American Quilts and Folk Art coming to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Docents,

It was a pleasure meeting all of you today, for those of you who are new, and it was great to see those of you again who are old hands. This handout contains the resources I briefly went over with you, as well as quite a few more that I did not have time to discuss in detail. My email address, office phone extension, and reference desk hours are listed on the business cards I gave you, as well as on the libraries page of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s website, should you have any questions or further needs.

1. When the Metropolitan Museum of Art first put on the American Quilts and Folk Art exhibition, they skillfully linked the exhibition pieces on the website to their online educational resources. You should take advantage of these so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to your talks. A great place to start is their thematic essay on Nineteenth-Century American Folk Art. It defines the term “folk art,” gives you some easy-to-follow restrictions on time period and classification, and links to other related topics, as well as books and essays that have been written about folk art.
2. So as not to ignore the first part of the exhibition title, also look at their thematic essay on American Quilts and Coverlets. Like the previous essay, it has excellent citations for journal article links, links to other essays and resources on the website, and links to objects in the exhibition. You will certainly want to use the links to objects so you can get an idea of the variety and themes of American quilts.
3. While this may not be quite as key for the scope of your talks, it would be good to familiarize yourself with the materials of the quilts, covered on the Met’s thematic essay on the Materials and Techniques of American Quilts and Coverlets. People often ask questions on tours about how an artwork was made, so you should be prepared to give at least a general description.
4. Now that the basics of the exhibition are covered, you should also be focusing on what our institution brings to it. The MFA Houston was one of the first cities in the country to show the Gee’s Bend quilts when they went on tour ten years ago, which helped solidify our already-established reputation as a destination for American folk and decorative arts. With our fabulous libraries, we’re also a research destination for these categories of art and not just a viewing place. You’re probably familiar with the Hirsch Library, which is our central location, but if you haven’t been to the Powell Library at Bayou Bend, make a trip immediately! Powell’s collections focus especially on American art, decorative arts, and material culture. I’ll get into the physical book collections in a moment, but it’s worth noting that some of its incredible resources are digital. On the Powell webpage, you’ll find a link to the William J. Hill Texas Artisans & Artists Archive. You can find some very relevant folk art items in this online collection, including quilts, and the archive links to objects from a variety of Texas museums.
5. The Powell library webpage also contains a link to the online catalog, which you can limit to searching one library or all locations within MFAH that are open to you. The next few resources are citations for books and exhibition catalogues in our libraries that may help you. This first book describes Amish quilts in particular, but discusses more generally the way that folk art came about in the United States. It is like to be helpful as reference: Smucker, J. (2013). Amish Quilts: Crafting an American Icon. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

6. This book was published in conjunction with a major quilts exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2010:

Prichard, S. (2010). Quilts 1700-2010: Hidden histories, untold stories. United Kingdom: V & A Publications.

7. This is a catalogue from a Shelburne Museum quilts exhibition in 2012:

Burks, J. M., & Cunningham, J. (2012). Man-Made Quilts: Civil War to the Present. Shelburne: Shelburne Museum.

8. This is also a Shelburne Museum quilts catalogue, but from a traveling exhibition this year. Civil War-era quilts generate a lot of interest, and this and the previous book discuss them in detail. You may get a lot of questions about them due to recent traveling exhibitions:

Shaw, M., & Bassett, L. Z. (2012). Homefront & Battlefield: Quilts & Context in the Civil War. Lowell: American Textile History Museum.

9. This catalogue from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 2014 show on the Pilgrim/Roy collection of quilts focuses on a more theoretical approach to quilts, especially in terms of color:

Parmal, P. A., & Swope, J. M. (2014). Quilts and Color: The Pilgrim/Roy Collection. Boston: MFA Publications.

10. This catalogue focuses on the extensive collection of quilts held at Colonial Williamsburg:

Baumgarten, L., & Ivey, K. S. (2014). Four Centuries of Quilts: The Colonial Williamsburg Collection. Williamsburg: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

11. This is a catalog of so-called masterworks from the American Folk Art Museum:

Warren, E. V., Conelli, M. A., Stewart, M., & Hollander, S. C. (2010). Quilts: Masterworks from the American Folk Art Museum. New York: Rizzoli.

12. This is a general exploration of the history of collecting American folk art, which you should be able to find useful in contextualizing the collections represented in this exhibition: Stillinger, E. (2011). A Kind of Archeology: Collecting American Folk Art, 1876-1976. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

13. It is important to remember that the national borders we know now were not always so defined in the United States. What we think of as American may have changed over time. Therefore, I think you might find this book on Canadian folk art helpful:

Fleming, J. A., & Rowan, M. J. (2012). Canadian Folk Art to 1950. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press.

14. Keeping in line with the previous point, lots of folk art, including what we collect at MFAH, comes from indigenous and Hispanic populations that you may not see represented so often in collections of folk art from the Northeast. This book gives an overview of folk art themes relating to women in Mexican art:

Bartra, E. (2011). Women in Mexican Folk Art. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

15. Speaking of Hispanic folk art, another incredible resource we have at the MFAH is the International Center for the Arts of the Americas (ICAA), which we house. Among the many projects that the Center comprises, one that will be very relevant for you is its Documents Project. One way to search the documents archive is through topic descriptors, and the topic of folk art has 85 results you can look through. This will be very different from what is in the exhibition for the most part, but the importance of it cannot be overstated, and you should be familiar with it for the sake of people on your tours who may want to learn more about folk art internationally.

There are always more resources to discover, so do not hesitate to ask me if you would like to look for something more specific, particularly as themes of your talks emerge. I hope this will be sufficiently helpful to get you started.

Best of luck!

Lena Denis  

Associate Curator

American Decorative Arts

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston