A visual celebration of contemporary quilts, this sumptuous anthology brings together the work of over sixty artists who have chosen quilting as their medium.
Edited by quilt-maker and textile artist Catherine-Marie Longtin, Quilts: Colour, Design, Material looks at quilting not just as a time-honoured craft but also as a legitimate art form. Viewed through the lenses of colour, design and material, this book brings together a selection of quilts that display the breathtaking range and ambition of their makers. Some engage with familiar subjects - protest, history, connection - while others explore the more abstract qualities of pattern, colour, light and texture. Central to all is the approach to quilting both as a tradition to be preserved as well as a blank canvas for serious artistic exploration.
Alongside rich and colourful photographs of the work, this book features first-person essays by a selection of the artists, offering a rare window into their process. From the thousands of decisions that go into making a quilt, the ideas and references that shape them, to the reasons why, of all the mediums available, they chose this particular one. Essays by scholars Janneken Smucker and Sarah Walcott provide historical, cultural and material context, while a foreword by renowned collector Roderick Kiracofe anchors the book within the longer history of quilting in America and beyond.
This is a book that moves the conversation about quilts forward, away from the question of whether quilts are art and toward the far more interesting questions of what artists do with them.