Culcitology (QUILTS) with Luke Haynes, Olivia Joseph, and Joe Cunningham

Scrap quilts. Sewing bees. Secret codes. Political activism. Controversies. Three of your new favorite Culcitologists – Olivia Joseph, Luke Haynes, and Joe Cunningham – are stitched together for one mega episode on one of the most underappreciated and widely practiced arts in the world: quilting. We cover donated quilts, galleries vs. linen closets, incarcerated quilters, the ONE person you do not want to enter a fair with, quilting and covid, the Gee’s Bend Alabama quilters who turned modern art criticism on its head, and the icons you need to know about. Also: washing, preserving, appraising, repairing, and enjoying quilts. It’ll change the way you interact with your aunt, your local thrift store, art shows, and your very bed itself.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alie Ward?

  Oh, hey, it's the guy whose outfit you want to compliment, but you don't want to make things awkward, Ali Ward. And I know you're thinking that the runtime of this episode has to be a typo. It's not, it's real. We have a dive so deep for you, it'll change the way you interact with your aunt, with your local thrift store, with art shows, and your very bed itself. It's quilts, and it's a big one, because how could I not make a quilt of various experts? Give me not only the history and the context and the how to and the advice and the narratives woven into this incredibly underappreciated, and dare I say, highly political art form. So joining us today is an author, fine artist, and historical expert. I could say your first and last name and the pronouns you use, too.

• 0:40Speaker 01

  Sure. Now?

• 0:42Alie Ward?

  Yeah, go for it. We're rolling.

• 0:43Speaker 01

  Okay. I'm Joe Cunningham, and my pronouns are he/him.

• 0:49Alie Ward?

  We also meet a museum curator, a textile conservator, and, though a non-quilter, a quilting scholar. Olivia Joseph, and I use they/she pronouns. And rounding it out for this ology is another world famous fine artist and quilter.

• 1:03Speaker 02

  Luke Haynes, he/him.

• 1:04Alie Ward?

  Did you know that there's sort of an ology for quilting? Culcitology?

• 1:09Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:09Alie Ward?

  There sort of is. I think one person has used it, but in Latin, colicida means like patchwork blanket. Isn't that cool?

• 1:20Speaker 02

  That's really good. I was curious about what the vernacular was going to be.

• 1:24Alie Ward?

  Now, this is not to be confused with our mosquitoes episode, which is colicidology. Also, jeopardy. Let me come on. Let me read ology clues for you. I will be chill. I will bring my own snacks. Put me in. Also, heads up, we have another episode coming out this week. I know, stay tuned. If you're saying, Dad, Ward, how did you make a two-hour episode with three guests, plus a bonus episode, plus a downloadable gift for us for free, all in one week, and get it out on time? I didn't, which is why this is dropping on a Wednesday. Sorry about that. We did our best. Also, that downloadable gift, spoiler, it's an incredible pattern custom-made for you by Luke Haynes, and you can find it in the show notes or on our website at aliward.com/ologies. Colicitology. Luke?

• 2:08Alie Ward?

  A thousand thanks. I can't wait to see what everyone makes. Okay. Also, I'd like to drop a thanks to patrons of the show who submitted questions via patreon.com/ologies and who support the show for as little as a dollar a month. Thank you to everyone out there in our merch from Ologies merch, including the new protest and revolution themed merch that we put out last week, designed by Andy Diaz, with 100% of the proceeds going to the National Immigration Law Center. You can see the show notes for that. Also, thank you to everyone who leaves reviews for the show, which earnestly help us so much, such as this recent one from Samuel Lake, who wrote, "As an elementary school custodian who works in the evenings, this podcast has been a marvelous way to make cleaning toilets a little bit easier. This podcast is a beautiful collection of

• 2:49Alie Ward?

  talks with specialists and experts from every imaginable field." Samuel Lake, thank you for spending your nights with us. Hello. Also, thank you to everyone who leaves reviews. I do read them all. And thanks to sponsors who made it possible for us to donate to not one, but four causes this episode. This episode is sponsored by Seed. Bloating, irregular bowel movement, gas. When your gut is off, it gets your attention. Seed's DS1 is a three-time award-winning probiotic, clinically shown to improve regularity, reduce bloating, and alleviate gas, so you can move and eat more freely. Take better care of your gut with Seed. Get 25% off with code

• 3:29Alie Ward?

  25OLOGIES at seed.com/ologies. These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. We have to say that. How's your ponytail looking? Maybe like a little thinner than it used to? We've talked about this in our menopause episode. At some point, it's bound to happen to all of us. So if you're ready for thicker, fuller hair, start your free online visit today at forhers.com/ologies for personalized care. So that's F-O-R-H-E-R-S.com/ologies. Individual results may vary. Featured products include compounded drug products, which the FDA does not approve or verify for safety, effectiveness, or quality. Prescription required. Price varies based

• 4:13Alie Ward?

  on product and subscription plan. See website for full details, restrictions, and important safety information. Picture this. Years of guaranteed research support and a vibrant scientific community that has your back. If you are a PhD student, postdoc, or early career faculty in the biological or biomedical sciences, that doesn't have to be a fantasy. HHMI has a program for you. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute supports scientists at every career stage with a people, not projects, approach, long-term support, and the resources for breakthrough science. Applications open now. You can find your program at HHMI.org/ologies. Okay, let's hop in. This episode will teach you to love quilts,

• 4:55Alie Ward?

  to seek out quilting exhibitions, to run your fingertips over the seams of the quilts in your closet. We'll cover scrap quilts, silk quilts, Indian quilts, hidden messages in quilts, controversies, the one person you do not want to enter a fair with, how a quilting bee can change the world, the respect due to fiber arts, quilting and COVID, the Alabama quilters who turned modern art criticism on its head, galleries versus linen closets, the past, the present, the future of quilting, the icons you need to know about, washing, preserving, appraising, repairing, and enjoying quilts with Olivia Joseph, Luke Haynes, and Joe Cunningham, three of your new favorite cosmetologists.

• 5:55Alie Ward?

  Let's talk first to Olivia Joseph, who had a fellowship at San Diego's Mingue Museum, and that translates to functional, handmade art of the people in Japanese. And there, Olivia curated a show titled Layered Narratives: Quilted Stories of Gender and Race at the 1876 Centennial. And prior to that, they did their undergrad in communications and studied sociocultural anthropology at UC San Diego, and then interned at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African-American History and Culture in DC. And Olivia is now a program coordinator for the National Museum of the American Latino. So what path led them to textile curation and conservation?

• 6:36Alie Ward?

  I got excited about your work because you know so much about the history of quilts. And you're in the museum world. Did you always want to work with fiber arts or fabric? Or is it really a certain time period that kind of attracted you to what you do?

• 6:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I got into museum spaces more so for objects broadly. But I found that I was drawn to textiles. And there was this one textile conservator that was super enthusiastic about it. And I think interacting with that particular quilt up close and personal from a preservation perspective was very impactful. So the museum that I was working at at the time was the National Museum of African American History and Culture. And so it's a history institution. So I think when we're looking at these objects all of the time, it's through this historical lens. And so when I was interacting one on one with the objects, I think for me, what was in mind was

• 7:36Speaker 04

  what stories are being told through this object. And so I remember at least the particular quilt that I brought up, and that was Gary Tyler. So Gary Tyler is this African American quilter who was actually wrongly convicted of a crime in, I believe, 1974. So he spent around 42 years in prison. And so hearing that story was very interesting. And it seems that he found his craft while in prison. I remember reading that he did interact with textiles growing up. But it was really while he was in prison that he was actually making quilts. And he actually ended up showing other people how to make quilts as well

• 8:20Speaker 04

  to donate to nursing homes. And so that quilt that I was interacting with and that I was looking at was one of those quilts where it's Gary Tyler helping to piece together the quilt. But there's four other prisoners who actually worked on different components of the quilt. I would kind of explain it as being in quadrants. And in each of the different quadrants, there was, stylistically, it was very, each quadrant was very different. And honestly, like, super beautiful to look at.

• 8:52Alie Ward?

  And so this 2009 quilt at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, titled "The Blueprint," was made by Gary Tyler, Lawrence Jenkins, Alan Nguyen, and Haroon Sharif El, who were incarcerated at Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. And the quilts made there support the Angola Prison Hospice Program, where Gary Tyler had spent time volunteering. And this piece, "The Blueprint," is mostly in shades of blues and yellows, and it features a sun in each corner. And the artist's statement reads, "What good is it to learn and not share? Therefore, the history of hospice is recorded and sent to the four corners of the world." It would be another seven years after this particular quilt that Tyler was finally released

• 9:35Alie Ward?

  from Angola after serving 41 years for a crime he did not commit. And if incarcerated men quilting rings a bell, you might be getting this story confused with a 2024 Netflix documentary. Sadly, it was only 35 minutes long. It's like, why not longer? And it was titled "The Quilters," and it follows a group of incarcerated men working on quilts that are donated to children in the foster system. It was screened in several prisons to weeping audiences.

• 10:03Speaker 05

  That's what puts me on the outside. When I do this, I don't even be in here.

• 10:09Alie Ward?

  But back to Gary Tyler's work and Olivia's reaction to seeing "The Blueprint."

• 10:14Speaker 04

  And I remember him describing it as it being something liberating. And so I think for me, that is what stood out and what caught my interest, to specifically learn about his story.

• 10:26Alie Ward?

  So what brought author and quilter and fine artist and curator Joe Cunningham into it? Let's go to my birthplace to find out.

• 10:33Alie Ward?

  And now you're in San Francisco. I'm talking to you from San Francisco, correct?

• 10:37Speaker 01

  Yes, that's correct. I'm right on Market Street at my studio, which is right downtown San Francisco.

• 10:42Alie Ward?

  But you're not originally from there. Are you a Midwestern boy?

• 10:45Speaker 01

  That's correct. I'm from Flint, Michigan originally. I lived there well through my twenties, and then I moved to an island in Northern Lake, Michigan. My then-partner and I built a house and a quilt studio on Beaver Island, which is a three-hour boat ride out into the middle of the lake. And I lived there for 10 years.

• 11:04Alie Ward?

  He later moved to San Francisco, obviously because that's where he is, and he lives there. When did you start making things with your hands? Did you start by fixing things and then realizing you loved that kind of meditative work?

• 11:14Speaker 01

  Well, it didn't start that way. The way it started was I was a musician, a guitar player. I started playing guitar very young, and I started playing in nightclubs when I was 15. And a woman came in and introduced herself to me and wanted me to play guitar with her on some gigs, wanted to hire me. And so over at her house for rehearsals, I saw these boxes of things that turned out to be quilts. And I asked if I could see one, and I'd never seen a real quilt that I knew of. And I was just blown away. Turned out that she was engaged in documenting a quilt collection. She had gotten a grant to do this, and she had to produce a catalog of all 300 quilts. And she was enjoying the process but dreading writing the catalog. And I myself had a year of community college writing classes. And I said, "Well,

• 11:59Speaker 01

  I could write that catalog for you." She said, "Well, you'd have to know something about the history of quilts, wouldn't you?" So I volunteered to read all the available literature, which at that time was, this is 1979, there was about five or six books. So I read all of those books about quilt history with any scholarly intent. And then at one point, she came over to my apartment and said, with a quilt in a hoop and a thimble and needle and thread, and said, "If you're going to write about quilts, you should know how to quilt."

• 12:29Speaker 01

  We teamed up and made quilts together and wrote books and everything all through the 80s and built a house on an island. Yeah.

• 12:35Alie Ward?

