Quilts at the North Carolina Museum of Art

The other day David and I went to the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh for the first time.  It is not too far from our townhouse.   There is a special exhibition going called Layered Legacies: Quilts from the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts at Old Salem - on until July 21.  

"Quilts materialize the bonds of home, family, and community as they are passed down from generation to generation. Yet they are also records of our shared history, interwoven with broader social, cultural, and economic legacies that make up the complex fabric of the United States."

Complex, for sure.  The quilts were made during Slavery and Reconstruction years, and the exhibition acknowledges and highlights how the quilts would likely have been produced by "unacknowledged hands" - and absolutely so, when we consider the cotton batting and fabric.  

We do not assume that Eleanor made this quilt herself. Note the "household of"  - 

An 1845 crib quilt from the household of Mary Videau Marion Yeadon, in Charleston, South Carolina: 

There was a white work quilt made by two sisters in antebellum (pre Civil War) Tennessee.  One sister married a slave holder, while the other sister married an abolitionist minister.  

From the museum website: 

Layered Legacies invites audiences to consider the multilayered stories stitched into quilts made in the American South between the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. Featured are more than 30 bed coverings and related objects from the collection of the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts and Old Salem collections. Foregrounding the masterful artistry of women, these bed coverings are expressions of love, objects of exquisite craftsmanship, and material documents containing hidden stories of long-forgotten women, both white and Black, wealthy and enslaved, whose hands created and cared for these important textiles.

It is well worth seeing if you are in the area!  It has given me a lot to think about. 

xo

Cynthia