Rockwell Museum currently has a special exhibit, “From the Bed to the Wall: Quilts from a Private New York Collection.”

Quilts are… what? Prosaic utilitarian objects… interesting folk craft artifacts… revelatory data of history, society, culture, and ethnicity… creations of high art.

The answer is, any of the above… and sometimes more than one at once.

Curiously, it seems that from the 1700s to today, quilts have made a journey from high craft, to common furnishing, to high art.

When cloth was an expensive, hand-made material, quilters were upper-class women, well-skilled in decorative arts. The new “dark, satanic mills” of the industrial revolution flooded the world with millions of acres of cloth, for which price suddenly became almost inconsequential.

Now ordinary women… and it was overwhelmingly women… became quilters. Design and technique became folkways. Since it was women’s work, and since the end result was a domestic product, and since hardly anybody paid money for it, scholarly and cultural types paid it no attention at all.

The exhibition in Rockwell’s mezzanine carries us from the end of the 18th century to the dawn of the 21st. Technique is not much touched upon. Part of the emphasis is on design, and part is on the cultural or personal settings of the creators.

“Crows Quilt,” a creation by African American artist Sarah May Taylor (1916-2000) was one of my favorites. Three crows adorn each block, but no two blocks are alike, each varying the color and position of the birds.

My other favorite was “Center Diamond,” made about 1910 by a Pennsylvania Amishwoman. The geometric design fits with traditional Amish wariness about figural art, but it also makes a bold, dramatic assertion that seizes your attention from across the room. It opens the “Amish and Modernism” section of the exhibit, an apt if counterintuitive observation – Amish design… so conservative and traditional… anticipates, and even guides, modern design.

Joyce’s favorite was a highly personal sampler quilt, where many blocks include prayers or meditations, almost as though the whole thing forms a personal or religious journal.

We examined an 1891 redwork pattern quilt, trying in vain to discern whether the artist embroidered her figures freehand, or whether she stitched over a printed pattern. (If she did it freehand, she was DARN good.) We also looked closely at a midwestern Amish Bow Tie quilt (c. 1920), finished with several eye-catching errors – such as one block incomplete, one block rotated 90 degrees, and one block off-color. It’s been a traditional practice in some Amish circles to deliberately make a quilt with visible errors, to emphasize that only God achieves perfection.

There were a couple of doll quilts and a couple of crazy quilts, plus a few “friendship” or “signature” quilts, on which the names of makers, friends, or supporters are embroidered. This included a “tithing quilt” from Brewerton Methodist Episcopal Church (New York, 1924). The term was utterly new to us, despite a couple of decades of living in southeastern Pennsylvania… it seems it’s a signature quilt, but what it has to do with tithing is beyond us!

(The quilt exhibit runs through January 10. Also on just now are are “Antigravity: Elaine K. Ng,” through February 2022; “Three Generations: Pablita Velarde, Helen Hardin and Margrete Bagshaw,” through January; the Gingerbread Invitational, through December 31; and “Martine Gutierrez: Takeover,” through December 13.)