  Well, I imagine that you did not realize it was going in any of these directions when she walked into this club.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  That's right. That's right. So I didn't have any previous interest in quilts. I'd never been particularly handy.

• 12:48Alie Ward?

  Do you think that your work as a musician playing guitar, like, do you feel like you already had a pretty good brain-hand motor connection to your fingers?

• 12:56Speaker 01

  Yes, there's that, I think. And in high school, the only class that I really liked was art history. And so I was sort of predisposed to study quilt history, you know?

• 13:08Alie Ward?

  So Joe has been in the quilt game for decades, and he's published so many quilting books, it's a long list, but a few of them are American Beauties: Rose and Tulip Quilts and Amish Quilts: Quilting with Style, Principles for Great Pattern Design. He wrote 20 Little Patchwork Quilts, and some of those were co-authored alongside one-time partner, Gwen Marston. And one of his books, that's my favorite, is just a catalog of his work. It's titled Joe Cunningham Quilts. And his style is explosive. It feels very kinetic, like the pieces seem to kind of vibrate looking at them. And in it are beautiful quilts, like one embroidered really simply with the faces of sleeping protesters camped out in Kyiv, Ukraine, as a tribute to that revolution.

• 13:53Alie Ward?

  And he has another titled The Cunningham Line, that's this cream-colored backing with these stark black skeletons stitched into it. And they're following kind of a looping line, like ancestors trailing ahead and behind him. And there's like a Liechtenstein-esque quilted portrait of this abstract glamorous woman with a speech bubble saying, "I'm glad I'm on a quilt and not some dumb old painting." It's titled Some Dumb Old Painting. And his book also features a few collaborations with his friend and fellow quilter, Luke Haynes. And Luke's style involves a lot of portraiture and almost like street art levels of light and shadow. And his work is renowned in the quilting world with pieces in the permanent collections like at Duke University.

• 14:38Alie Ward?

  The American Folk Art Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, and like, he has a list of shows around the world. He's also been a friend of mine for decades. And before I met him, I didn't know you could quilt as a job.

• 14:52Speaker 02

  Is painting a job? I don't know. Is, you know, any of it sort of a job? Like, what's the job of it? I don't know. But I've been making quilts full time for 20 years. So for whatever that's worth.

• 15:03Alie Ward?

  20 years. Do you come from a family of quilters?

• 15:07Speaker 02

  No, not so much. I mean, there was some quilting, sort of my great grandmother. It was more of an acronym soup, you know, ADHD and sort of all of these things. We didn't have all of those letters back in the day. So I just had a lot of busy hands and latchkey kid time. So, you know, kind of creating crafts and art and things really was the way to kind of bridge myself and attention. Thankfully, my English teachers let me knit in the back of class, so.

• 15:34Alie Ward?

  They did?

• 15:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:35Alie Ward?

  Did you ever have to give them your spoils? Did you have to make them a scarf? And they're like, fine, you can.

• 15:42Speaker 02

  In retrospect, though, this has never crossed my mind until you asked that question. I really ought to have, really ought to have. And thanks to you, I regret that slightly now. They deserved it way more than what, you know, the closet of my house deserved it.

• 15:57Alie Ward?

  Find them on Facebook. Dust them off. So for Luke, who was raised in poverty in the South, knitting was this gateway fiber craft. And it's so sad that his scarves saw few necks because I would love one of those if I were a teacher. But Luke attended North Carolina's School of the Arts and then got a full ride to study architecture at New York City's Cooper Union. And quilting was just his destiny. Was your first quilt made out of scraps or whatever was around? Or did you say, I'm going to quilt, I'm going to go to Joann's and get a bunch of very specific pieces of fabric?

• 16:33Speaker 02

  I mean, I have still to this day not really gone to Jo-Ann's and gotten a bunch of very specific fabric. It's my first one was a box of fabric squares that were pre-cut that my mother, who is a prodigious yard sailor, had found. And so she got these at a yard sale and gifted them to me. Thanks, Mom. And I was in art school at the time and I thought, I wonder if I can make a picture using fabric. It wasn't so much this kind of quilting pedagogy that a lot of quilters come from familial or cultural or community. It was more just like, gosh, I wonder if I can use this raw material that I have.

• 17:09Alie Ward?

  You already had a sewing machine, right? You weren't doing it by hand.

• 17:12Speaker 02

  Whoa, I started by hand. I think I did like 10 squares by hand and then I said, never again. And I have not looked back. And I pulled out that machine and figured out how to thread it and, you know, probably didn't get the tension right for a decade after that. But I feel like hand sewing has its place for people who want to do that on purpose.

• 17:32Alie Ward?

  Mm-hmm.

• 17:33Speaker 02

  But it's not necessarily the most efficient. And though for me, I said, no, thank you.

• 17:40Speaker 02

  Fair enough.

• 17:40Alie Ward?

  You said, I welcome my machine overlords.

• 17:44Speaker 02

  Exactly. Bring it on. Just plug me in.

• 17:49Alie Ward?

  So that was Luke's first quilt. But by quilt, what are we even talking about? What does quilt mean? What does anything mean? We're all gonna die one day.

• 17:57Alie Ward?

  And you mentioned something like you had never seen a real quilt before. And what exactly is a real quilt versus a bedspread?

• 18:08Speaker 01

  A friend of mine, I freaked her out one time when I hollered at her and said, a quilt is not a bedspread. A quilt goes on on top of the bedspread. So, I mean, the simple definition of a quilt is three layers. When it's laying on the bed, the top layer is called the quilt top, and there's a backing, which is just another piece of fabric. And in between those two things is some kind of wadding or batting. And then the quilting is the stitches that hold the three layers together. And if you do a row of running stitches to hold the three layers together, that makes a line. And so somebody thousands of years ago figured out,

• 18:50Speaker 01

  oh, that's a line. It could go anywhere. So you could make designs with the quilting itself. But also, the quilt top is most often the colorful part that we think of as a quilt. And that can be pieced with fabric sewn side by side, or it can be appliqued by laying one patch on top of a background fabric, you know? You get that thing done, and then you have to quilt your quilt with quilting.

• 19:17Alie Ward?

  That makes sense. To be a quilter and to make a quilt.

• 19:21Speaker 01

  That's right. You have to quilt your quilt with quilting.

• 19:23Alie Ward?

  A sandwich. When you were reading those four to five books about quilting in 1979, what surprised you or what were some of the foundations that remain relevant today?

• 19:33Speaker 01

  Well, there was a couple of things that surprised me. The way quilts started was not, was not the way I imagined. I had absorbed the information somehow that quilts got started because the fabric was so precious to those early settlers, and they had to save every scrap and they had to sew it together to make a blanket, which that's what I thought it was, but it wasn't that at all. The way quilts started was that in India in the 1600s, they made quilted cotton bed coverings. They looked kind of like what people used as hippie bedspreads in the 60s. I don't know if that makes any sense.

• 20:08Alie Ward?

  Imagine a movie about a stoner in a college dorm room. You know, the sheet with like a circular pattern and paisleys and stuff hanging up on his wall? It was based on Indian textiles, like the katha style. And according to a BBC article titled, "The Stories Hidden in the Ancient Indian Craft of Katha", katha textiles have those running stitches of quilts, and they piece together worn-out clothes, and they're usually sewn with the borders of old saris. But even further back in the 1600s, some archaeologists date the first quilts to 5,000 years ago. But yeah, what brought quilts into our modern age? Were those sewn fabrics handcrafted by most of? Women in India.

• 20:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. They were so attractive that the spice traders and the teas traders took them with them back to England and France. And then the women in England loved these new bed coverings and then they would send back word and say, we really like those. Could we have them in colors that would suit our decor? And so then the craftspeople in India started making them. It was a commercial thing and it was primarily done by men doing the weaving and the printing of the fabrics. By the late 1700s, it was part of your repertoire, if you were a tailor, to make a quilt. There were shops full of men and women quilting fabric by the yard that you could buy for a quilted skirt,

• 21:32Speaker 01

  quilted petticoat or a waistcoat, anything that tailors would then make, or even quilted bed coverings.

• 21:40Alie Ward?

  Oh, fancy, fancy. So traditional kathas from India typically have a central focus, like the sun in the middle, or a lotus flower, or a tree of life. Or they're made of strips of plain fabric, but the quilt stitching is like embossing into these intricate patterns. And those stylistic approaches were applied to more upscale fabrics and then exported to Europe. And then in America, upper-class women were envious of their cousins' cool quilts. So they got their servants to replicate the styles. Joe explained to me.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  That was the first ones that were done along the east coast were for the well-to-do women that could afford this stupid amount of labor. Because, I mean, if you're cold, you're not going to cut fabric into a thousand little pieces and then sew them back together by hand. You know what I mean?

• 22:29Alie Ward?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 22:30Speaker 01

  That doesn't make any sense. So it was the well-to-do women that got their servants to make these imitation European bed coverings. That's how quilting got started here.

• 22:39Alie Ward?

  So that was the intro into quilting, but it didn't stay within the wealthy circles. It spread out, kind of like a mandala, to the hoi polloi of normal folks who diwied it instead of putting their enslaved help or paid servants on the task, given that they didn't have them.

• 22:56Speaker 01

  And then what happened was that, well, the life of a woman in late 1700s, early 1800s, was, I mean, the way I understand it, it was just sheer delight, right?

• 23:09Alie Ward?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. You didn't have to do anything, yeah.

• 23:12Speaker 01

  Everything, all the time. Backbreaking, constant labor and isolated labor, right? I mean, lots of times where the men would go off and work with other men and have like social life during their work life.

• 23:26Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 23:27Speaker 01

  But many women were confined to the house with the kids, making the food, growing the food, growing the babies and cleaning and everything, all by themselves. And so along comes this fashion for quilted bed coverings. And what you have to do to make a quilted bed covering is to sit there, you sit down at the frame, one hand under the quilt and one hand on top, and you run your needle along this line. It's going to take at least 100 hours, could take more. And you're sitting there and you're making a blanket, right? So nobody can claim that you're not working. So you see, and your mind, as a long time quilter, I can tell you, your mind is free when you're quilting. You get into a flow state, you know, it's fantastic.

• 24:11Speaker 01

  And then sometimes you get together with other women around the quilt frame. So in America, for some reason, it caught on.

• 24:20Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  Right? Like, oh yeah, I want to do that, I want to do that. And the men were off doing other things. It's not like in Europe where it was a commercial thing and therefore there was money in it, therefore men would do it. But here it became an all female pursuit. And so there's no money involved because they, well, American women created this brilliant format where you can sew anything together any way you want. So it can be complete creativity. There's no technical limits on it because you can just do it any way you want. It's, we're individuals here, right? You can do it any way you want. And it can look like anything because it's a gift. And what is the recipient going to say? Like, oh, I was hoping for more yellow in the corner.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  I mean, it's a gift, man. So since it's a gift, there's no money, there's no competition, there's no glory. That means that it became an invisible thing to men. It became an all female realm and only the freakiest, weirdest kind of man would take it up.

• 25:21Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 25:23Alie Ward?

  And that's true to this day.

• 25:25Speaker 01

  Oh, that's right. Absolutely. So it became an all-female pursuit. And the brilliance of that edifice that they built, that American women built, it solved all these things, right? It allowed them to work with other women, and it allowed complete creativity, and it warded off the attention of men. And, you know, there were shows and fairs and stuff. I mean, not really quilt shows, but people at the county fair would hang their quilts up. And you could see what your peers were doing. And of course, at quilting bees, you could see what your peers were doing. So you could take it as far as you wanted. Or you could just throw some junk together and make a scrappy, raggy kind of quilt, and it still keeps you warm, just like a real fancy one. So it was a brilliant construct that American women came up with.

• 26:09Alie Ward?

  So more in a sec on what a sewing circle or a quilting bee entails. But a quilting bee comes from the notion of a bunch of workers coming together like a beehive. Also, worker bees, all ladies, and stingers, how about needles?

• 26:25Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 26:25Alie Ward?

  Also, in terms of prizes, I found accounts of this one modern-day quilter. She lives in New Mexico. Her name is Carol. She is infamous locally at state and county fairs because her work is so good. She ribbons so hard that, according to one quilting message board, Carol is the reason why one poster's mother-in-law won't enter New Mexico fairs, surrendering, there's no point. Carol is going to enter something amazing. Carol Johnson can't help being excellent, and she's a great sport about it. She told one newspaper, "There's so many different categories in home arts and also in creative arts. Don't be scared to enter. It's fun." It's easy for you to say, Carol. Not everyone can be you.

• 27:07Alie Ward?

  But really, what are you supposed to do with 43 years of over 600 ribbons, Carol? Well, Carol did it again. She made a quilt out of her 609 ribbons she got from quilting. Guess what happened to that quilt? It made it to the Smithsonian. Just think, you're in your own little bubble of the world. And somewhere in a quilting circle in New Mexico, someone is seething. That it will never be Carol. That's not the point of quilting. Just enjoy it.

• 27:37Alie Ward?

  When I hear quilting circle, I always picture a bunch of people with their own quilts sitting in a circle. But it was more, was it more like people came to your frame to help out?

• 27:45Speaker 01

  Yes, absolutely. In the 1800s, we're talking about.

• 27:49Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 27:49Speaker 01

  Yes, the quilting frame, it's just a big square, a little bit bigger than the dimensions of the quilt itself. So you could have six or seven or eight or nine women quilting around. They would get sometimes two or three quilts done in a weekend, like busy bees going at this stuff. Yeah. So it all quilting on the same quilt. You know, you'd, you'd bring your quilt top and it would get quilted at the bee. You know, you would go to a handful of them over the course of a year. Didn't happen all the time.

• 28:17Alie Ward?

  Let the party commence. What about any social movements grow out of these? Like when you have servants and when you have lower classes and you have enslaved people, when you have women who aren't given any rights, do they start to organize quietly doing this?

• 28:34Speaker 01

  Well, yes, frankly.

• 28:37Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  Many of the early suffragettes despised quilting because it was enforced domestic labor. Why should I sit there for a hundred hours and make a blanket for the family? You know? Yeah, they hated it. And so there was a kind of an ambivalence there. And then others would go around to quilting groups and make a pitch for their causes, whether it was temperance or suffrage or, yeah, all kinds of things happen because yes, it's groups of women getting together and there's no telling what they're going to say to each other.

• 29:15Alie Ward?

  Okay, so all of this quilt backstory, it's making me fascinated by them. There's also so much gossip. But how do you even go about researching any of this? These are pieces of art that have backstories lost to time. No one was posting their quilts on Instagram or pinning things on Pinterest in the days of dust bowls and smallpox. Where do we start to gather the scraps of history? I want to scream into the sky.

• 29:41Speaker 04

  I think sometimes it's just about taking a step back and looking closer at the materiality of the quilt. And even if it's not necessarily like information about the maker itself, you can get more context about the time it was made. There's things that are very specific to maybe the way a fabric was made in the Victorian era. There's maybe more natural dyes that are used. And so, understanding that those natural dyes are being used in the quilt, you can gain more context about some of the history, maybe the way that different fabrics are being produced at the time. When I was doing some quilt research, I was looking at quilts that were made for the centennial,

• 30:24Speaker 04

  which for people who don't know, the centennial is the 100th year celebration of the signing of Declaration of Independence. So that was a world fair that happened in 1876. And so there's a lot of patriotic prints that show up in those quilts. You see a lot of eagles. I would also say like the shields, liberty cap and bell. So very patriotic imagery, which I think makes sense if they're celebrating the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. So there's things that end up in the quilts that are relevant to the time.

• 30:57Alie Ward?

  Such as? Jo explains.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  Well, there have been political-minded quilters since almost the beginning. By the bicentennial, quilts didn't have to look any particular way, and therefore, women could invent patterns. And they did by the hundreds of thousands. American women came up with the idea of making blocks, a block pattern. So if you make a 12-inch block, you can do that sitting in your lap, because women did not have quilt studios to make a whole big setup of frame for anything besides the time that you really had to have it set up to do the quilting.

• 31:31Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 31:32Speaker 01

  So they could make the 50, 60, or 20, or whatever, blocks in their lap, right? And not take up any room in the house.

• 31:39Alie Ward?

  And those blocks make up the patterned top of the quilt.

• 31:43Speaker 01

  And so then, the quilts became made out of this grid. Of blocks. Well, when you've invented a block, you get to give it a name, right?

• 31:54Speaker 01

  And early when it's Tippecanoe and Tyler, too. Burgoyne surrounded, which is about General Burgoyne being surrounded by the colonists and defeated and so on.

• 32:04Alie Ward?

  So this was the 1840 presidential campaign slogan of a candidate named William Henry Harrison and his running mate, John Tyler. And it was derived from Harrison's defeat of indigenous tribes. And it enabled him to seize the land of what is now Indiana. He also had a long political career trying to legalize slavery in the Midwest. He sucks. So he turned that into a presidential mission. Harrison took on the vibe of a simple log cabin dwelling everyman. He adopted the nickname Tippecanoe after a river close to the battle. And he did win the presidency and he remains a legend because during his inauguration,

• 32:48Alie Ward?

  he bloviated a two hour long speech despite the freezing weather. He got pneumonia from that and then he died a month into his presidency. I've had bruises that have lasted longer than that. But yeah, if you're ever at the Kentucky Museum in Bowling Green, Kentucky, you can see an 1845 quilt featuring a border of cabin printed fabric nodding to this Tippecanoe and Tyler two campaign. You can see it and you can say yet again, what a presidential embarrassment on so many levels.

• 33:17Speaker 01

  People were showing their political affiliation in quilts early on in the 1800s. And so all along, there were people who used quilts as an art form. And so they used imagery, they made quilts of picturing farm life, quilts picturing political life. And there's a famous political quilt from the 30s when I believe Herbert Hoover said prosperity is just around the corner.

• 33:46Alie Ward?

  So this is the Fanny B. Shaw prosperity quilt called prosperity is just around the corner. And it was created over two years in 1930 to 1932. Smack in the middle of the economic chasm of the Great Depression. And then President Herbert Hoover was like, y'all, it's gonna be fine. It's gonna be fine. Prosperity's just around the corner. And then he signed into law something called the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which raised international tariffs that only made the economy worse and deepened the depression. And despite a thousand economists saying, hey, Hoover, don't do that. One chief executive from JP Morgan at the time recounted that he,

• 34:27Alie Ward?

  quote, "almost went down on his knees to beg Herbert Hoover to veto the asinine Hawley-Smoot tariff." Anyway, the law went through, economy got worse. Tariffs, who knew? But yeah, so this Fanny B. Shaw quilt is almost like a political cartoon.

• 34:43Speaker 01

  And so she made a quilt block with the corner of a building and a person looking around the corner. And so there's like, you know, 36 of these blocks with somebody looking around the corner.

• 34:55Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 34:56Speaker 01

  So it's very subtle political commentary, but amusing. And so there was elephant quilts and donkey quilts and everything in the 20s. Yeah, it happened all during the 20th century.

• 35:07Alie Ward?

  And to recap, quilts from India became a coveted style that spread and went to France and England and Portugal. And then the US copied it. But what about influence from the East? Let's ask Olivia.

• 35:20Alie Ward?

  I know your work also deals with eastern and western use of quilts.

• 35:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, so quilting came to the Americas with the settlers from Europe. But I find it interesting to see some of the eastern influences that end up in western quilting. And so going back to that centennial I mentioned earlier, I mentioned that there was international exhibits. And there was actually a Japanese bazaar and villa that was there. And this is 1876. People are curious about the goods that Japan has. And I don't know if you've ever heard of crazy quilts? You might have randomly, random cuts of fabric joined together that also have embroidery put on the quilt.

• 36:04Speaker 04

  I think it's more so for the design, more so than the function of holding the quilt together. There's some thoughts that.

• 36:15Speaker 04

  The crazy quilt became more popular or kind of originated during that Victorian time because of some influence of Japanese crazed wares.

• 36:26Alie Ward?

  Oh, and crazed wares and ceramics have a crackle look to them. And likewise, these crazy quilts in all kinds of colors, they look like shattered glass in an assortment of hues, all pieced back together.

• 36:41Speaker 04

  And so some people believe that that's where the influence of the crazy quilt came from in terms of like the design. But then you also see different fabrics that are making their way into those crazy quilts. And so there are some Japanese kimono fabrics that are in those quilts. It was something to show off. So satin, velvets, fabrics that you would have been proud to show off in your showroom. In addition to the kimono fabrics, you might find different embroidery. It's in a designed manner. So you might have fans or different flowers, spiders, some of those different embroidered motifs making their way onto the quilts and definitely influenced by some of the Japanese

• 37:26Speaker 04

  crap that was happening.

• 37:28Alie Ward?

  Yeah, I'd never heard of crazy quilts before. So let's get down to some other genres of quilt because before you can break the rules of quilting, you have to know the rules of quilting. It's like grammar and poetry. How do you know if a quilt is a charm or an early one? Or I'm trying to think, like a postmodern or a barn square? Like, what are all these styles?

• 37:50Speaker 04

  Yeah. So for example, you mentioned the early quilt. That's a quilt made before the mid 1800s. How can we know when it was made? Well, let's look at the fabric, also thinking about the technology that exists. And so maybe you don't see as much machine sewing. You might notice more hand sewing, earlier fabrics. There's some fabric types. So for example, a chintz fabric, which is basically this calico fabric, which

• 38:22Speaker 04

  I would define that as a unbleached, not fully processed, heavy piece of cotton. And so the chintz is taking that calico fabric and there are woodblock designs that are pressed onto that textile. And so because you're able to identify that, that is something that is happening earlier on, like pre 18, mid 1800s, that is kind of like an indicator of that early quilt.

• 38:52Alie Ward?

  And chintz fabrics, I note, originated in India. And think of like calico dresses or your great grandma's curtains or like a doll dress. That's a look of chintz. And yes, chintzy became a word for cheap, which is mean because when it comes to whimsy maxing, like let her cook.

• 39:09Speaker 04

  You did mention the charm quilt. I think of defining characteristic of that is the amount of fabrics that are displayed on that quilt specifically. I think when you think about charm, a lot of people will use scraps of fabric that they have collected over the years to assemble those quilts. Charm quilts can be made in many different designs. So you might have pieces of fabric that are triangular, rectangular, hexagonal, but really it's the amount of different fabrics that are there. Charm quilts can have fabrics that range decades sometimes.

• 39:46Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 39:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, if there's fabric that's been passed down, like sometimes that will end up in the quilt. Some people will take, if they're souvenirs, pieces of like a handkerchief that might end up in the quilt. So it's scraps. Sometimes people put different clothing pieces, furnishings. And so it really is like a collection of all these scraps. So those are two examples of quilts. I definitely have more that I can share if you would like.

• 40:11Alie Ward?

  Yes, yeah. Those are just the only two that I know of because I'm not you.

• 40:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, I will say the charm quilt is my favorite just because I like to look at the sciency part. I'm like, oh, like, this is a natural dye, like, how did it fade over time? But there's this other quilt type called a feed sack quilt. You can kind of guess from the name. It is a quilt made using feed sack fabrics. And so those are cotton bags that would have held things such as rice, sugar, beans, tobacco. And they were popular in the nineteen twenties, so around the Great Depression. And the reason why, I think you could kind of see where this is going, the reason why that was pretty popular at the time is because people were focusing more on getting the goods that they needed.

• 41:01Speaker 04

  And those goods happened to come in this colorful cotton bag. And so it's kind of serving this two in one purpose. I'm getting the, the goods that I need, plus this additional free printed fabric. And manufacturers would intentionally put those goods in colorful bags to try to get people to buy more of their product. So I really love that. And they're super bright, vivid, colorful fabrics. Um, so I really love that. If you get a chance to see it in person, it's, they're super vibrant. But that's like another one that comes to mind that's super colorful that I really love.

• 41:40Alie Ward?

  I've read about flower sack dresses or cloth sack dresses. So I imagine, especially in when times were so lean like that, getting this bonus of like, oh, I also can use this to clothe my children or to make my house warm. I mean, I definitely would go for the flower sack. They were the same price. I'd choose the cuter's flower sack, you know, like, who wouldn't?

• 42:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 42:05Alie Ward?

  Just a side note here. So if you've ever seen a colorful square wooden painting, not cloth, but a big painting nailed to the side of a barn, driving through the Midwest or something, and been like, what the hell, man?

• 42:16Alie Ward?

  Is that Illuminati shit? No, it's not. It's a barn quilt. Usually they're eight feet by eight feet, and they tend to follow kind of symmetrical, colorful, geometric patterns. And European colonists brought them over to say, hey, I'm me. This is my barn. And they also tipped off revolutionary soldiers so that they could pop in for some stew or maybe a wound dressing. And some say that barn quilts were also used in the signaling of the Underground Railroad. But others say no, that those were actually fabric quilts pinned onto clotheslines as a messaging system. But we're going to get to that all in a sec. Now, these wooden barn quilt paintings are not to be confused with the log cabin pattern of sewing a quilt, which is like if you took apart

• 43:00Alie Ward?

  a bunch of Kit Kat bars, but they're fabric, and then arranged the solitary Kit Kats in concentric squares. That's kind of a log cabin pattern. Olivia explains it better.

• 43:11Speaker 04

  It starts off with this squared centerpiece, and then you have different rectangular strips of fabric that kind of start to border the initial square piece. It's supposed to be influenced by the log cabin in the way that the pieces of fabric are kind of stacked on each other. Sometimes that very centerpiece can have different colors. So you might get a black piece. You might get a piece that is red or yellow. And all of those have different meanings.

• 43:42Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 43:42Speaker 04

  A red piece centerpiece would have symbolized the hearth of the home. Yellow, kind of like the light that is coming through, like the windows of the home. And black is commonly associated with being part of the Underground Railroad and indicating that that is a safe house.

• 43:59Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 43:59Speaker 04

  So yes, people would hide messages in their quilts. I've actually gotten a chance to spend time with a quilt guild in San Diego, where I'm originally from. Um, and they shared some of the Underground Railroad quilts that they have. But yeah, different patterns could signify different things. And so when I mentioned earlier, the log cabin, that was typically used to indicate a place of safety, a, a safe house. And so I think typically when we're talking about the Underground Railroad, it wouldn't necessarily always be a quilt that has a bunch of different patterns on it, like spelling out a message.

• 44:41Speaker 04

  Sometimes it was just one big quilt with one motif, maybe hung somewhere as a sign.

• 44:48Alie Ward?

  Now, given how much oral history, especially surrounding quilt art, has been lost, this history is a hot topic. So before the 1990s, the quilts of the Underground Railroad don't appear in written history. But around 25 years ago, an art historian and a journalist worked together to publish this book called, Hidden in Plain View: A Secret Story of Quilts on the Underground Railroad. And they had been inspired by a quilter named Ozella Williams, whose elder relatives descended from enslaved people, passed along oral history about quilt blocks with coded meanings, like the log cabin pattern to mean a safe house, or a bow tie, meaning to dress up so as not to call attention to yourself.

• 45:31Alie Ward?

  A star signaled to head north through this network of trails and roads and ferry crossings and canals that could lead an escaped enslaved person from the South to the safer northern territories. However, talk to 10 quilt historians and you might get 10 different opinions on these Underground Railroad quilts. Some, even scholars of Black quilt making, assert that there's no merit to the tales of using quilts as a messaging system, as they appear nowhere before the publication in 1999 of this book. Others say that coded directions are common in African countries and expecting oral history to appear in the written records is absurd.

• 46:14Alie Ward?

  But either way, Underground Railroad quilts, and the legend of them and their secret codes, have gained a place in culture. And there are patterns and colors that carry on the legacy and pay respect to the struggles and the triumphs of the Underground Railroad. So moving on through time, we talked about early quilts. First wave feminism, colorful charm quilts, log cabin patterns of these radiating rectangles, scathing political shade delivered via quilt memes, depression era crafting. There was wartime fabric rationing and it gave quilts their time to shine. But now let's hit the post-war space age and feminism's second wave.

• 46:56Speaker 01

  It was after World War II. During World War II, so many women went into the workforce, right?

• 47:02Alie Ward?

  Oh, right. Yeah, yeah.

• 47:03Speaker 01

  During the war, all the men are gone and the women got to go and work. How great, make their own money and this, you know, hey, this is all right. Men came back from the war and the women got booted off those factory jobs, all kinds of jobs. So a lot of women were becoming highly educated and empowered feeling. And then they ran, for some reason, felt oppressed. I don't really understand why, felt oppressed. You know, you couldn't have your own checking account in a lot of places. It was so weird. Along with all of the awakening of women in America in the 20th century, came this idea of fiber arts that have been excluded from the world of art

• 47:48Speaker 01

  and yet are this vast realm of creativity. Like, why is that? And if I'm a woman and I'm going to be kept out of the art academy anyway because I'm not painting like a man, right? I might as well do whatever I want. And so, starting in the 50s and the 60s, a lot of women started realizing, well, I could make art with fabric, right? Why not? So then, in the 70s, especially with the rediscovery of American crafts that happened around the bicentennial. The way I see it, I was a card-carrying hippie, back to the lander, you know, growing my own organic vegetables and eating.

• 48:26Alie Ward?

  Macrobiotics?

• 48:28Speaker 01

  Macrobiotics, thank you.

• 48:29Alie Ward?

  Yep.

• 48:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, all of that stuff.

• 48:33Alie Ward?

  It's a diet based on the yin yang principles of Zen Buddhism. It focuses on local in-season food, mostly whole grains, seaweed, fruit, legumes, and fermented soy. I love this guy.

• 48:43Speaker 01

  And we wanted to tear the whole place down, right? It was the Vietnam War. I was just one of this whole generation where we were against each other. So then along came the bicentennial where it was nothing but a big party. And we can all agree on it, right? There's no reason to be against the bicentennial. I mean, you could come up with reasons, but as a society, we sort of came together around that. And along with the bicentennial came this rediscovery of early American crafts, including quilting.

• 49:13Alie Ward?

  With all these types of quilts, do you have an antiques roadshow treasure in the attic that you can put on eBay? Pondered most of America.

• 49:21Alie Ward?

  When it comes to preserving a quilt, let's say that you have a quilt in your family and you want to really appreciate it more, what are things you should look for to appreciate? Like the types of stitching or the types of fabric? Or should you learn more about the great, great aunt that made it?

• 49:35Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 49:36Alie Ward?

  All of the above.

• 49:36Speaker 01

  All of those things, all of the above.

• 49:40Speaker 01

  Unless you've studied quilts somewhat, you don't know if this thing that's so cool that your grandmother made is unusual in the pattern, in the quilting, in the craftsmanship, in, you know, how, is it an okay example of this type of quilt? And so you really want to ask somebody that knows something about quilts to see if you can figure out if this is a really uncommon thing, first of all. And then number two is the condition. Yeah, you want it to be in good shape. In the 19th century, a lot of the dyes, especially brown and black dyes, would have iron oxide or iron something, and that stuff starts to rust eventually and the fabric just shatters.

• 50:24Speaker 01

  And so if there's shattering fabrics in the quilt, and it's a lot of the pieces, it's going to be a losing battle to try to save it.

• 50:33Alie Ward?

  If you are daunted by preserving a quilt, especially one with a lot of meaning, let's talk about the largest piece of community folk art in the world, which is, of course, because this episode is about quilts, a quilt. Many of you patrons asked about this one in particular, including Magna Kasowska, Mouse Paxton, Karen Dicker, Joey Zweig, Morgan Earl of Grammalkin, Jacob Morve, Bennett Vanderbosch, and Greg Wallach, who asked us to speak about the importance of the Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt. So myself, being from the Bay Area, the AIDS Memorial Quilt has a huge place in my heart. And huge bit of an understatement, this is a tapestry. It weighs 54 tons, 120,000.

• 51:12Alie Ward?

  Pounds. It covers 1.3 million square feet, which is like 20 football fields. And it honors over 100,000 people whose lives have been ended by the AIDS epidemic. And to raise visibility and erase stigma and encourage care for the victims of the disease and its impact on the queer community, one night during a candlelit vigil, 1985, attendees were encouraged to write the names of their loved ones who had died from AIDS. And at the end of this march, these signs were taped up on the San Francisco Federal Building. Again, 1985. It looked like a quilt of names and identities. And the idea of making a memorial quilt was born spearheaded by a man named Cleve Jones alongside Mike

• 51:54Alie Ward?

  Smith and what would become thousands of volunteers. Each panel is made by family or volunteers to represent the life and identity of an AIDS victim. Over the years, it's been displayed in Washington, among other places, and it now resides in San Francisco. And actually, I just learned through the end of March 2026, if you're flying through SFO Airport, get there a little early or stay a little later and head to Departures, Level 3, and you can see portions of this AIDS memorial quilt on display. And to learn more about the history and also the present day therapy is for HIV, you can listen to our recent episode with Dr. Ina Park, which we'll link in the show notes. And yes, Google

• 52:34Alie Ward?

  image search "this quilt" because it's just gutting and touching all at the same time.

• 52:40Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, yeah, that's a beautiful project. And it's really a one of a kind. The guys that created it were really smart about what they were doing and kept their eye on the ball for of what they wanted to create here. And so it's a regular size, three feet by six feet. Oh, wow. I wonder, yeah, right? Three feet by six feet, I think, is the regulation size. And there's no stipulations about technique.

• 53:07Speaker 01

  Or imagery or anything.

• 53:08Alie Ward?

  I didn't realize that the size regulation, and yes, that is three foot by six foot dimension, is to represent a human grave of each person. And reading about this had me sobbing in a coffee shop. So much relief for how far medicine has come, so much grief for how long it took to help people because of stigma, how many lives lost, and so much anger about how disparate care is in certain countries and socioeconomic strata. It's a lot.

• 53:39Speaker 01

  So when you see the AIDS quilt as a quilt artist to go through there, it's a wonderland of things you would never think of to do, right? If you're educated in quilts, you just wouldn't do that. You wouldn't put a shower curtain down on there and you wouldn't, you wouldn't, that's not how you applique. You wouldn't glue these things. But because it's a wide open creative field, people get to make what they want to memorialize that person with. And it's such a beautiful thing. I just saw it for the first time a

• 54:18Speaker 01

  couple of years ago. A good friend of mine, Mike McNamara, had a big part in the local AIDS quilt chapter in the headquarters. And also, he's a very generous guy and has helped make quilts for people for that. He's made dozens of them.

