Who is American? Skirball exhibition in L.A. answers the question with quilts
By John Scognamiglio
When I first started writing American Quilters about a decade ago, people who owned a quilting machine would almost never be seen in public. When the owners arrived, they sat at a picnic table outside, sewing and drinking coffee in the sun—unaware that their quilts hung in the living rooms of local families. They didn’t care that their machines were in mothballs, or that the work they’d done had been sitting in mothballs for years. They had no idea what they’d done or why. And they never had the time to answer a simple question: Who the hell are you?
Even now, when quilters and quilt owners are talking, they rarely address the question—how many of us are you?
I’d like to make it easy: we’re not the only ones. We have hundreds of thousands of friends, and friends that we don’t even know. We’re all quilters. We’re all friends.
I think we should talk more about who we are as quilters. And who we are as neighbors. We’re all neighbors, and most of us live in California—or nearby. Our families are friends. Quilters.
We’re all quilters. We’re all friends.
But not all of us are in the same neighborhood. We’re a quilt-loving community in the Los Angeles area, with a big, diverse variety of styles and styles of quilts, all made by local quilters in small studios in our hometowns. But our homes are not within range of a quilter (or a community) that is a little smaller.
There are lots of ways to make a quilt. You can make it from a pattern that’s hand