June 14 – October 19, 2025
About:
This exhibition – featuring quilts from Pennsylvania quilters and collectors – turns the eyes of post-internet contemporary art to look anew at traditional quilts and quilt making.
Related Events:
Quilts Revisited: A Lecture with Historian Janneken Smucker
Saturday, July 26, at 2 p.m.
Iron Front Event Space,
434 Market Street #301,
Lewisburg, PA 17837
Join the Samek Art Museum for an inspiring afternoon as we welcome Janneken Smucker, a distinguished professor of history at West Chester University and the acclaimed author of A New Deal for Quilts.
Janneken will discuss the history of quilting and how the U.S. government utilized quilts and quilt-making to encourage Americans to create quilts individually and collectively in response to unemployment, displacement, and recovery efforts. A reception will follow at the Samek Downtown.
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Curatorial Text:
Many quilt exhibitions in the art world feature artists who take the traditional materials and techniques of quilt making and “upcycle” them to make quilts with contemporary art images and concerns. This exhibit proposes to go in the opposite direction, turning the eyes of post-internet contemporary art to look anew at traditional quilts and quilt making.
The inclusion of a painting and a print from the Samek Art Museum’s collection here illustrates the shared use of aesthetic strategies across mediums. For instance, the use of boldly contrasting tones and geometric shapes create visual excitement in Albers’ print and the adjacent quilts while the changing direction of triangles moves the viewer’s eye across the plane of the work. In Riese’s painting and the adjacent quilt, repetition of purple color throughout the work creates harmony and emphasizes the overall surface of the work as an object.
Such aesthetic decisions in quilting are iterations and variations of traditional themes since quilting often operates as a social art form within the patterns of history rather than opting for the hard breaks of avant-garde art. Quilting features collaborative and social artistic practices as much as the lone visionary genius of modern art mythologies. Quilting’s use of scraps is not only practical but also invites the viewer to consider the social connotations of each piece as in a collage. A bit of aged fabric may hold a family memory while a piece of a kitschy industrial print may evoke a sense of play.
Quilting is an ancient art that has long been in conversation with the global art world; this exhibition hopes to bring that conversation home.
– Richard Rinehart
Samek Art Museum Director & Curator