.Most feminists predicted that the elevation of quilts to fine.art status would be a positive development for women in both the male.dominated art world and in traditional women's quilting circles. I would like to present the results of an investigation into who has, in fact, benefited from this elevation; the inquiry suggests that the increase in status for some quilts was bought at the cost of women's control over quilting as an art form, the creation, reception, and preservation of their quilts, and at the cost of deep divisions between tradi.tional quilters and art quilters, including some feminists, which resulted from a splintering of what had been a fairly unified artistic tradition.
This analysis was originally a case study within a larger work on the political and ontological ramifications of recent developments in aesthetics.' In that work, I criticized as overly simplistic the account given by Marcia Eaton of the way in which artifacts may become, or cease to be, works of art. While contemporary work in the philosophy of art, including Eaton's, acknowledges that art, particularly in the twentieth century, has taken inspi.ration from nonart artifacts (for example, Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon), utilized them in the making of new works of art (see my discussion of Robert Rauschenberg's Bed below), and even occasionally treated them as works of art on their own terms (as in Jonathan Holstein's 1971 Whitney show of American patchwork quilts), aestheticians have insufficiently noted or appre.ciated the extent to which these artifacts were already seen as works of art within the various traditions from which they were appropriated. More careful attention to the place of quilts and quiltmaking in what I will call traditional quilt culture reveals the presence of a woman's artworld, coexist.ing with those institutions and practices we usually designate by that term. Drawing on my earlier work, I will utilize the convention of referring to the high art culture as the artworld,~ and to any oppositional or marginalized artistic tradition as an artworld. That the referent of the term zvork of art cannot be fixed, on this account, is the result not only of the evolutionary and transgressive nature of the artworld,~ but is also due to the presence of artworlds2 that coexist, overlap and occasionally compete with it.
If one reads the material on quilts published in the last twenty.five years in the United States, including not just art books but scholarly monographs and, most importantly, articles in women's magazines and the women's pages of American newspapers, it becomes clear how complex and contested is the current status of quilts. The popular view, which is also the view with which I began this research, has it that quilts, lined up in neat rows like suffragettes, have now achieved acceptance as a uniquely American, uniquely female art form.4 This picture is not just incomplete; it's inaccurate. There are at least three distinct quilt cultures. Although more or less independent, each culture overlaps and influences the others, and each culture can plausibly claim credit for quilts being or becoming works of art. None of these quilt cultures alone has done, or perhaps can do, justice to quilts' multiplicity of meanings.
In descending order of social legitimacy, the cultures I have identified are what I will term the art quilt tradition or culture, the feminist quilt culture, and the traditional quilt culture. It should be noted at the outset that each of the three quilt cultures considers at least some quilts to be works of art, and there are individual quilters from each of the three cultures who are seen as artists within that culture. The following brief summary may help in navigating the I distinctions I will draw out more fully below.
.
The traditional quilt school is composed of the vast majority of women who have quilted in the past and most of the women who quilt now. Their story is complicated by the fact that traditional quilters have been, histori.cally, the makers of the quilts now theorized about and bought by both feminist and non.feminist art critics and collectors. If an art collector buys a quilt made after 1940, however, odds are that the quilt was not made by a member of the traditional quilt culture, since quilts made by traditional quilters after that date are generally considered to be less aesthetically valuable.
One way to describe the relationship between the traditional quilt culture and the others is to say that the traditional quilt culture is the trunk from which the other quilt culture branches grew. The traditional quilt culture has a branch of its own, however; it is not merely an ancestral or stock culture. The art quilt and feminist quilt cultures, both of which sprouted in the early 1970s, attend to the quilters of the trunk, but they generally ignore, when they do not actively denigrate, the traditional quilters in the branch of the tree growing alongside their own.
The feminist quilt culture is diverse. It includes women's studies scholars who are interested in women's art, feminist historians who use quilts as docu.ments of social and domestic history, and a handful of feminist artists who are making quilts directly for the art market. Some of the state.by.state efforts to document quilts have been informed by feminist concerns, but they rely heavily on traditional quilters and their social organizations to locate the quilts they will document, photograph, and exhibit.6 The art quilt group includes a few gallery directors and curators, but its main constituents are collectors, artists who make quilts, and art book publishers.
