Americam Decorative Arts makes its home in Milwaukee this summer with the Milwaukee Art Museum's exhibition “American Quilts: Selections for the Winterthur Collection.” For the opening in May, Winterthur's Curator of Textiles Linda Eaton visited Milwaukee to explain more about how the quilts are documented, often only after years of extensive research.
While this particular exhibition first opened at the St. Louis Art Museum and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts before traveling to the MAM, these fragile quilts from 1760 to 1850 detail the handiwork of these early American women. The quilts definitely depict what these women were interested in although the backstory to the quilts define their unique individual lives.
Even Mary Remington's whitework quilt and bed hangings hide more under their covers than first realized. Women were expected and educated to be superb seamstresses in this era. Mary's quilt demonstrates this expertise in a decorative art that coincides with celebrating the singular moments in a woman's life and any other interesting personal events surrounding them.
This became the purpose for one of the showpiece quilts that introduces the exhibition and one of the only surviving examples of a quilt with a family coat of arms stitched into its central oval medallion. Interestingly enough, Mary embroidered her family name, not her new married name on the quilt. As an only child born to wealthy parents this choice immortalized their family legacy instead of the new one she would be creating when she married.
The exhibition uses Mary's correspondence to her fiancé Pelog Condon for thematic organization and to discuss curent issues important to Mary, including business and politics. While Mary was an only child where her father hoped to make a “good match” in a marriage, her family also desired her happiness. Condon came from a poor family with numerous children and Mary's long, three-year letter writing questions her fiancé's motives. She desperately wished to know if she was being courted and married for love or for money, certainly important to a modern marriage.
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Three years of letters were written simultaneously while Mary worked on her wedding quilt. Ironically, Mary eventually made the decision, and convinced her fiancé loved her, she married him. The marriage resulting after the wedding proved Mary and her father wrong. She was married for her money, rarely saw her husband who traveled extensively, and her father appeared to have prevented a divorce after a year, a rare event to contemplate in the 1800's.
Even more tragically, Mary died in childbirth, the ultimate sacrifice. Her quilt remains a testament to a life cut short, which the hardcover catalogue reviews along with other biographies from the women who fashioned these exquistie textiles. Yet, even in 2010 Mary's contribution to her era becomes precisely stitched into this historical context experienced throughout the exhibition at the MAM and then preserved by the Winterthur Collection.
When viewing these exquisite quilts consider the research that happens behind the scenes to uncover what these women were about, what emotions and circumstances the quilts were created for, these very real lives in the 1800's. Enjoy purusing the catalogue for additional information regarding these women who dutifully stitched. Perhaps there will be the discovery that even though women today frequently spend little time devoted to embroidery, the quilts represent more than merely fabric, thread, and technique. They represent quilts appliquéd with emotions and concerns reflecting daily life that all women share as part of a sisterhood. (Exhibition continues until September 6).