• 54:34Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 54:35Speaker 01

  I've made a few.

• 54:36Alie Ward?

  Also, all art is political because politics are based on our survival. Life is political. Science is political. Policy should be emotional and making art is how tides are turned. Every piece of art is someone's soul speaking. Also, AI art, fuck off. And a lot of you Ologies patrons asked about. Ellen Orleans, Ally Belt, Kaylee Moy, Dr. Nikki.

• 55:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:01Alie Ward?

  Hannah E. and Rebecca Holt, all asked.

• 55:03Alie Ward?

  Dr. Nicky said, please talk about the Gee's Bend quilts.

• 55:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:06Alie Ward?

  So, yeah.

• 55:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay, so Gee's Bend is in Alabama. It's about 40 miles west of Selma. There's a bend in the river that used to be a plantation. And it's called Gee's Bend. It's very isolated community. And when the Voting Rights Act came along, people in the nearest town that had a ferry that went back and forth across the river that the people could take to go over there and vote, the local town stopped that ferry so as to isolate the black people, who are the descendants of the former enslaved people in that neighborhood primarily, on that plantation, were not able to get over there and vote, at least not easily. So, then in the 90s, there was a couple of guys, art collectors from Atlanta, that started going to Gee's Bend regularly. And because they realized that the women there

• 55:51Speaker 01

  had been relatively isolated and had developed their own aesthetic, which is much more improvisatory and free than the kind of rigid quilt designs that had been held up as the ideal before that.

• 56:07Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 56:07Speaker 01

  So they amassed this collection, put up a show at the Houston Art Museum, and it was so sensational. It ended up going to the Whitney in New York, getting a big write-up in the New York Times and becoming world famous. It was around 2000 to 2004 or 2005. And they would sing. They, they sing when they're making quilts. And they've been singing together since the cradle.

• 56:40Speaker 01

  And to hear these magical voices singing spirituals, it was, it was too much.

• 56:47Speaker 02

  And so, these makers were making quilts from fabric they still had, that just was around. And the aesthetic was born from...

• 56:57Speaker 02

  It began with just function. Okay, we've got these legs of jeans and we've got this mattress bedding. We're going to put that together until it's big enough. And then we're going to use it on the wall of our house to keep wind from blowing through. Full stop. And then a few generations of that, you see these really, really dynamic, beautiful moments where a daughter will sort of say, okay, my mom makes these straight leg jean quilts. What if I turn the corner with them? So, okay, now the jeans aren't just up and down. Some of them are going horizontally. And so you see this aesthetic that was tangential to kind of the aesthetic that's being kind of pumped through art schools.

• 57:36Alie Ward?

  Think abstract, modernist art or picture Mondrian or Matisse or Rothko.

• 57:41Speaker 02

  And so they're making quilts because they need quilts. And their aesthetic is born of this really beautiful familial pedagogy. Grandma taught, daughter taught, granddaughter. And they're like, okay, well grandma's got a way to do it, but I have to make my own way to do it. And within that, maybe I'll turn the corner. Maybe I'll go around the edge. Maybe I'll find some red. And so you see kind of within their work, some of these amazing artistic moments that are very genuine and a microcosm of tiny reactions to their community as opposed to having the entire art world crashing down on you at any moment that you have to sort of say, oh, am I as good as, did I make it enough? You know, are we in the red era, et cetera? And so, you know, the cheese bend quilts and those quilters, their aesthetic is one

• 58:26Speaker 02

  that I really lean to, to look at kind of a purity of making. And I find it to be so interesting and wonderful for some of those aspects.

• 58:35Speaker 01

  So before that, the women that I learned from, starting in 1979, they had this idea that a quilt should be this highly engineered item where all four corners are, you know, it's symmetrical is the basic idea. If you have a triangle, then all three of those points need to be sharp and accurate and so on. And everything was so tightly controlled and it was all about the structure, structure, structure. Since the cheese bend revolution, since those quilts, they exploded on the scene. A lot of the old time quilt makers were just outraged. How can these, they're not, their stitches are not even small. They're not, they're not trying to make tiny stitches and they're, and they're just, their corners are cut off and they're just, and.

• 59:17Speaker 01

  It's outrageous. Yeah. And of course, people from the art world then thought, oh yeah, these look like modern art. And so they became highly collectible and, and famous. There were postage stamps made in the early part of the century of the Gee's Bend quilts. I mean, they became very, very successful. I got a grant one time because I wanted to go there and I did. I went and quilted with them for a week. I met them when they were here in San Francisco. They had a show at the DeYoung and Lucy Mingo wrote her phone number by the picture of her quilt in the book and said, call me and come and quilt with us. And so I did. Oh, wow. I mean, it was like going to the Beatles' house.

• 59:58Speaker 01

  It was so great because it was quilting the way, the closest that I'll ever experience what it was like 200 years ago, you know? It was really, really great. And I became good friends with them and I still stay in touch with a couple of the women there. Most of them, the old timers have passed on now and there's a new generation. But the Gee's Bend quilts were so influential that what I learned was the definition of a quilt was this highly structured item. Since the turn of the century, for many people, the definition of a quilt, the idea of a quilt, it signifies freedom. It signifies freedom of creativity to do whatever you want. Yeah. There are people who feel that a quilt needs to be proper and there are people who feel that a quilt should be creative, you know?

• 1:00:43Speaker 01

  A quilt, it's a, a very symmetrical series of blocks. It looks like an old fashioned, like a doily or something, right? It looks, it, it's, it says to you, old fashioned. And so it's easier for people to recognize those kinds of quilts. Oh, don't you wish you could get me to talk about this stuff? I have a hard time shutting up. I love it. Or like Amish quilts, they went big in museums because they look like minimal paintings. They resemble a Joseph Albers painting or something, Barnett Newman. But Amish quilts, which are so severe and plain and so much resemble, even though they heavily predate most modern art, what intrigues people in the academy and the institutions,

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  and you'll hear it over and over, how did this farm woman from rural Pennsylvania that never saw a minimal painting somehow stumble into this?

• 1:01:38Speaker 01

  Making this thing that resembles modern art. And it's the same thing with the Gee's Bend quilters. People will say, oh, they, you know, they were just doing the best they could with what they had. I want to smack those people.

• 1:01:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:01:49Speaker 01

  Because, oh, right, this person that started making quilts when she was 10 and then made quilts for 50 years. Oh, she just happened to throw those colors together. She didn't know what she was doing. It was unintentional. I mean, they talk about these women like they're blind and stupid. No, they're not blind. They're not stupid. They're just making what they see in their minds, the way they see it. But in the museum world, I'm getting rid of all of my possibilities of ever getting, selling more quilts to the museums. I realize.

• 1:02:17Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:02:18Speaker 01

  The museum world, the uncanny. How did these women living in this isolated community in Gee's Bend in rural Alabama? How do they make something that looks so much like modern art? It's just uncanny. And, you know, the idea that they knew exactly what they were doing doesn't occur to a lot of people. So, uh, um, so it's a, it's a real uphill battle.

• 1:02:43Alie Ward?

  And have you been able to see in person any of the Gee's Bend quilts at all?

• 1:02:49Speaker 04

  Personally, no, I would love to see those. I would love to see those in person, but I, I do love looking at them online.

• 1:02:58Alie Ward?

  They're gorgeous.

• 1:03:00Speaker 04

  They're gorgeous and they kind of sometimes remind me of those log cabin quilts, just because of all the colorful strips of fabric. Well, more so like the rectangular strips of fabric that are used, but a lot of the ones that I've seen are super colorful. And so I find those really fascinating. I would love to see one in person.

• 1:03:18Alie Ward?

  And even in the name of these quilts, it tells a story as Gee's Bend was an area named after the enslaver who owned the land. And if you're like me, if you would love more on the history and you want to see one of these quilts in three dimensions, you can also visit the area. You could shop for authentic Gee's Bend quilts via their Etsy shop. If you go to geezben.org, they have more information and resources. Who are some other fiber artists that you can see in museums?

• 1:03:45Speaker 04

  I went to the Smithsonian. American Art Museum, and I remember seeing a quilt by Bisah Butler, who is a popular Black American fiber artist. And she has these really colorful quilts that are usually, I think the most popular quilts that she has are portraits of different Black figures. And so there are some popular figures such as Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. But really colorful fabrics, sometimes utilizing some African fabrics. Definitely the opposite of what you expect of like Black and white portraiture, which I think she does pull a lot of inspiration from some of those portraits. And I think some people, even though it looks like a quilt,

• 1:04:29Speaker 04

  some people don't even refer to their work necessarily as quilts. I've heard the term cloth painting.

• 1:04:35Alie Ward?

  Oh, wow. I looked up Bisah Butler's work, and it is stunning, stunning, stunning. Absolutely cloth painting. Gorgeous portraiture of historical Black figures inspired by vintage photos to modern imagery of people rendered in these technicolor fabrics. And she also includes textures like metallics and vinyl in her fabric. There's faux fur that jumps out, kind of in relief. She renders skin tones in different colors that really feel illuminated from the light around them. Just breathtaking. You can follow Bisah Butler on Instagram to see more of her work. It's B I S A B U L T E R. And Olivia also mentioned the work of Dawn Boyd,

• 1:05:20Alie Ward?

  and in particular, a 2016 piece called Pisian Dancer, which features two little girls dancing together in the foreground with four kind of maternal ancestral figures standing behind them. One is in traditional African dress. Another is wearing almost a uniform of a servant. A third is wearing a bustled Edwardian dress. And a fourth, modern woman, is holding a book titled American Art. And Dawn Williams Boyd's style is kind of blockier and bold. She uses embroidered shapes to add detail, like lips and eyes to figure's faces. And she also uses Objects sewn into the pieces to give realism and texture.

• 1:06:03Alie Ward?

  And her piece, Bad Blood Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments, depicts a black man in a coffin, carried by fellow black men. But in the background is a doctor in a white lab coat, brandishing a needle. And his face is devil red with a pointed beard and ears, arched eyebrows, and these long claws clutching a syringe. And the one thing about quilts is they feel so much more personal than other art forms to me now. And it feels like each quilter's story and personhood is really core to the piece. Getting to know more about quilts has made me realize how much of a person's kind of spirit feels like it's imbued in the art. Was it for you, getting into the community of quilting

• 1:06:47Alie Ward?

  and also of fine art quilting, do you find that it's more difficult because you are a man? And people say, hey, what are you doing in our space? Or do you find that it's more like, oh, you must be a good one?

• 1:06:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, I mean, yes and no. In general, all I ever felt, from the minute I walked into a room of women quilters, all I ever felt was acceptance and support. And it really helped that I was studying early on with these two women, Gwen Marston and Mary Schaefer. And I was serving this kind of apprenticeship. And so then, I mean, this is women, Ally. This is women. I would come into the room, and I'm 27 years old. And they would go, oh, you look like my grandson. Oh, you look like my nephew. Oh, you look just like my son. You know, I mean, come on. And so that made it very simple. But also, I never had any defensiveness about it. I just wanted to learn, learn, learn, learn.

• 1:07:42Speaker 01

  And I do know guys, nameless guys, and Luke Haynes is not one.