.The Art Quilt Culture
The story of the art quilt tradition begins in duly of 1971, when Jonathan Holstein guest.curated a show of quilts at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. This event is considered the single most important in the certification of quilts as full.fledged art objects.,7 Holstein is also, more than any other single individual, responsible for the fact that quilts have been accepted in the highest reaches of the artworld) to the extent that they have been taken away from traditional quilt culture and defeminized.
At this time [pre.Whitney], normal criteria for judging the importance of quilts was [sic] age, historical associations, workmanship and beauty.... We were ... interested . . . solely in how well they worked as visual phenomena. While no one who collects quilts can remain unaware of their extraordinary meaning as social documents, we managed to stick ruthlessly to our criteria, feeling that was the only way we could reach our goal [of having an exhibition in a major art museum].... The emphasis on the visual aspects of quilts over their other intrinsic qualities, a position which characterized the Whitney exhibition and others, was a necessary step in freeing quilts from their bedspread/craft/mythol.ogy baggage.
His insistence on evaluating quilts on only the narrowest of visual criteria, and his presentation of quilters as "anonymous women," even when many quilts in his collection are signed and dated, have been criticized at length by other feminist writers. My criticisms will be directed at two other features of the art quilt culture less.often discussed: documentation and money.
Holstein and Gail van der Hoof had been collecting quilts throughout the eastern United States for a number of years before the Whitney show. If the labels on the quilts in the catalog of the exhibit and in his 1973 book are any indication, the only data he collected on any quilt he bought were the state in which it was purchased and the approximate date it was made. Having set such a poor example for those who would follow, he acknowledged in 1986, "as the quilt collecting craze gathered force during the 1970s, it became apparent that many textiles were leaving the social matrix in which they had been embedded since they were made. As a result, much valuable information was being lost."~ "Were leaving the social matrix," he said, not "were being taken," as if the quilts ran away from home, yearning to be free of the "baggage" of their social matrix, namely women's traditional quilt culture.
.There is no way to recover this information once the connection between the quilt and its "social matrix" has been severed; I would suggest we should view the treatment of quilts collected in this way as a form of cultural theft.
Despite the deserved reproach feminists have leveled against quilt collec.tors for their sloppy documentation practices, few scholars have asked hard questions about why families have sold quilts that had been passed down through generations, and no one has drawn attention to the fact that Hol.stein and others have made fortunes on their collections while the individuals from whom quilts were bought made a few hundred dollars at most. While I have not been able to find any accurate information on the size of Holstein's profits, there is another large quilt collection for which numbers are available.
In 1977 David Pottinger left his Detroit plastics manufacturing job and moved to Honeyville, Indiana, where he bought the general store serving a small Amish community. In addition to selling goods to the Amish, he also bought their quilts, some seven hundred in all. ~ ~ He donated one hundred of them to the Museum of American Folk Art in New York. In order to keep the rest of the quilts in the state, the Indiana State Museum had to raise the $650,000 Pottinger was asking for the collection. The Lilly Endowment put up $400,000 and "the Indiana State Museum Society volunteers [worked] to raise the remaining $250,000."~2 The cost to Indiana was more than $1,000.00 per quilt; at the time Pottinger was collecting, even the finest examples of Amish quilts could be bought for only a few hundred dollars.~3
The Traditional Quilt Culture
The traditional quilt culture is the most difficult to write about, in part because of its remarkable unselfconsciousness. There is an additional problem created by contemporary traditional quilters having been cut off from their own history by the appropriation of their past by the two other quilt cultures. In addition, the traditional quilters of the past and the quilts they made are the raw materials for theories about quilts and quilting constructed by the other quilt cultures. Contemporary traditional quilters, on the other hand, who don't often theorize about or document their own work, are denigrated by the art culture and too often ignored by feminists.
