quilts: A Living Tradition (Shelburne, Vermont: Hugh Lauter Levin Associates, Inc., 1995), 9.