• 1:07:48Speaker 01

  His experience has been mostly just like mine, but who feel rejected by the women in the quilt world. And I don't have any patience for that because I have 46 years of experience at being accepted, you know? So, no. However, in the last quilt show... That I participated in that was an all male quilt show in Los Angeles at the Craft Museum there. I think there was seven or eight guys and it got a lot of press. There was, you know, an article in the Los Angeles Weekly, an article on NPR. There was an article in the Los Angeles Times and there were some women who pointed out,

• 1:08:28Speaker 01

  oh, it's a quilts by seven men. I can only imagine the headlines that we would have gotten if there was a headline, seven female quilt makers make, have a show.

• 1:08:40Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:42Speaker 01

  So there was this mild protest online about it and that really turned my head and I thought, you know, that's right. I'm privileged enough. I'm a tall, white man, you know? I like exemplify privilege when I'm walking down the street around here. And it is a privileged thing to stand out and be an unusual quilter like that and to get noticed for being a man. I'm not interested in that. I want to get noticed for my work, you know?

• 1:09:06Alie Ward?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:09:07Speaker 01

  Like I say, there's millions of women and it's a woman created field. I'm just a guest here. So anyway, after that show, I never did another all male show. Yeah. Single gender.

• 1:09:16Alie Ward?

  All male review, as they say.

• 1:09:19Speaker 01

  That's right. That's right.

• 1:09:21Alie Ward?

  Luke has also gotten attention for being a man in a traditionally women's world. And like Joe, he considers it an honor.

• 1:09:28Speaker 02

  You know what? So I, I do want to say as an aside, in the particular case of quilting, there is a beauty to the gendered aspect of it as a culture. It's important for things to not be gendered because you don't want to put a barrier to people's entry point. But it's also beautiful to remember that the reason that quilting was gendered was this moment of time when women were getting agency. Really culturally in the United States, women were kind of allowed bank accounts and allowed to vote, heaven forbid. And, you know, like, all of these amazing things were finally happening and quilting happened at that moment. And so within quilting, there were these groups of women who could get together and have conversations, have community and earn some

• 1:10:13Speaker 02

  money and keep that money. It's less about pushing men out as much as it's sort of saying, this was a sacred place for women. And that's very important and I love that.

• 1:10:23Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me.

• 1:10:24Alie Ward?

  Since we were cooped up, quarantined and started sort of exploring crafts more.

• 1:10:30Alie Ward?

  I feel like fiber art has come into the view of a lot of people who weren't exposed to it before. Do you feel like it's becoming more and more an outlet for artists to kind of like return to that?

• 1:10:44Speaker 02

  100%. And I think there was a nexus of a lot of things that were happening and not just because we were stuck in our house and we could only make so many loaves of sourdough bread a day and we needed other outlets. I think that there was this moment in capital A art where people were a little bored with just trading Warhalls to impress each other. And sort of like, okay, you know, the expressionists are very expressive, but what else? And so I think that some of the more sort of avant garde museums and exhibition spaces were finding success in viewership of making more interesting things. And so that was a big part of it.

• 1:11:25Speaker 02

  And then simultaneously, we're seeing this onslaught of media, social media, entertainment media, just educational media, all the way through experimental dynamic media. And within that, people are having these very human experiences. The barrier to entry to make a video of anything is tiny. So if someone on the internet wants to make a beaded pouch and they want to show other people how to make a beaded pouch, they could do that in an afternoon. Whereas before, if you wanted to learn to paint 100 years ago, 50 years ago, 30 years ago, if you wanted to learn to paint, you'd go to a paint studio, you

• 1:12:03Speaker 02

  would go to a high art, teach me how to make still lifes with oil paints institution. But now, we have the length, breadth, width, and depth of human knowledge at our fingertips. So people can just as easily learn to paint as they can learn to make cakes that look like sculptures, as they can learn to quilt, as they can knit, they can make clothing. And so then bring in the pandemic when we have a whole lot of free time and a whole lot of stuff to ignore and, you know, sort of take our brains elsewhere. And so we find a value culturally, I think, in the human made, in the handmade, and the artisanal,

• 1:12:44Speaker 02

  because it feels so much more individualistic and specific. So all of those things were coming together really at the same time. And I think it's wonderful.

• 1:12:53Alie Ward?

  My quarantine craft was whittling.

• 1:12:56Speaker 02

  Really?

• 1:12:57Alie Ward?

  And it lasted about four minutes. I cut myself literally with the first stroke and then bled so much that I fainted.

• 1:13:07Alie Ward?

  But then I got gloves, so I shouldn't say that. I did Whittlemore stuff, but my first session, I was like, I'm out. But then I, I realized you get knife proof gloves. But yeah, I was just, it was a sharp blade, but I still loved it. But when you're coming up with your next design or when you're coming up with your next piece, where does that start? Do you start by sketching or do you start by rendering something on a, on a machine or a computer? Like how, where do you go from?

• 1:13:34Speaker 02

  I mean, all roads lead to Rome. I am a very tactile individual and so there's a lot of haptic sketching in the sense of like, I've taken fabric and I think, okay, do these colors work? I don't know until I've sewn them. Does this block work? Do you know, these kind of methods work? I definitely render on a computer if I want to do something fast. And so I'm able to use that as a sketching method. I'm very opportunistic. So if, if drawing it on the back of an envelope gets me where I want to go, I'm all for it. But I can also render it. I can also make the entire thing and then decide if I did a good job or not. There's plenty of that in, in arts and crafts. But you know, to each their own, there's a lot of people who are very tactile only.

• 1:14:16Speaker 02

  And there's a lot of people who sort of architectural style, build it before they even touch the first bit of fabric.

• 1:14:22Alie Ward?

  When it comes to subject matter for you, I love that you do a lot of portraits and you do a lot of self portraits too. And a lot of like self reflection in your work, which I think is really beautiful. Is that something that you've always explored as an artist? Or did that come about when you started working more in this medium?

• 1:14:39Speaker 02

  It's certainly something that I've explored across the board as an artist. There's a lot of reasons for it. One, there's a beautiful precedent of self portraiture time memorial, right? I mean, you know, the Laskell cave paintings are, are very arguably self portraiture. You put your hand on a wall and you blow pigment over it. You are creating your own human mark simultaneously. And interesting quip, I've been doing self portraits from the beginning because I was very shy about my work and I needed a subject. And so I had myself, I was ready to go and I didn't have to show anybody. I didn't have to, if it was terrible, I could say, okay, great. That's going to go into, we'll call them the archives.

• 1:15:21Speaker 02

  But years later, I'm making all these self portraits. They're going in shows. I'm touring around the world, whatever. And I've got these big pictures of me, seven and a half foot square, pictures of me on the walls everywhere. I'm, you know, showing them there. There are these things I've spent hundreds of hours making or whatever. And people who didn't know me and didn't know my sort of history were just like, this is the most egotistical man I may have ever met in my lifetime. He just likes pictures of himself. Whereas for me, it was more a sort of, I was too shy to ask any people I knew to sit for me to take a picture of them. Because what if it went poorly and I needed to show them and I was too embarrassed?

• 1:15:55Alie Ward?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:15:57Speaker 02

  Like, not a lot I can do at this point. It is, you know.

• 1:16:02Alie Ward?

  So Luke has explored different themes and scales in his work, from anamorphic perspectives where from head on, an image or a portrait looks distorted and stretched. But if you walk to different angles, it corrects itself in your vision. And he's also recently been an architectural digest, going back to his structural roots, with renderings of quilts being incorporated into buildings as walls and ceilings. So mixing that textile aesthetic with architecture. And you may also have heard about a collaborative series with a well-known public artist, Nicole Leth, who's also his spouse. And you also do public art and public art that even though your work fetches

• 1:16:46Alie Ward?

  literally tens of thousands of dollars, you're like a real legit artist. You also give away quilts to people that you will never meet. Can you tell me a little bit about how the affirmation quilts came up with Nicole?

• 1:16:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. It's a, it's a collaboration with my wife and she is a public artist. And she's a writer and her words that she puts publicly are these affirmations. And so she puts them on billboards and she puts them on postcards that she mails anonymously. She puts them in a lot of advertising spaces. She finds some different ways to mural things, to put work in this kind of public sphere. And I think public work is a really beautiful, underappreciated medium. And so we teamed up and kind of said, okay, well, I'm making quilts. You're making beautiful language. Let's make these objects together. And what we do is as we travel, we gift them to the world. So we'll go somewhere, we'll make one or a series of these full quilts and with these affirmations on them and we'll put them up.

• 1:17:44Speaker 02

  And there's a label on it that says, if you find this, you can keep it. It's made with love. It's machine washable. I hope it treats you well. And our name's not on it anywhere. It's about this narrative of being able to kind of give back to the global community who has supported me. And, you know, I feel so blessed and fortunate in finding ways of sort of like reinvigorating and re-engaging with the world in ways that, you know, are so enriching for myself.

• 1:18:13Alie Ward?

  And these affirmations were born of journal entries Nicole would write herself while grieving her father's tragic suicide. And the affirmations read, no one belongs here more than you. Thank you for being in this world today. Keep showing up. Keep loving. Keep going. You have been deserving of love every day of your life. Just such sweet goosebumps. The kind of public art where a sentence in block letters can just change your day or maybe your life.

• 1:18:42Speaker 02

  So we find these beautiful spaces around the world from very remote to Sydney Opera House to, you know, public spaces, whether it's a museum that's sort of worked with us or we just kind of like last week, we dropped one at an abandoned Sonic in Huntsville, Alabama. And it was there for probably 16 hours before somebody decided to take it. And we don't always know where they go because there's no contact information on it because we don't want anyone to feel beholden to earn it. We don't, you know, there's a lot of advertising that has started to pull affirmations in, but it feels as though you have to buy their hoodie or eat their chocolate bar in order to earn the you are beautiful or, you know, some, some kind of affirmative language. And for us, we don't want any barriers to that sort of affirmation because we don't feel there is.

• 1:19:27Speaker 02

  What that means is we don't always know where they go. If somebody finds it, it goes into the world and, you know, occasionally they find us and most of the time they don't.

• 1:19:35Alie Ward?

  How many have you guys done?

• 1:19:37Speaker 02

  Over 50 at this point. We kind of argue about how many, but yeah, over 50. I don't know how many countries, you know, four or five countries.

• 1:19:45Alie Ward?

  Welcome to the actual world of quilting. And in a moment, we will get to more of your questions, especially about cleaning, storing, preserving, repairing, appraising. But before we do that, let's blanket some good causes with cash. And this week, we're doing four. So I'm going to be quick. Luke Cho's craftingthefuture.org, which connects artists of color to scholarships, residencies, grants, and a supportive community, opening doors to transform lives and artistic careers. And for Joe, we're donating to the National AIDS Memorial Quilting Efforts, which helps to support the work and mission of the National AIDS Memorial Quilt and inspires new generations of activists in the fight against stigma, denial, and hate for a just future. We're also going to donate to gisbend.org to help

• 1:20:30Alie Ward?

  sustain community-led cultural tourism in Gisbend and Alberta, Alabama, supporting local artists, storytellers, and small businesses while preserving a living cultural legacy. And they say that tourism, when done responsibly, can support artists, it can strengthen local organizations, and create meaningful opportunities for future generations. And they say that a donation helps ensure that visitors encounter Gisbend not as a destination to consume, but as a community to engage with dignity, care, and mutual benefit. And in Olivia's name, we're supporting the San Diego Craft Collective, which is bringing craft to children in need in San Diego. And they design, prepare, deliver, and provide instruction for craft

• 1:21:12Alie Ward?

  kits to children in hospital rooms, homeless shelters, and classrooms, they say. So thank you to sponsors of the show for making these donations possible every week, and really to listeners of Ologies. Because you listen, we have sponsors, and we can make this show, and we can pay our guests an honorarium for being on and support their causes, really all because of you listeners. And thank you, of course, sponsors.