The 1976 Bicentennial was the impetus for a renewed interest by working and middle class Americans in America's folk arts and craft heritage. Although some women had continued to quilt between 1940 and 1976, quilting, in its richest social, artistic, and psychic complexity, had nearly ceased being prac.ticed. Fifteen years later, there has been a rebirth of quilting activity, especially among women of the middle class. Projects such as the Boise Peace Quilt Project'4 and the efforts of a Milwaukee quilting teacher to have quilts made for the local Ronald McDonald House~5 testify to a renewed appreciation of quilts as community.building events as well as aesthetic objects. Younger women are once again making quilts for exhibition at the state fairs that have often served as established gallery spaces for quilts made as works of art2 by traditional quilters.
In contrast to the art quilt culture, women who make quilts value not just their beauty as designed objects, but also the evenness and size of the stitching used in piecing and quilting them. Quilters also consider the reason a quilt was made to be a fact about its history of production that can direct the viewer's attention to intrinsic properties of the quilt that are worthy of contemplation (in Eaton's view, the mark of an aesthetic property). They especially value quilts made to express affection or concern for a family member. Beyond these general properties, the specific aesthetic choices quilters make depend greatly on class, race, and region. One attempt at distinguishing differences among quilters has been to divide them into plain quilters and fancy quilters. 16 These categories have the virtue of being used by women who quilt, but the line between the two is not hard and fast, and different regions and racial groups have made the distinction using different criteria.
Historically, traditional quilters were primarily plain quilters; some quilters never attempted a fancy quilt. A privileged few made only fancy quilts. The fancy/plain quilt distinction is in part an art/non.art distinction; that is, traditional quilt culture typically only counts fancy quilts as works of art.2 The distinction may sometimes instead be used to describe class distinctions among quilters. Plain quilts were, above all else, made to be used. In one Appalachian community, pieced, strip, and string quilts made of remnants, which were often synthetic, and quilted in a fan pattern with long stitches or tacks were considered "plain." The thread used contrasted with, rather than blending with, the cloth.' 7 Black quilters are usually, but not always, plain quilters, and the improvisational style said to be typical of African American quilters can be found in the compositions of poor white quilters as well.
.Fancy quilts are made "'for the beauty and not really for the service,""9 in other words, for other than strictly utilitarian reasons. The fancy quilters in the Appalachian community discussed above have a stereotypically feminine con.ception of what counts as beauty and value floral applique quilts more than rectilinear pieced ones. While plain quilts are made for a family's utilitarian needs, fancy quilts are often made to symbolize and sanctify relationships. Family members often encourage fancy quilters "to spend long hours at the quilting frame producing an item they know will eventually be theirs."20 The quilting and piecing stitches are done with thread that blends with the fabric, and both piecing and quilting are usually executed using smaller stitches than those found in plain quilts.
Another plain/fancy distinction was made on the basis of the size of the pieces used in constructing the top; the smaller the pieces, the fancier the quilt.2~ In addition, the distinction has been used to differentiate between shapes and elaborateness of the quilting stitches (rather than in reference to the quilt as a whole). Fancy quilting in this sense is used to refer to the complex and curvilinear shapes used to quilt open spaces in a pieced design, while plain quilting is quilting done in straight rows, either outlining the pieces or straight across an appliqued or geometric pieced top.22
Quilters use both the plain and fancy quilts they make, although fancy quilts may only be used sparingly. Quilts represent home, family, and community values rather than monetary ones, even to women who sell their work, which is probably why they are willing to part with their quilts for such staggeringly low sums. What I find significant, however, is that quilters express less conflict between utilitarian and aesthetic values than they do between the cluster of associations they attach to quilts and money. That a quilt is useful, in other words, is part of what makes it beautiful. That a homemade artifact, embed.ded in the history of a family, might have a high monetary value, on the other hand, is often not a welcome or even salient feature of quilt.ownership within the traditional quilt culture. Contrast this with the assumption made by most participants in the artworld~ that utility detracts from aesthetic value, may, indeed. even disaualifv an artifact as a work of art, while monetary value, when it is not considered irrelevant, is seen as enhancing its value as a work of art.
