Marin F. Hanson

This paper highlights an exhibition called Quilts Under the Microscope, which was organized for the International Quilt Study Center and Museum at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2010. The exhibition presented a group of damaged quilts that after close examination divulged some of the secrets of their past and helped determine the best way to safeguard them for the future. The exhibition was designed to introduce museum visitors to the many agents of deterioration that can slowly (or quickly!) destroy quilts and other heirloom textiles. Photomicrographs and macrographs of damaged areas were used to spotlight various types of damage. The exhibit also helped visitors understand how to care for valued heirloom textiles in their own homes. It was developed and produced with the curatorial assistance of students in a graduate course. This provided a rich learning experience for the students and resulted in a very popular exhibition for the Museum.

This paper examines the phenomenon of ‘One Hundred Good Wishes Quilts’ (OHGWQ), early 21st-century quilts made by American families to commemorate their adoption of a Chinese child. Since 1994, the single largest source for international adoptions in the United States has been the People’s Republic of China. Indeed, between 1999 and 2012, nearly 70,000 children of ethnic Chinese descent joined thousands of American families. During that same period, however, adoption from China, which began as a relatively quick and easy process, became progressively longer and more difficult. To cope with this lengthening, unpredictable, and sometimes emotionally turbulent process, parents began to make OHGWQ, which have roots in a northern Chinese patchwork practice and spread rapidly through the China adoption community via the internet. This paper traces the development of the OHGWQ, examines the Chinese and American antecedents that served as sources for the new practice, and assesses the meanings that parents and others have assigned to the quilts and the process of making them. At the same time, the paper is intended to serve as a model for how we can use quilts as metaphors for socio-cultural phenomena―in particular, changing attitudes about how adopted children should be integrated into American society and how Americans view Chinese culture in general.

Using two examples of cross-cultural interaction, this paper examines how periods of cultural exchange have influenced quiltmaking practices. American quilts with clear links to Eastern cultures echo the larger patterns of economic and cultural trade between Asia and the West during the past several centuries. Beginning with the use of Asian-produced or Asian-influenced fabrics in the eighteenth century, American quiltmakers have frequently looked to the "exotic" East for design inspiration. The distinctive Old Order Amish quilt style exhibits clear tied to "English" (non-Amish) quiltmaking techniques, patterns, and formats. Amish quilts support the assertion that Amish culture is continually influenced by and reacting to larger American or "English" society. During the current quiltmaking revival, cultural exchange has again had an impact; Japanese quiltmakers have adopted American quilt styles, adapting them to create a distinct Japanese artform, while "English" quiltmakers and quilt collectors have embraced the Amish quilt aesthetic.

"The crazy quilt was born, hit its zenith of popularity, and faded from high fashion all within the last quarter of the nineteenth century," writes Marin F. Hanson, assistant curator at the International Quilt Study Center, University of Nebraska-Lincoln. "Composed of irregularly shaped and randomly placed pieces of fabric-usually silk-and embellished with profuse embroidery, the crazy quilt was a product of many influences: the greater availability of silk fabrics, the philosophies of the aesthetic movement, a new fascination with Japanese design, and the introduction of English needlework styles." To help us understand how this essentially "urban fad" penetrated rural America, here Hanson examines a crazy quilt produced by Eva Wight of Saline County, Kansas, in 1891. "Examining Eva Wight's quilt in its various contexts, therefore, helps us understand how late-nineteenth-century quiltmaking in central Kansas may not have been radically different from quiltmaking all over America."

One Hundred Good Wishes Quilts (OHGWQ) are a contemporary form of material culture that commemorates an American family’s adoption of a Chinese child. Made and/or coordinated by parents in the midst of adopting, OHGWQ are community-based objects constructed from fabrics donated by a large number of family, friends, and acquaintances. A practice that spread largely via the internet starting around 2000, the OHGWQ tradition is based upon a host of phenomena and contexts: the sudden growth of China adoption in the late 1990s and 2000s; indigenous patchwork and quilting practices in China and the U.S.; the Western history of cultural appropriation; and present-day forms of web-based communication.
Drawing on interviews with nearly two dozen adoptive parents, this research utilised a phenomenological approach to explore the experience of making a OHGWQ, a form of material culture never previously studied. The work explores how OHGWQ function on the individual or personal level, in such ways as celebrating a significant moment in a family’s history, making the adoption process seem less onerous and interminable, building support for a non-traditional method of family-building, and giving makers the opportunity to participate in a form of “everyday creativity” (Gauntlett 2011). The thesis also examines the OHGWQ’s place and meaning in the lives of those who organise and/or make the projects and within American society and culture at large.
In particular, the thesis demonstrates that the OHGWQ project plays several “in-between” roles, functioning as a link or transitional device in each case: between being a non-maker and a maker, between disparate Eastern/Western cultural practices, between various groups of people, and between pre- and post-adoption senses of identity for the family as a whole and potentially for the adoptee. In essence, it is argued that OHGWQ connect people, cultures, and ideas.

A comprehensive analysis of 650 quilts made between 1870 and 1945 revealed two related yet divergent trends. On one hand, many quilts embody the anti-modern sentiments common to the era, in particular those of the Aesthetic Movement and the Colonial Revival. Reacting against the negative aspects of industrialized life, these two movements looked to exotic cultures and past eras for inspiration. The Aesthetic Movement influenced crazy quilts of the 1870s and 1880s, with an emphasis on foreign-inspired motifs and needlework methods. The Colonial Revival reintroduced quilt styles that had been popular in America prior to the Civil War. On the other hand, technological advances, such as the sewing machine, dye synthesis, and improved communications, simultaneously transformed quiltmaking into a fully modern pastime. While these parallel developments may seem contradictory, they are characteristic of a nation struggling with what it means to be “modern.”

A strong characteristic of American popular culture in the 1920s and 1930s was its fascination with all things “oriental,” or generally exotic. It was expressed in a multitude of areas, including furniture, fashion, movies and architecture. It was also evident in quiltmaking, an extremely popular pastime of the era, in the preponderance of patchwork patterns that had an exotic theme or name. Sometimes the designs of these patterns directly reflected their exotic names; most often they did not. The reasons for the popularity of exotic pattern names are varied. Certainly, pattern designers were capitalizing on the fashion for anything oriental. But, as this paper will propose, ladies' magazine publishers and quilt column writers also were reacting to Americans' ambivalence about Asians—their fear of the “yellow peril” mixed with their admiration for Eastern design. By naming and renaming patterns and, more importantly, by mixing oriental, “colonial,” and modern imagery and verbiage, they diluted the negative connotations of the exotic and potentially made it more palatable to the tradition-centered quiltmaking world.

Fifty years after its debut, the exhibition Abstract Design in American Quilts is remembered as a pivotal moment in the intersecting histories of art, craft, and design. Installed at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art in 1971, the exhibition presented traditional American pieced quilts on walls more commonly used to display modern art such as abstract expressionist paintings. The exhibition, curated by Jonathan Holstein and Gail van der Hoof from their own collection, unexpectedly struck a chord with museumgoers and art critics alike, breaking attendance records and subsequently traveling to museums across the United States, Europe, and Japan. With Abstract Design in American Quilts at 50, an exhibition series that includes an installation of the original quilt group, the International Quilt Museum at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln reexamines the half-century impact of this watershed exhibition. In five essays, leading quilt scholars assess the areas upon which the exhibition, in its various iterations, had its greatest impact, most notably the growth of quiltmaking across the United States and in art circles. The essays also discuss broader cultural phenomena that produced an environment in which quilts and other forms of material culture could be viewed and valued in new ways.