• 1:21:35Alie Ward?

  And we usually do questions from listeners via patreon.com/ologies after this break, but they've kind of been peppered through the show because this is a rare quilt format. But this next one was asked by patrons. Hannah, Ads Yermanologist, Protect Trans Lives, who asked, "To hang up or use as a blanket?" That is the question. Courtney Stogsdill says that they've inherited a lot of antique family quilts and love the idea of these textiles still getting use and love, but I also respect their status as historical artifacts. So how does a curator handle, like, literally, rare pieces? Does everyone have to wear gloves? Is it like, do not hold a coffee over this?

• 1:22:12Speaker 04

  It's, yeah, definitely. No food, no drinks. But I think, at least when we're inviting guests, it's definitely, like, please do not touch the quilt. But I will say, like, as someone who handles quilts and just textiles in a preservation space, it's very common to not use gloves, actually, because then you're able to thoroughly feel the quilt. You probably wouldn't be able to tell while you're wearing a glove if there is maybe a piece of fabric that is maybe thinner because of the wear. And so at least using your hands, you're able, I think, to tell more about what's happening with the condition of the quilt.

• 1:22:51Alie Ward?

  What about the notion of preserving it? Does it ever, like, break your heart and your brain? How many quilts are, like, in dumpsters, or in attics, or are falling apart that are these really beautiful, one-off pieces of art? Where is the line between, like, letting it return to the earth as a fiber and we have to get all these before they're just discarded?

• 1:23:13Speaker 01

  Oh, that's a brutal question. I'm gonna start crying if I think about it very much. That's brutal. They're just gonna return to the earth?

• 1:23:22Alie Ward?

  I don't know. We all will.

• 1:23:24Speaker 01

  I know. Yeah, it's kind of a losing battle. I've had to make peace with it myself because people are going to cut up quilts and make them into jackets. They're going to cut up quilts and make them into upholstery or jacket linings. They're gonna make them into shirts and pants. And if it was a ratty old quilt that has sections that you cut off and reuse, well, good for you. But a 19th century quilt in good shape that's used... In that way, and people will say, well, I'm honoring it. I'm honoring my grandmother's quilt by making it something that I can wear. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's the same way that you honor a, an oil painting by cutting it up and making it into

• 1:24:06Speaker 01

  placemats, you know, the way you would do, right? I see it exactly the same. So it's infuriating to me and yet it's just, there's no stopping it. And so I can't really fight that battle, you know?

• 1:24:21Alie Ward?

  Some people might argue that you don't sleep and sweat or maybe bone on top of an oil painting, but some quilts are just for looking at. Any other options? Joe says you could replicate the ones that are falling apart, make an exact copy of them as an homage, but does that not scratch that human itch for individualism? And what if your grandma was a bitch? Or what if you have one in great condition? Can you sell it to pay off your car? Oh, don't do that.

• 1:24:49Speaker 01

  If it's unusual and it's in really good condition, try to get it appraised by a quilt appraiser. There's many of them around.

• 1:24:55Alie Ward?

  Well, Steve Goodwin says-

• 1:24:58Speaker 06

  Hi, my name is Steve Goodwin and I come from a family of quilters. I've inherited a number of quilts my mom made. She always said that quilts were meant to be used, not put away in chests. I use them often and I treasure them. And my question is, what's the best way to preserve these quilts? I'd like to be able to pass them on to my children and grandchildren.

• 1:25:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm speaking from the perspective of maybe like a conservator preserving the quilt. If you're storing them, I think, yes, following the advice of taking it out periodically and folding it in different directions so that those creases don't stay there over time. And I think, again, like if you're storing it, keeping it away from light, and I know at least in the museum setting, there are these like older quilts. Some people aren't, like, they don't get washed commonly. So you, there are some unwashed quilts in the collection that are, they're going to continue to be unwashed because it helps to preserve the condition. It helps to keep the object stabilized.

• 1:26:03Speaker 04

  And when I'm saying stabilized, it's just- Preventing further deterioration from happening from all of that heavy handling that might happen in, I, I don't think you would put them in a washing machine, but even sometimes like the hand washing, depending on like how firmly you're washing them could, maybe a seam will come undone or something. But those are just like things that are done in the museum space with the quilts.

• 1:26:27Alie Ward?

  Okay, let's say that you don't live in a museum, but in a normal person's house, and you have one in the linen closet for when you have house guests.

• 1:26:35Speaker 01

  So the best way to launder it is in a bathtub. Put it in the tub and get six or seven inches of water in there and don't twist and wring and be difficult on it because when the quilt is wet, it's very fragile. It can pull itself apart. So you can just sort of push up and down on it, you know, let it rise and fall in the tub very carefully with a very mild detergent, Dreft or Vell. But you can go online and get quilt washing soap. I don't know which ones there are out there right now, but they're out there. When you're done, then rinse that, do it like two or three times, rinse it, doing the same process. Let the water out of the tub, let the quilt sit there and drain as much as you possibly

• 1:27:18Speaker 01

  can, push it gently to get all the water out of it you can. And then if you're in a warm place and you have a lawn, you could lay it on the lawn in the sun and lay something underneath it, especially towels that would absorb the water would be good and cover it so that passing birds don't insult it. And that's how you would wash a quilt, basically. There is this stuff called Retro Clean or something like that, that you can just let the quilt soak for 24 hours or 48 hours in this stuff. If, if the white part of the quilt is all yellow, this will make it white again. And then you gotta rinse, rinse, rinse and do all that other stuff.

• 1:28:00Alie Ward?

  Rachel Guthrie, Savannah McGuire, Kate Gav and Nina Jacoby wanted to know the best ways to store a quilt. Savannah Guthrie wrote in, how do we preserve our family quilts? I have one that incorporates fabric from my dad's underwear from when he was six or seven years old that his great grandmother made. And I want to make sure it lasts until the end of my lifetime.

• 1:28:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. So if you were to hang it on a wall where it got direct sunlight, that will shorten its life every day. It'll be shortening its life. So don't leave it hung up for a long time where it's going to get sun. If you are, it's really worth it to put a ultraviolet, a UF filter. You can get UV filtering film that you could put on your window. And that makes it, it's the UV rays that really will damage the fabric. So put UV film on your window if it's going to be exposed to direct sunlight that way, or even a lot of light, whether it's direct or not, that will help. And when you store it, don't store it in plastic. Store it in like a pillowcase is good. If there's any kind of wool in it, be very assiduous

• 1:29:06Speaker 01

  about keeping it closed because moths will find their way in if there's any moths around. Take it out and refold it in different ways, every year at least. So all of those things will help. Get it out for special occasions and leave it on your bed for a week or two here and there, and then put it away. Yeah.

• 1:29:23Alie Ward?

  This next one is for my sister, Celeste, and

• 1:29:26Alie Ward?

  You know, other people, Yolanda, Curly Hair G, Ali Words, and I'm asking this question for my sister, who doesn't even know that I'm recording this episode, about repairing a quilt. Yolanda said, how do I go about getting an old quilt repaired? It was rather abused in its day, the late 19th century. Took it to a quilt shop. The owner said to give it up, but my great grandmother was one of the quilters, or the only quilter, so that doesn't sit well with me. Is there a point of no return? Yeah, other people asked about restoring quilts, and I know that my great grandmother made a quilt that is now in my sister's hands, and patches are falling off, but it has a lot of memories. And so I know my sister's going to want to know, can she get in there and rest it? What do you do?

• 1:30:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, when I was young, I used to be very much like you, like a purist about this. Come on, you're not just going to use any old thread. You got to use the kind of three ply thread that she would have used, you know, and you got to, and the fabrics, well, get yourself some 19th century fabrics and all of that stuff. But then I started realizing at some point, if I find a quilt that was quilted in 1810,

• 1:30:37Speaker 01

  Right? And then in 1880, somebody repaired it with some 1880 fabric that doesn't fit with the 1810 quilt at all. Then I think that's great. It's like, oh, look at this. It tells a story, you know, somebody made it. And then 70 years later, somebody else repaired it. And oh, isn't that? And I would think that's great. So to be consistent, I have to say it's perfectly fine to repair an old quilt. But do it. Repair it yourself. The other source of information for you is going to be your local quilt guild. Almost every town in America has a quilting group. And in quilt guilds, there are often, what people

• 1:31:19Speaker 01

  don't understand is they think that quilting is drudgery that must be done for some reason or other. They don't understand that it's one of the most pleasurable activities a person can engage in. And so guilds are very often full of women who make dozens of quilts a year for charity. Because what are you going to do? Keep them? And that's been a longstanding part of the American quilt experience is making quilts for charity. And so there will be some women in almost every guild who love to do repairs, who love to do sewing. So that would be the place to check. Because you don't want to get a conservator involved in repairing your quilt. Because, I mean, I like conservators, very much. And I admire

• 1:32:02Speaker 01

  them and their work. But that's big money. And if you have endless money, then do get a conservator. And they're few and far between, but they're out there. But otherwise, go to your local quilt guild.

• 1:32:13Alie Ward?

  Oh, and you mentioned the charities. Pamela Dudzik and Lauren Ehrenholz wanted to know. Pamela said, what are the best organizations that collect quilts to be given away to those in need? Lauren mentioned that there's a quilting group that donates quilts to the families of deceased organ donors. The quilts are placed over the donor while they're in the hospital. And then the family takes it home as a memorial. Any other groups that you've heard about that are doing great work in that area?

• 1:32:35Speaker 01

  Oh, my goodness. Oh, here, let me straighten you out on that. It's always been the case, women made more quilts than were necessary for the household.

• 1:32:46Speaker 01

  And for whatever reason, it became part of the case with the American quilt scene that people sought to give quilts to those in need. And it's a big part of the quilt world. And it's a part that you don't hear too much about. If you get interested in quilts, then you'll hear about the big time quilt artists, the people that won the big contests and all that stuff. But there's no glory when you're a member of a guild and you make a quilt for an organization that will break your goddamn heart to hear the name of the organization. Pardon me, you know what I mean?

• 1:33:18Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:20Speaker 01

  And there's no glory. Their names are not brought up and glorified, like, you know? And it's my favorite part of most guilds. When I go to a guild to do a lecture, I go over to the community service table and ask them, who are they giving quilts to? And can I see what came in this month? Because very often at a guild, there'll be 15 or 20 or 40 quilts being donated to those in need. Knitting caps for the kids in the NICU and the cancer wards and all of this stuff. And so who do they give the quilts to? The battered women's shelters, to the homeless shelters, to the, like I say, to the cancer wards, to the, you know, anybody that's desperate and needs.

• 1:34:05Speaker 01

  They make quilts for cops to have in the trunk of the car so that when cops have to pick up a kid from a house, you know, child protective services, they will give the kid a quilt so that they have something of their very own that somebody made for them. So what I would say is go to the guild, your local quilt guild, and find out who do you donate to? And they have, you can donate it to them and they will give it to somebody in the local area, which I think is the very best thing.

• 1:34:35Alie Ward?

  Yeah. Oh, you're making me cry.

• 1:34:37Speaker 01

  Oh, man, it's brutal. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:34:39Alie Ward?

  I know you want to make your own quilt. And whether you're a novice or you're a longtime quilter, I am enthused to report we're going to have another episode this week. It's a little bonus, all about quilting tips with longtime quilters Luke and Joe. And if you're not sure what to quilt and you wish you had a quilting circle who could share what they made with each other, we have you covered on that front, too, thanks to Luke. I'm going to tell you more in a sec.