Over and over women say that the purpose of making a quilt is to express love. Rather than demonstrating mastery over what is by any standard a difficult medium, the effort and time required to make a quilt beautiful are valued not for their own sake, but as tangible evidence of an abiding affection for a family member, a desire for world peace, or concern for a community of children with cancer.
All of this suggests that for traditional quilters, the term work of art has a more complex meaning than it has in the artworld.~ For example, "x is a painting," or "x is a sculpture" is typically considered to imply "x is a work of art." The distinctions that are made amongst paintings and sculptures are usually made in terms of quality, not membership in the class of works of art. Quilting as a medium does not work in the same way. For traditional quilters, a quilt, simpy ~oy virtue of its meml~ership in the class, is not necessarily either a work of art2 or not a work of art.2 Despite the fact that quilting as an activity does not always result in a work of art, there are, nevertheless, quilts that are made to be art works and that are treated as such within the community of women who share quilting as, among other things, an artistic tradition.
The Feminist Quilt Culture
The development of a specifically feminist approach to quilts can be dated from the publication, in 1973, of Patricia Mainardi's article, "Quilts: The Great American Art."23 In her essay, Mainardi presented the first feminist art historical treatment of quilts, complete with an analysis of the interweaving design traditions of African American, Native American, and European quilters and the role quilting played in women's social and emotional lives. In other words, Mainardi treated the artistic tradition of quilts as an artistic tradition in its own terms, although she also used the language of the artworldi in speaking of the evolution of quilt design. Mainardi also excoriated Jonathan Holstein and other members of the artworldi for their sexist treatment of quilts, citing, in particular, the presentation of quilt artists as anonymous, self.effacing women who in no way saw what they were doing as art.
The second landmark event in the history of the feminist quilt culture was the creation of Judy Chicago's fee Dinner Party, first exhibited in 1979. The table runners for Trotula, an eleventh.century midwife and gynecologist who lived in southern Italy, Sojourner Truth, and Susan B. Anthony all contain quilted sections. In their text, Eml~roidering Our Heritage: The Dinner Party Needle. Chicago and Susan Hill summarized quilt lore found in books written by traditional quilters; through them, the traditional lore became part of
.feminist lore about quilts. Mainardi's and Chicago's approach to the reclama.tion of quilts as art, while not identical, is similar; both attempt to envision quilts as art on their own terms.
The other approach to quilts taken by feminists has been concerned less with the aesthetics of quilts than it has been with quilts as texts of social history. Because women have left few documents with which historians can reconstruct our past, feminist scholars have turned to quilts as one source of information about women's lives. The difficulty with this approach is that explicitly reducing even narrative quilts to their textual content fails to chal.lenge and may even buttress the categories of text, history, and art that have excluded women from participating in all three.25
Probably the lowest point in the history of feminist involvement with quilt.ing was Charlotte Robinson's The Artist ar~d the Quilt,26 conceived in the early 1970s and finally completed and shown in 1982. Twenty famous women artists,~ not all of them feminists, were recruited by Robinson. Each artist was paired with a quilter, most of whom were unknown in the artworld~ at the time the project began. The artists, in some cases without consultation with the quilters, made works of art~ that were then "translated" by the quilters into their medium.
Some of the women who quilted for the project expressed pleasure in both product and process and stated that working with professional artists had stretched them in ways they liked. Some of the quilters felt they were treated as the second.class member of the partnership, although these voices are muted in the self.congratulatory text on the project published by Robinson. Up until the sale of the entire collection to Phillip Morris, only the quilters had been paid for their work. Each of the quilters received $2,000, which Robinson had generated through grants. Ironically, this added to, rather than diminished, their exploita.tion. It is true that the artists~ could better afford to do the work without pay, but it made the quilts, waiting for a buyer, the product of the artists;~ the quilters, like materials, were purchased to realize the artists' intentions.
