The red threads that cover most of the colcha are made from wool dyed with cochineal, a dye made from the larvae of the cochineal beetle that feed on prickly pear cactus. Cultivated on large plantations in the central Mexican region of Oaxaca, cochineal had been used by Indigenous people in Mesoamerica and the Andes for millennia before the arrival of the Spanish. Indigenous labor and knowledge was needed to produce this dye on a large scale in this region of Mexico, an industry that began in the sixteenth-century when the dye became a prized monopoly controlled by the Spanish crown and continued to the mid-nineteenth century, a few decades after Mexico’s independence.

An amalgam of European and Indigenous influences, other aspects of the colchas’s design reflect the pervasive presence of Asian export textiles and other decorative arts in this region of North America. The two white birds in the central field, embroidered between the pairs of lambs, resemble phoenixes found on silk embroidered textiles of the period, which were created in China for export to the Spanish-controlled Philippines. Galleons transported these and other luxury trade goods from Manila to Acapulco on the western coast of Mexico, where they were carried overland to Mexico City and then sent to Havana and eventually Seville from the eastern port of Veracruz. The vases with flowers facing inward from each corner, the scrolling vines interspersed with animal figures, and the overall composition of the outer border with blocked out sections of the inner field are also found on large-scale Asian textiles of the period, from embroidered hangings and covers to woven carpets.2

A century later and nearly 3,000 miles away, Eunice Williams Metcalf (1775–1844) of Lebanon, Connecticut created a bed rugg, most likely just before her marriage to Arunah Metcalf in 1794. (Fig. 2) Embroidered bed ruggs made in New England in the eighteenth century recalled highly prized woven European bed ruggs of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, which were woven in professional workshops using a complex loop pile structure. Bed ruggs of any manufacture appear in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American probate inventories much more frequently than quilts. The design of this example is like other bed ruggs embroidered in New London County, Connecticut during the last quarter of the eighteenth century. While made individually at home by sewing rows of running stitches in loops that were cut to create dense pile, their designs follow global patterns established centuries earlier, as seen in this example’s scrolling border with carnation blossoms in the lower corners, which are like the seventeenth-century colcha. Most likely a prized possession, Eunice Williams Metcalf and her new husband took the bed rugg with them when they and several extended family members moved to Cooperstown, New York.3

Around the same time but two-thirds of the way across the continent in what is now New Mexico, a woven blanket was made from locally raised and hand spun churro sheep’s wool. (Fig. 6) Weavings like this have been referred to as Rio Grande blankets, after the river that flows through this region of the Southwest, which was annexed by the United States in 1848, at the end of Mexican-American War. While Europeans brought churro sheep to this northern outpost of New Spain as early as the end of the sixteenth century, it was the arrival in 1805 of master weavers and brothers Ygnacio Ricardo and Juan Bazan from Puebla, a city southeast of Mexico City, that introduced designs like the serrated stripes of this Rio Grande blanket, which were common in the blankets and serapes of Oaxaca and Saltillo. Its brown and white stripes were made from wool in the natural color of the sheep, while the blue stripes were created from wool dyed locally with imported indigo.

American quilts and other bedcovers have been part of the nation’s evolving understanding of itself since the great 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, when this patriotic coverlet was made. (Fig. 7) Produced on a power loom and patterned with wool wefts brightly colored with chemical or aniline dyes that were controlled with a Jacquard loom mechanism, this souvenir bedcover features the torch-bearing figure of Columbia atop Memorial Hall, where sculpture, paintings and other works considered “fine art” were displayed for the fair’s nearly ten million visitors. While the Centennial Exposition celebrated American technological achievements like the Corliss steam engine displayed in Machinery Hall, smaller and more nostalgic exhibitions in the Women’s Pavilion and the New England Log Home of domestic interiors featured quilts and coverlets. In these spaces, visitors encountered women in historical costume who demonstrated the use of spinning wheels, tape lace looms, and quilting frames.10 While this souvenir coverlet represented America’s technological progress, the country’s first international exposition established a pattern of illustrating America’s past through women’s work in textiles. Like other international expositions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the contributions of African American men and women and the voices of women’s suffrage advocates and organizations were absent from these backward-looking public displays.11

