Kansas Quilts and Quilters [Paperback]

While this is a goody history book on the art of quilting, I don't feel the title is a good representation of what is within the book's covers. After hearing and reading about the Kansas Quilt Project of 1986, I was anxious to get my hands on a copy of this book to see a good representative portion of the 13,000 quilts that were registered. What I found was a book with only 50 pictures (give or take a couple because I counted them) that actually had quilts in them. Half of those 50 were not even quilts "discovered" during their project, but quilts already housed in various museums that in my opinion, being a Kansan, have "been seen before". Also, of the pictures taken from the Quilt Project discovery, the majority of them were in black and white. Part of the art of quilts is being able to see their colors, can't do that with this book.

I hoped for a photographic look into the quilts made by our Mothers, Grandmothers, etc of Kansas. The authors stated that there were no unique "Kansas" quilts or quilts that set themselves off with a "Made in Kansas" look to them, so instead they showed a VERY small sample of the quilts they found, lots of pictures of people and things (no quilts) and a lot of conjecture over what ethnic group should actually take credit for bringing the art of quilting to Kansas.

This book was a disappointment to me being the Daughter, Granddaughter, and Great Granddaughter of Kansas quilters. I hoped I would see a wonderful picture book of quilts made by Kansas women. That did not happen.

KANSAS QUILTS & QUILTMAKERS sets a new gold standard for the study of American quilts. The writers whose essays make up the book treat the quilts made by Kansans with the respect they deserve. No condesension, no tales of a dreamy dreamy past. Instead, they bring to their studies inquisitive, independent minds and a knowledge of quiltmaking, history, and textiles that permit them to grasp the meanings of the quilts they study.Their conclusions grow out of hard research, not received tradition. The result is a book that should be on the bookshelf of every student of American history, cultural anthropology, material history, women's history, quiltmaking, or textile study.

In its formative years, Kansas was a microcosm of America in the tense years leading up to the American Civil War. Congress had declared its voters would have the right to determine whether the state would come into the union as a slave state or a free state. And so partisans of both sides rushed into Kansas not merely to lay claim to part of its rich soil but also to determine its future and, most believed, the future of the United States. The bloody years of John Brown's massacres were but preludes to the bloodier war that would soon consume the nation.

KANSAS QUILTS is rooted in a deep understanding of this past and of the complex state that grew out of the it. Its writers discover no single unifying principle in the quilts produced by the Kansas Quilt Search. And to their credit, they refuse to invent one.

Looked at from outside, however, one is tempted to observe at work in this fine book certain principles that seem to characterize the quiltmakers whose lives and work are its subject. Neither history nor geography favored the survival of the weak in Kansas. It was not a place where one could easily turn her back to the physical realities of life or get lost in theory. Survival depended on keeping one's eyes open and on learning to make sense of what the eyes revealed, on being able to live in bleakness so profound it sometimes led to suicide, on being able to find redeeming comfort in the ordinary. The writers of KANSAS QUILTS have these gifts. They themselves are pioneers--tough-minded, imaginative scholars who favor fact over myth and who treat with seriousness a subject too often treated with condescension, even by scholars who declare themselves students of "women's history."

It is not surprising, therefore, that the book begins not with an overview, but with the papers of a Kansas woman who estimated that she had made over 300 quilts by her 93rd birthday. In her recording of daily life, a world opens. It is a world where women wash and iron, sew, think, go to church and community meetings, bear and bury children, do business, make homes for families, and exercise their creativity through home arts like quilting.

Aided by an astonishing variety of photographs and lively prose, we who read the book are privileged to enter and understand this complex world.

The photography and selection of quilts is superb. The scholarship is sound, imaginative, and ground-breaking. And who failed to tell the world Kansans could write so interestingly?

Americans are not noted for writing interesting history, but the authors of KANSAS QUILTS AND QUILTMAKERS write interesting history.

I am not a Midwesterner, but if I had to name only 2 quilt books that changed the course of my own study of quilts and quiltmakers--perhaps even my study of women's history, both would be by Kansans--"The Romance of the Patchwork Quilt" by Rose Kretsinger and Carrie Hall and "Kansas Quilts & Quiltmakers" by Barbara Brackman, Jennie Chinn, Gayle Davis, Terry Thompson, Sara Farley, and Nancy Hornback.

Different times, different books. But both knowing what they were talking about and concerned to get it right.

Don't miss this book. It's beautiful and it's true.

My site, "America's Quilting History" is is about the whole nation, but I am constanty finding helpful information in this book as I write articles for my site. Even though this book is about Kansas it also tells the story of quilting in middle America. It is a book I have returned to again and again.

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