Middle.class and/or educated feminists have sometimes had difficulty rec.onciling our desire to valorize our female past with the day.to.day reality of women who are still enmeshed within the confines of women's traditional lives. Feminists have a vested interest in presenting quilting foremothers as strong, independent, and self.consciously creative women. Miriam Schapiro, an artworld~ artist, has been in the forefront of the effort to claim women's traditional arts2 as part of the high art~ tradition. She has written,What is a quilt? Among other things, it is the history of women. It is a reassembling process, which in itself may embody a solution to human problems. It is inspiration, a connection with self, the dogged will to make something extraordinary in the midst of family routine, a sense of wholeness, the wish to please, to succeed, pleasure in the act of working and knowing the power of "making."
What should such a feminist say to a woman who seems to feel that the quilting, although it is nice to do and she enjoys it tremen.dously, has little real worth.... She bases her belief that she isn't artistic on the fact that she can't draw a straight line; she doesn't consider her ruler as a tool to be used in helping her achieve her goals; rather, she considers it cheating. She therefore does not consider her quilts to be an art, but nevertheless is not at all embarrassed or reticent to have pictures taken of them or to answer questions about them.
If the materials published by feminists are any indication, mostly we say nothing and ignore women who do not fit our preconceived notions of what a quilter should be like. Judy Chicago is at least honest about feeling disillu.sioned by some aspects of her apprenticeship to a china.painter, which she undertook in preparation for painting the porcelain plates for 7he Dinner Pary. Chicago expresses admiration that the china.painters teach and work in pub.lic, rather than living their artistic lives in private, shut away from the unini.tiated but curious who might want to learn from them. She continues.
My learning experience with the china.painters was not totally positive, however. Many of them viewed me suspiciously, were outright hostile, or thought of me as someone who wanted to exploit them despite all my efforts, both public and private, to honor them. This kind of reaction forced me to confront the conserva.tism and fear which, along with generosity and warmth, typify the 'subculture' of women's crafts.... They did not take themselves seriously nor did they believe that their experiences were important enough to express. This lack of self.esteem re.sulted not only in a continual dependence upon preformed patterns and designs, but also in a resistance to new ideas and unfamiliar thoughts. All this only rein.forced my belief in the importance of addressing women's lack of self.worth as a crucial step in creating change and my determination to achieve this through art.
Chicago is herself trained in the high.art tradition of the isolated and private artist. She felt that tradition oppressed her as a woman; surely one response to the oppressiveness of the artworld,~ which the china.painters have undoubtedly also felt, is to choose not to identify oneself as an artist at all.
Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock have tried to reconcile these apparent conflicts by arguing that the contrast between heroic quilting grandmothers and simpering quilting granddaughters is due to historical changes that have their source outside the sphere of women's artistic traditions. In particular, they cite "the intersection in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of the development of an ideology of femininity, that is, a social definition of women and their role, with the emergence of a clearly defined separation of art and craft."30 Lucy Lippard describes the rift in terms of the general decline of domestic arts, and attributes it to the process of de.skilling that accompanied the rise of industrial production and the consumer ethic that concurrently replaced working class artisans' pride in a job well done.
While social history, particularly feminist social history, goes some way toward providing a framework within which to place these developments, the economic and social context doesn't answer all the questions posed by the history of quilting. In particular, feminists have to acknowledge the extent to which we have contributed to the gulf between traditional artists2 and art~ quilters, both feminist and not.
The tensions between traditional and feminist quilters are not often dis.cussed openly, in part because the two groups to some extent live in separate worlds. It is significant that the fragments of conversation about the rift that have leaked into print take the feminist quilters' side of the story.
As an increasing number of contemporary [feminist and/or art] quilters' works are reviewed in arts publications, some of these artisans are disassociating them.selves from the traditional roots of quilting, Partee and Westfall say. "The stakes might be higher in the contemporary quilt art movement, but contemporary and traditional quilts are not mutually exclusive. They're part of a continuum. And we see ourselves as a necessary part of that continuum," Partee says.... "The contemporary, innovative quilt maker is not saying 'What I do is better,"' she says. "What this artist is saying is, 'I appreciate what the traditional quilt maker did. I understand the medium. Now I want to use the medium to express something different."'