The arrival of the railroad in the last quarter of the nineteenth century introduced factory-produced wool, often dyed in bright, synthetic colors.12 Building railroad lines did more than change the palette and materials available to weavers and quilters. It brought unwanted change, if not dire threat, to many Indigenous communities, while benefiting certain white ones, as seen in one quilt associated with the small city of Peru, Indiana. While no family history is associated with what is now called the Railroad quilt, the initials appliquéd on the caboose to the right of “ER 1888” suggest that it was made to commemorate the construction of a ten-mile connector between the Eel River and Wabash lines in that year, which made Peru an important stop in a rail network that connected Detroit with Kansas City and extended as far east at Toledo. (Fig. 8) The Eel River Railroad’s repair shops and roundhouse were disassembled and moved from their original location in nearby Logansport, Indiana. The whimsical depiction of this “stolen” roundhouse at the center of quilt with flag flying belies the acrimonious press and lawsuits generated by the citizens of Logansport and investors in the Eel River Railroad against the Wabash Railway Railroad. The white letters appliquéd on to the caboose, “MLB,” suggest that the quilt may have been made by Fannie Bears Gould (1874–1941) for her mother Madeline Lamb Bears. Their family was involved in several railway companies with Indiana routes, and Fannie Bears Gould was known for her prize-winning needlework. Gould also served as the vice-president of the committee that organized Indiana’s representation in the 1901 Buffalo Pan-American Exposition. While not documented to have hung in an international or regional fair, its design suggests that it was made for display on a wall, not to be draped over a bed.13

In the exhibition section “Quilts as Art,” the Railroad quilt was hung opposite to two national treasures made by Harriet Powers—her Bible quilt made 1885–1886, now in the collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, and the Pictorial quilt made 1895–1898, now in the collection of the MFA. (Fig. 9) (Fig. 10a) Considered the mother of the African American story quilt tradition, Harriet Powers (1837–1910) was well known when she made these works of art. Born into slavery in Madison County, Georgia, Harriet Powers married her husband Armistead Powers in 1855. By the mid-1880s, they had moved their family to a farm outside of Athens where she and her husband became active members of the Mount Zion Baptist Church. According to the artist herself, they read the Bible regularly.14 Her life and two surviving quilts have been studied extensively for many years, often in the context of West African textile tradition and sometimes as the product of a solitary, visionary artist.15 (Fig. 11)

The Reverend Charles Cuthbert Hall received the Pictorial quilt as a gift from a group of “faculty ladies” at Atlanta University in 1898 as thanks for his support of the university, founded in 1865 by the American Missionary Association to educate African Americans. This quilt’s Old and New Testament scenes made it an appropriate gift for a Presbyterian minister. Powers also depicted four stories of natural phenomena, including the Leonid meteor shower of 1833 in the center block with orange stars, and a morality lesson in the Pictorial quilt. (Fig. 10b) Its fifteen appliquéd blocks, nearly all of which contain striking reverse appliquéd stars and even the hand and eye of God, are arranged horizontally, much like the example in the Smithsonian’s collection described by Harriet Powers as “Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.” Known today as the Bible quilt, it garnered prizes and celebratory newspaper coverage after its display at the Northeast Georgia Fair in 1886 and in the Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition of 1895. They are exhibited together for the first time ever in the MFA’s Fabric of a Nation: American Quilt Stories.16

The dual role that quilts played in America as functional bedcovers and works created for display on walls took on even greater significance in the last decades of the twentieth century. The last two sections of the exhibition titled “Modern Myths” and “Making a Difference” explore this unresolved tension. Quilts had been shown on the walls of many American art museums throughout the twentieth century as examples of finely made textiles among other decorative arts before what is often considered the “break though” exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art during the summer of 1971. This exhibition, titled Abstract Design in American Quilts, featured about sixty nineteenth-century quilts from the collection of Jonathan Holstein and Gail van der Hoof and focused on the visual similarities between quilts’ geometric patterns and mid-twentieth-century abstract painting. Amish quilts, like the MFA’s 1940s Floating Bars quilt, came to represent a homegrown and prescient apotheosis of non-representational art, described in 1997 by the noted critic Robert Hughes as “America’s first abstract art.”17 (Fig. 12) Feminist art historians like Patricia Mainardi criticized Holstein for focusing on the anonymity of the quiltmakers and his use of “the quilts to legitimize contemporary formalist painting.”18 In the past decade, a more nuanced understanding of these iconic quilts has emerged that acknowledges the influence of Welsh quilting traditions on Amish quilts, their changing meanings and functions in Amish communities, their marketing to outsiders, and their place in museum collections.19

Fabric of a Nation: American Quilt Stories features several quilts from the MFA’s collection made by women in Gee’s Bend or Boykin, Alabama from the 1930s to 1975. The first Gee’s Bend quilt seen by visitors to the exhibition was the “Vote” quilt made by Irene Williams (1920–2015) in 1975, where it was displayed with others in red-white-and-blue flag and star patterns that span nearly a century and over 1,000 miles of the continental United States to suggest the art form’s expansive and evolving nature. (Fig. 13) The Vote quilt and others made in Gee’s Bend were stacked up high on beds to keep loved ones warm, like those made by Amish women in Pennsylvania and states across the Midwest. Like the Amish, Mennonite, and other pieced geometric quilts collected and exhibited by Jonathan Holstein and others of his generation, these were presented as abstract constructions in cloth. In 2002, an exhibition of Gee’s Bend quilts organized by collector William Arnett traveled to thirteen museums in the United States, including the MFA and the Whitney Museum of American Art.20

Unlike Jonathan Holstein’s Abstract Design in American Quilts thirty years earlier, Bill Arnett and other contributors identified each quiltmaker, placing them within the context of this community while selectively overlooking broader aspects of the makers’ class and race.21 Irene Williams, for example, lived on the outskirts of town in the Rehoboth neighborhood and began making quilts after her marriage with the few materials at hand, instead of learning from aunts and grandmothers as many other Gee’s Bend quilters did. It is not known if Irene Williams joined Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on his march from Selma to Montgomery on March 21-25, 1966, just nine years before she made this quilt from this red, white and blue VOTE patterned cotton and white and pink solid fabric with pieces checked and blue striped cloth. She most likely saw him speak one evening at Pleasant Grove Baptist Church just a year before this historic march. Inspired by Dr. King Jr.’s words, many in Gee’s Bend crossed the Alabama River to register to vote at the Wilcox County courthouse in Camden, only to have the ferry service terminated soon after. Williams’s quilt speaks to the innumerable obstacles to overcome to assert this most basic right of citizenship.22

Molly Upton (1953–1977) made Watchtower in the same year that Irene Williams created the Vote quilt in the wake of the civil rights movement, but in anticipation of the Bicentennial. (Fig. 14) In the summer of 1975, Upton set up her studio in Boston City Hall, along with friend and artistic partner Susan Hoffman (b. 1953), after receiving a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for the Works in Progress project that funded artists working along the city’s Freedom Trail. Work from all ten artists participating in this project was shown at the Boston Center for the Arts in an exhibition organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art. Upton combined a range of textiles to create this imagined architectural structure in black and white pieces of cloth placed in a landscape of subtle earth tones beneath a deep blue sky made from solidly dyed blue cloth and worn blue denim pieces closer to the horizon.23 Upton was in the vanguard of American artists from this period who chose the quilt medium to express their vision, making what have come to be known as ‘art’ quilts, destined for gallery walls.24 In traveling exhibitions of art quilts to Europe and especially Japan, this new generation of quilts functioned as cultural exports.