• 1:35:01Alie Ward?

  You know, last questions I always ask are the hardest and the best parts of what you do. But yeah, is there a particular challenge that really vexes you when it comes to studying these cloth items, studying this kind of history?

• 1:35:14Speaker 04

  At least for me, there is a lot of oral history and stories that are not written down. So unless you're directly interacting with quilters, keepers of this history, sometimes it's hard to come across some of that information.

• 1:35:32Alie Ward?

  OK, so we had some really loud sirens during this part of Olivia's interview, but she had told me that she wishes that the history wasn't so prone to being lost. But she also likes Barbara Brackman's Encyclopedia of Pieced Quilt Patterns as a reference. And that and the Quilt Index site are great resources for learning more about traditional patterns. So to pick up the history, she hits the books.

• 1:35:53Speaker 04

  I actually have like the books right next to me.

• 1:35:58Speaker 04

  I have this book here, The Encyclopedia of Pieced Quilt Patterns by Barbara Brackman, which is like around 200 pages. And it's just different pages filled with patterns, different patterns.

• 1:36:09Alie Ward?

  Wow.

• 1:36:10Speaker 04

  And I think the one thing, too, at least with researching more about quilts, is sometimes there's patterns that are referred to by one name in some regions and different names in different regions. And so if you maybe know the one name, but you don't know the other name. So for me, like having that encyclopedia was helpful because there were some listings of some of the other names that could be used, that are used by different communities. So those are like some, some challenges that I've definitely found.

• 1:36:39Alie Ward?

  Capturing an oral history or doing audio interviews, even if you just put them on a drive somewhere, could, I'm sure, be so appreciated by future generations, too.

• 1:36:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:36:50Alie Ward?

  You know, I always ask the worst thing about what you do. Is it scrap management? Is it, what's the hardest thing about quilting?

• 1:37:01Alie Ward?

  What do you hate about it? You can be petty.

• 1:37:03Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:37:05Alie Ward?

  And I'll ask your favorite.

• 1:37:10Speaker 01

  Well, let me see. The worst part of it for me is this is my career. And so there's a massive amount of admin.

• 1:37:19Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:20Speaker 01

  And I am the least organized person you can imagine. And so it's particularly taxing. So the admin for my career, that's, that's the hard, that's definitely the worst part.

• 1:37:30Alie Ward?

  Let's keep the negativity rolling. It gets cheerful, though, I promise.

• 1:37:33Speaker 02

  So to out myself, I'm certainly one of these neurodivergent people with some good alphabets. But sort of with this ADHD, right? One of the things that happens with it that's beautiful is your brain's going a mile a minute and you can take in so much information. But you don't get a dopamine hit when you finish a thing. So I don't love finishing things. I just like, I run out of willpower before I, I hate binding a quilt. The finish of a quilt is binding. You put this thing around the edge and then you're done. And it's like, you know, I always tell my wife, like, oh, I have to go do that. It's going to take me like four or five hours. And she's like, Luke, it's going to take you 30 minutes, start to finish, to do this binding. And I just tell, I'm like, yes, but it's going to take me five and a half hours of building up

• 1:38:18Speaker 02

  the stamina, inertia, taking side quests, going to drink a soda. I forgot to water the garden before I can actually do that 30 minutes of binding. But anyway, so my favorite parts are definitely the, the learning arcs, the things that keep me dynamically focused. It's the parts that keep me very present. I really like that. And even the meditation of just doing the piecing, there's something really grounding about that. So my favorite part is kind of that moment where I know that I did it. I nailed it. And then, but then after that is my least favorite part instantly. Whatever it takes. Yeah, you know, you've never seen someone dust plants until it's time for me to bind a quilt.

• 1:39:01Alie Ward?

  You need Nicole standing over you with a fanny pack of jerky like they do in doctoring.

• 1:39:07Alie Ward?

  We're cheering you on from the sidelines.

• 1:39:10Speaker 02

  Again, what's cool about quilting is that people come to it in a lot of different ways. And we all have different learning styles. And I think quilting is one of the, one of many things, but a beautiful medium that people can come to because they like the hapticness of it, or because they like the problem solving. I mean, you can go all the way from math to people who just want to touch things. Everybody needs a hobby.

• 1:39:33Alie Ward?

  Being able to work with my hands like that is so good for my brain. My brain gets to do its own hamster wheeling, you know, and I'm just a mentally healthier person when I can do it. So I think quilting saves lives.

• 1:39:46Speaker 02

  Absolutely same. Quilting does save lives. I'm the same way. So at various times in my career, I've hired assistants and interns or whatever who've been able to do, I can give them the busy work to start with as I'm training them to do stuff. And I find that, you know, that part, when I sort of offload the, okay, sew these tiny bits of fabric a thousand times until they're roughly bigger, is something that is so meditative for me that I don't recognize that I've built into my own life. I'm so fortunate to have found this as a career that I didn't realize some of the things that are amazing. And like you say, there's a meditation to, I've got to sew a thousand of these things together. I've cut perfectly good fabric into smaller bits and I have to fix that by putting it all back together.

• 1:40:29Speaker 01

  What about Joe? The best part for me is when I am making a quilt, and it doesn't matter what phase, if it's the very beginnings, or if it's the last stitch going in and all the way in between, when I'm doing that, I feel like this is what I was put on this earth to do. And, you know, I'm not religious in any way, and I, there's nothing that, anyway, but that's how I feel. I feel like, oh, I was made for this. So that's the best part.

• 1:41:00Speaker 04

  That's so beautiful. That's so wonderful and so inspiring.

• 1:41:04Alie Ward?

  And of course, highly recommend checking out his work. Joe is on Instagram as Joe the Quilter, and Luke is at Entropies, E-N-T-R-O-P-I-E-S. And we'll, of course, link to that in the show notes. We'll link more on our guests, also on our webpage, which will be linked in the show notes. So as someone who works in museum settings, who does Olivia love? Do you have a favorite quilt you've ever seen? Is there one that just like you dream about?

• 1:41:30Speaker 04

  Hmm, I really am obsessed with the quilts made by Abisa Butler, which is why I mentioned her earlier. But I really, I think the thing that is so fascinating and so beautiful about them to me is just how colorful they are. And I think it's also interesting, at least when I first saw one of her quilts, it was in a Smithsonian Museum in an exhibit called Reckoning. And it was just so interesting to see, it was a quilt of Harriet Tubman, presented with other objects that were, I guess, essentially could be used as forms of protest, but also just protest resilience.

• 1:42:14Speaker 04

  Those were some of the themes that were being shared in that gallery space. But to see a portrait and not just like a simple black and white portrait, something that is colorful, there's pieces of African fabric as well as other colorful fabrics. So I think I'm not entirely sure if her intention was, I don't know, kind of to bring to life this person instead of like in a black and white portrait, which might not necessarily always capture some of the qualities of a person. The colors specifically are something that stand out to me.

• 1:42:48Alie Ward?

  I think whenever you see a You know, a historical figure, especially if it's been the same couple of photos over and over again that you're kind of used to. When you see them in a literal different light with different colors, a different vibrancy, it brings like a vitality almost to that person's history and really puts them in a three dimensional world kind of with you, I imagine. Definitely. That sounds gorgeous. Having a quilt that is a portrait of you, like the honor doesn't get much higher. And I'm very humbled to say that Luke was generous enough to make an Ologies quilt featuring my smiling face, holding my beloved daughter Gremlin, who is a dog. It's so stunning and beautifully done.

• 1:43:32Alie Ward?

  And I'm just, I can't believe that I have a Luke Haynes, like a real, original Luke Haynes quilt in my house. I will, I'm so thrilled. I will post it on our Instagram. I'm blown away. I will treasure it. I will preserve it forever. It's surreal. Okay, but that's not all. We have a second quilt for you to enjoy. You just get to make it yourself. Surprise. So, commissioning you for a pattern for Ologites, perhaps even for beginners, for a small quilt that people could start.

• 1:44:01Speaker 02

  Oh, I would love that. That would be amazing.

• 1:44:03Alie Ward?

  Like a couple of, a couple of feet, like two, three feet square, maybe? You could, you could sit on it in a picnic. It could be your dog blanket. You could hang it on a wall. You could do whatever.

• 1:44:16Speaker 02

  I would love to make a pattern that, that is kind of given to the community as a way to sort of say, let's all start together.

• 1:44:22Alie Ward?

  Yeah. Oh, I would love that.

• 1:44:24Speaker 02

  That would be very fun. I'm, I'm very excited about the potential of sort of saying, here's an entry point for anyone who wants it, or here is a fun project for anyone who's already entered as just a way to sort of have a community sew along and we can all share what we're making and not have to design the thing, but something that each one will be slightly different so that when we share, we'll have a sort of a global narrative. And I think that would be very fun.

• 1:44:49Alie Ward?

  Oh my God, that'd be amazing.

• 1:44:52Alie Ward?

  So ask delightful people, deep diving questions because small talk is for the week. Thank you so much for being here, Joe, Olivia and Luke. And yes, later this week, we'll have a bonus minisode with some quilting tips and how tos. Can you imagine if you joined a quilting group that donated handmade blankets to kids in patience and people in need? It would change lives, yours included fundamentally. So consider it. Again, the social media handles of everyone are linked to the show notes. Luke is at Entropies, E-N-T-R-O-P-I-E-S, and Joe is Joe the Quilter on Instagram. You can find Olivia Joseph on LinkedIn. We are at Ologies on Instagram and Blue Sky. I'm at Ally Ward with one L in both. We have Smologies, which are shorter, kid-friendly and classroom-safe episodes, available in

• 1:45:35Alie Ward?

  their own podcast feed, wherever you get podcasts. So look for S-M-O-L-O-G-I-E-S. They are their own podcast. Please tell your friends and spread the word on those. So you can find those wherever you get podcasts, or you can go to allyward.com/smolologies for the links. Again, that new protest and revolution themed merch by Andy Diaz is at ologiesmerch.com under our new collection. And 100% of the proceeds go to the National Immigration Law Center. Thank you to Erin Talbert, who admins the Ologies Podcast Facebook group. Aveline Malik makes our professional transcripts. Kelly Ardwyer does the website. Noelle Dilworth sews my schedule together. The hard work of threading our machine is done by Managing Director Susan Hale and piecing all of our audio scraps together, including this huge one. We also had help from Jarrett Sleeper, because this

• 1:46:20Alie Ward?

  was such an audio quilt. Also Jake Chaffee and Lead Editor Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio. The work they did is incredible. So thank you all for that. Nick Thorburn made the theme music. And if you stick around to the very end, you know, I may tell you a secret. This week, it's that I recorded some of these asides in my car today in the parking lot of a library. I love the library. The internet is so fast and you don't have to buy anything. But I was in my car and I couldn't run the AC because it would be loud. And I live in LA and, you know, the planet's burning. So I swear, it was like sauna levels. Like, it had to be over 115, 120 in the car. And I learned this, for

• 1:47:01Alie Ward?

  some reason, why was this surprising? It's so much harder to read and say words. When you're literally cooking, like getting poached in a hatchback. And at first I was like, why am I so bad at this today? And then it was like, oh, my body is probably like, what the fuck are you doing? Why are we reading something off a laptop instead of jumping into a lake right now? Anyway, it was hot, but we did it. No regrets. Love being out of the house. Okay, uh, watch for the bonus episode drop. Say hi to your quotes for me. Bye bye.

• 1:47:47Speaker 07

  It was a good quilt. It was an awesome quilt.

• 1:47:51Speaker 08

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