Ruth McDowell, a contemporary feminist artist who makes quilts for the art market, complains that it is diffiocult for quilters like herself not to be bitter about the extent to which their work as artists is not considered as valuable as it might be had they chosen a different medium in which to work. She acknowledges that there is a tendency to blame traditional quilters for this, which she also says is a tendency that must be resisted.
On the other hand, she is angry at traditional quilters for being resentful of the relatively large sums art quilters make for their work. She is also angry that traditional quilters take exception to the unwillingness of art quilters to stay within the confines of established patterns and methods of construction. "Choosing her words carefully, she continues.... 'Unfortunately, there's a lot of controversy that goes on between the traditional people and the ones who say, ". . . to copy exactly what they did 100 years ago is not getting us anywhere." . . . And I wish these traditional people would not feel so threat.ened by these new things."'
The Processes of Quilts Becoming Art~
I hope thus far to have demonstrated, or at least made plausible, that quilts are part of an artistic tradition that was less privileged than the artworld,~ but nonetheless an artworld2 in its own right. Both the feminist quilt tradition and the art quilt tradition have laid claim to the recent certification of quilts as works of art,~ but even feminists at times overlook the reality that quilts were works of art2 before feminists discovered them as such. Broadly speaking, the art quilt culture claims to have made quilts into art while the feminist quilt culture claims only to have discovered that they were art all along. The former is arrogant as well as erroneous; the difficulty with the latter is that it presumes that no orze knew quilts were works of art2 before the feminist discovery that they were, which is also false. Nonetheless, each of the quilt cultures, including the traditional quilt culture, contains a narrative of certification. Not sur.prisingly, each culture tells the story of quilts.become.art quite differently, and these differences can help us distinguish between cultures yet further.
Discussions of the certification process of quilts by the artworld~ typically ask, When did quilts become works of art? Was there a single identifiable moment when these homecrafted objects left the arenas of kitchen and bed.room and arrived, appropriately attired, for the gala gallery opening? Most of the writers who express an opinion on this subject acknowledge that there was a transformation, a process occurring over a space of several years, rather than a single event in time. Nonetheless, there are certain identifiable moments that have been consistently mentioned as crucially significant. The 1971 Whitney show, "Abstract Design in American Quilts," is the one usually pointed to by the art quilt culture, while the American Bicentennial in 1976 and Robert Rauschenberg's 1955 mixed media piece Bed are foregrounded in discussions by the traditional quilt culture and the feminist quilt culture, respectively. In comparison with the other events, the Bicentennial is usually credited with stirring renewed interest in making quilts, rather than in their aesthetic appre.ciation; in this sense it does not mark the certification of quilts as works of art in the same way as the 1971 Whitney show and Bed have been thought to do. Since I have argued that at least some quilts were already works of art within the traditional quilt culture, this is to be expected. If this is right, the Bicenten.nial marks, then, the rebirth of an artistic tradition, rather than the creatiorz of one.
The writers who mention the American Bicentennial as a central event in the new appreciation of quilts are, for the most part, reviewers for local newspapers and authors of how.to.quilt articles that appear in the women's pages of newspapers and in women's magazines. "Interest in quilting surged dramatically after the 1976 Bicentennial. Many communities, stirred by thoughts of pioneer folk art and America's past, made commemorative Bicen.tennial quilts, reviving the idea of the old quilting bee."34 Within the world of dealers, collectors, and gallery curators,Jonathan Holstein's show of quilts at the Whitney Museum inJuly of 1971 is generally credited with being the single most important event in the transition of antique quilts from "mere" craft to high art. Robert Bishop, Director of the Museum of American Folk Art, wrote in a 1983 article, "'Abstract Design in American Quilts,' an exhibition assem.bled by collectors Jonathan Holstein and Gail van der Hoof at the Whitney Museum of American Art, changed all that [underappreciation of and low prices for quilts] and encouraged the public to perceive the extraordinary sense of color and design inherent in these early American textiles."35 Sim.ilarly, Elizabeth Warren, a curator at the same museum, wrote, "[Since the Whitney] American quilts have been appreciated for their visual appeal as art, as well as for their functional value as bedcovers, and their historical impor.tance as fabric documents of the lives of American women."36 The clear implication is that quilts were not appreciated for their visual appeal before the Whitney show.
