"Recent Acquisitions: Crazy Quilts" is on display April 11-July 29, 2018 in the Third Floor Education Gallery at the International Quilt Study Center & Museum.
The precise origins of Crazy quilts remain a mystery, but the form appeared as a fad in both the U.S. and the U.K. in the late 1800s. The epitome of Victorian “fancywork,” Crazy quilts were both a reaction to and a product of a world in which factory production and global trade were supplanting earlier ways of making and thinking about items for the home. Until the mid-1800s, the appearance and contents of the home were considered reflections of their inhabitants’ values and moral character. The fashion for Crazy quilts grew alongside the notion of “taste” as an expression of individual style.
The typical Crazy quilt is a jigsaw puzzle-like composition-a patchwork-of shapes and textures, ephemera and inscriptions. Silk, satin, and velvet are typical materials, and Crazy quilts often incorporate souvenir ribbons, and embroidered images from nature and popular culture. Figures in the style of English children’s book illustrator Kate Greenaway were especially popular in Crazy quilts, as were Asian design vocabularies disseminated in style guides and in women’s magazines. Known as chinoiserie and japonisme, these styles and motifs were often appropriated, without regard to cultural context, to decorate domestic objects.
The quintessential “high style” Crazy quilt was a parlor piece-too small and fragile to be used as a bedcover, and typically displayed in the formal living room in which Victorian homeowners greeted visitors. Vernacular interpretations-plain, utilitarian Crazy-style quilts made of durable wools or cottons-dispensed with the investment of so much leisure time and labor. The quilts shown here feature such Crazy-style hallmarks as luxurious fabrics and trim, profuse embellishment; asymmetrical design, and imagery that is by turns stylized, standardized, and idiosyncratic.
15 май 2018