Despite the modest tone Holstein occasionally adopts, no one has insisted as loudly as he that the Whitney show, more than any other single event, was responsible for the revolution in the valuation of quilts. In fact, much of his subsequent career as a collector, writer, and quilt.show judge has been depen.dent on the supposed centrality of his role in the process of artistic elevation. "From this exhibition, it has generally been said, stemmed an international awareness of American quilts as designed objects. But it would be more accurate, perhaps, to say that the Whitney exhibition was the first in a series of events which changed forever the way quilts were seen."37
The centrality of Holstein's role in the reevaluation of quilts and the signifi.cance of the Whitney show in particular have been adopted as articles of faith by the popular press as well as by the art press, despite the fact that the popular press has been the only forum for the traditional quilt culture. A contemporary review of the Whitney show was headlined "Art: Quilts Find a Place at the Whitney."33 Newspapers from communities as diverse as San Diego, Louisville, Kentucky, and Philadelphia have all credited the Whitney show with, at a minimum, effecting a new appreciation of quilts as designed objects; some explicitly lay the credit for the creation of quilts as art objects at the door of the Whitney.
All these accounts explicitly or implicitly credit the Whitney show with the invention of quilts as designed, decorative, and artistic objects. The authors of these articles come close to treating quilts as if they were naturally occurring objects, made without benefit of human skill, intelligence, or aesthetic sensibility. Feminist quilt scholars have adopted one of two approaches when it comes to the question of how quilts are to be seen as art. Some agree with Holstein that modern art was a catalyst for a new, aesthetic valuation of quilts, but they have attempted to combine this insight with research into the role of quilts as social documents of women's history. One of the first feminist book.length pieces to be published on the subject of women and quilting was Th~e Quilters: Women and Domestic Art by Patricia Cooper and Norma Bradley Buierd. A review of this book by Melinda Frye includes the following comment:
Although the title suggests that this is an art book, it is more a work of cultural and oral history. arrived at throu~h the medium of a craft.... While inspired by
.all along, unappreciated at best, denied any status as works of art in their own terms at worst. These feminists have joined forces with the traditional quilters. Mainardi goes so far as to suggest that quilts were a crucial source of inspira.tion for modern art itself, and she rejects as male appropriation of female creativity the view that it was modern art that lay the foundation for seeing quilts as art.43
For the second sort of feminist writer, an event that took place in 1955 is more seminal than the 1971 show at the Whitney. In 1955 Robert Rauschen.berg incorporated a Log Cabin quilt into a mixed media "painting" entitled Bed. The quilt was glued or nailed to a bed.shaped form, and portions of the surface of the quilt were painted. Both Rauschenberg's use of this quilt and the circumstances surrounding his use of it have been the subject of commentary by a number of authors. Radical feminists point to Bed not because they think it made quilts into works of art, but because it symbolizes how quilts as art~ are often destroyed as quilts and, hence, as art.2
I will contend, in agreement with Mainardi, that this work set the bound.aries within which quilts could be viewed as art. ~ This early piece allowed for a new appreciation of the design elements of a particular range of quilts, but it also connected quilts.as.art.objects with male permission for their being seen as such. Rauschenberg was the first to publicly appropriate this female art form. On this view, Holstein's decision to collect quilts and his success in getting the Whitney to show them were continuations of that process.
Although Holstein's entire career is dependent on the apparent similarities between quilts and modern art, he has warned that one should be cautious about identifying them too closely:
Any direct linking of the two mediums would be demeaning to the history and presence of both quilts and paintings. Implicit in the act of creating a painting is
the intellectual process which ties the work of an artist to his aesthetic ancestors
and his peers, and places it in the history of objects specifically made to be art.
This is precisely the quality which was absent in the making of pieced quilts. In other words, art is smart, and quilts qua quilts are dumb, and therefore not art. The footnote to this passage discusses Bed as a paradigmatic instance of art as intellection; the fact that it incorporates a quilt does not demean the work because the reasons for its incorporation are entirely artistic and/or intellec.tual in nature. The text of this note reads, in part:
The quilt was taken from a bed, where it had no doubt served to warm sleeping householders.
Were they all.unsuspecting sleeping under "art," or did the quilt
become that only when Rauschenberg made his bed on the wall? Thus stated,
the answer would have to be that Rauschenberg made the quilt into art by
.incorporating it in his painting, even though the quilt itself, extracted and put on the wall, would, like many of its fellows, be visually similar to paintings of some of Rauschenberg's contemporaries.45
Penny McMorris and Michael Kile have jointly authored a book in which they discuss the history of quilting in the context of the history of popular culture. Their perspective differs from the approaches of both the modernist Holstein and the feminist Mainardi.46 They mention Rauschenberg's piece in the context of post.World War II art, which they claim (contra Holstein) was less intellectual and more open to popular and technical cultural influences than was pre.World War II art.
Art of the late 1940s and 1950s experimented with new media, including fabric. In 1955, Iwo new works of art incorporated Log Cabin quilts: I have already discussed one; the other was made by Anne Wilson.47 McMorris and Kile provide a bit more information about the householders from whom Rauschenberg took his quilt.
The Lag Cabin quilt used in Bed once belonged to artist Dorothea Rockburne. She recalls, "It was kind of special to me because I had it at the time my daughter Christine was born, and she used to spend a lot of time on it. I didn't actually give Bob the quilt, it just sort of appeared in the work one day. We were living at Black Mountain College then, and when you sent the wash out things had a way of appearing and disappearing. I remember when I first saw the painting he had made of it I thought, 'Oh! That's the quilt that I had.' It was a wonderful experience seeing it."48
Patricia Mainardi is the only consistently radical writer on the history of the creation and appropriation of quilts. As such, she has a much less benign interpretation of this event.
The elevation of quilts from folk art to contemporary craft to contemporary art has been marked by distinct stages of acculturation. Retrospectively, Robert Rauschenberg's Bed of 1955 can be seen to have enacted a paradigmatic mas.culine attitude towards feminine cultural production; he stated: "When I did Bed, I had just literally run out of things to paint on. There was a quilt that I didn't need and I thought it would be good." Bed reflected accurately the place women's traditional arts held before the feminist movement of the 1960s. It is as raw material or support for the "art," namely Rauschenberg's painting, that the Log Cabin quilt in his work is used, transformed, and destroyed. The precedence of male over female, high art over low, is graphically illustrated. And yet Rauschen.berg and many other male artists of his generation collected and admired tradi.tional quilts, although not quite as "real art" and certainly not as the work of "real artists."
By way of conclusion, I would like to make two points, one general, and one more specific. The general point is that if feminists are to have an account of quilting that does full justice to its considerable complexity, we will have to do better than we have done so far at including all the women who quilt in our analysis. The particular point has to do with what I think the complexity of quilting, and the story of its status as both art~ and art,2 can tell us about the ongoing struggle of women to define ourselves simultaneously as both partici.pants in society and oppositional outsiders to its institutions. Women's art forms can be experienced as a source of strength, joy, expression and as an affirmative badge of pride. [They] remain nonetheless stigmatic in the sense of a brand, a restriction, a definition as less. This is not because of any intrinsic content or value but because the social reality is that their shape, qualities, texture, impera.tive, and very existence are a response to powerlessness. They exist as they do because of lack of choice. They are created out of social conditions of oppression and exclusion. They may be part of a strategy for survival or even of change but, as is, they are not the whole world, and it is the whole world that one is entitled to. As long as contemporary traditional quilters are divided from feminists whether artists, quilters, collectors, critics, or historiansthe full story of quilts as an art form created and maintained by generations of women must wait to be told.