Pieces of the Past : Museum of Art’s American Quilt Research Center complements the facility’s folk and decorative arts collection

Sandi Fox found the Boardman quilt two years ago at a small quilt show in Sonoma County.

Originally presented to the Rev. George S. Boardman and his wife, Sarah, by the Ladies of the Third Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia in 1843, the quilt had been passed down through the Boardman family and was in the care of a woman who had married into the family.

“The quilt was a treasured piece in the descendants’ lives, and they had taken very good care of it. It was in extraordinary condition,” Fox said. “It has such an amazing aesthetic quality as well as a wonderful tie to a part of America’s social history. The moment I saw it, I realized that it was up to me to make sure it stays in that condition.”

Fox is an associate curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in charge of its American Quilt Research Center, a national repository for archival material on the history of quilts and their makers. The center was established in 1985 to support research in the field.

Fox wrote the proposal that launched the center. “I came from a strong background in the field,” Fox said. “I had published, had vast curatorial experience and had organized major exhibitions. I had been successful in getting grants. I think all of that helped.”

“The American Quilt Research Center complements our growing American decorative arts collection in an important way,” said Earl A. Powell III, museum director. “There is very little American folk art in Western museum collections. And to have a rich and distinguished collection of quilts is a distinction that the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is very proud of.”

The center opened to the public in 1988, and since then, Fox has built a major collection of more than 150 primarily American quilts made in the 19th Century. The center aims to preserve the textiles before they deteriorate further and their aesthetic heritage disappears altogether.

“I would match our collection now with almost anyone’s in the United States in terms of strength of the individual objects and their diversity,” Fox said. “We have exceptional Amish pieces, a rare Baltimore album child’s quilt, sturdy and enthusiastic log cabin quilts that I adore, fine examples of English, French and Italian pieces. And we’re particularly strong in friendship and commemorative quilts,” which are signed by all members of the quilting group.

An album quilt comprises blocks, each of a different design, which are usually appliqued in a floral motif.

The elegant Boardman quilt is one of the center’s most recent acquisitions. A joint gift to the museum from a local chapter of the Questers, a national antiques organization, and the owner, Dolores B. Thomas, it is a 9-by-10-foot quilt worked in the broderie perse technique: Floral motifs have been cut from chintz and appliqued to a plain background fabric. It contains almost 100 blocks that are signed in ink by the women who worked on the project. Fox believes that it was organized and eventually quilted by one woman because of the consistency of the stitching.

Upon its arrival at the museum, the quilt was sent to the facility’s state-of-the-art textile conservation laboratory. Because it was in such good condition, Fox said, “it just needed its wrinkles removed.” Other times, quilts might need to be gently vacuumed to clean them, or to be stabilized by having fragile or worn portions covered by a fine netting to hold the designs together.

Fox consults with conservators on the care of each quilt before it is photographed, exhibited or stored in a specially designed container. Some pieces are kept on rollers, others in large acid-free boxes or resting on long, wide shelves. Particularly fragile pieces are placed flat in large drawers.

“There is no other museum or educational institution in the United States that specifically has the time, space and support set aside on this subject,” Fox said. “What makes the situation so unique is that we have the supporting material for the objects we are celebrating. The archive is constantly growing, and the material is very diverse, including books and exhibition catalogues, literature of the period, magazines and newspapers, letters, diaries and personal journals, photographs, oral interviews, textiles and tools used in making quilts.”

Among the archival holdings are swatch books of wools used by Amish quilt makers, and photographs taken for the Works Progress Administration during the Depression that show quilts, their makers and their surroundings. Visitors can also view quilt patterns circulated among quilting bees in different towns, correspondence between quilters and an almost complete set of quilt patterns that were printed regularly during the 1930s in the Kansas City Star newspaper.

Conservators in the museum’s paper lab often protect fragile source material by enclosing it in Mylar, allowing a researcher to hold actual records. “So not only is the material here and organized, it’s accessible to the public under conditions that are still safe for the archives,” Fox said. She stressed that visitors do not need scholarly credentials to use the center’s resources. Anyone can come in by making an appointment.

On a recent Monday, when the museum was closed, Fox worked in the Ahmanson Building’s atrium with Steve Oliver, who photographed the Boardman quilt. “An important part of my responsibility here is to see that the quilts are thoroughly photographed, so that pictures of them can be reproduced in books or sent to individuals doing research in this relatively new field,” Fox said.

Quilts made a splash in the museum world in 1971, when the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York mounted a major quilt exhibition.

“It was an extraordinary event, because it focused on the quilts strictly as objects of design, and for the first time, an uptown group of people--by that I mean art critics, museum-goers, a more intellectual group of people--was paying immense attention to something that had been produced for a couple of centuries by mostly women in rural settings,” Fox said.

Shortly after the Whitney show, quilts started working their way into galleries and auction houses. With the women’s movement came a number of folklorists, women’s studies professors and students who began to research them. Suddenly, quilts were being approached from a number of different perspectives.

Then, around the time of the country’s bicentennial, “as we developed increasing awareness of things made by hand, quilts started appearing in home and garden magazines,” Fox said. “Before you knew it, we were talking about big budget items, and that changed the way many people looked at quilts.

“But there was also an increased awareness by just plain folk that what they had in their attics or trunks wasn’t just a quilt that their great-great grandmother had made and given to their grandfather, but an object by which they might learn more about their origins.”

Fox grew up in a small Nebraska town where quilts were a natural part of her surroundings. Her grandmother had a quilting frame in the basement, and there was always a group there quilting.

In 1949, when she was 14, her family moved to Crescent City, Calif. “During my freshman year in high school, I was riding a bicycle behind an old pickup truck. In it was a refrigerator with a quilt wrapped around it. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was a 19th-Century pieced quilt, with a wonderfully abstract design in rich indigo blues and tobacco browns. When the truck finally stopped, I bought that quilt for 25 cents. It was my first purchase of an antique quilt.”

From that moment on, her school papers revolved around quilts and what women did in the “olden days.” She began to interview women quilters in the area, recording their oral histories. “Sometimes, they would bring out quilts to show me. Remember, in 1949, I was talking to women who had quilted in the 19th Century, and who remembered their mothers quilting.”

As an English major at Pomona College, Fox continued her informal research in women’s studies and women’s history. “I was reading a lot of diaries, and I was fascinated by the knowing sense one got from reading what women were writing as opposed to the more formal history books.” She began to lecture and write articles on quilts and the women who made them.

Fox curated her first major exhibition at the Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Park in 1976. In 1977, she organized Japan’s first museum exhibition of 19th-Century American quilts at the Seibu Museum in Tokyo.

A distinguished quilt maker herself, her work was featured in a 1982 book and documentary TV series called “Handmade in America,” and she was commissioned in 1982 to create a work for the Music Center of Los Angeles County. Her commemorative quilt, depicting the Music Center’s venues and 122 signatures of some of the most significant performers who have appeared there, now hangs on the second floor of the Ahmanson Theatre.

Since the American Quilt Research Center opened, she has organized three exhibitions at the museum, including last year’s strikingly beautiful show of 36 rare American quilts from the center’s collection and from public and private collections, “Wrapped in Glory: Figurative Quilts and Bedcovers 1700-1900.” Fox is now planning a series of exhibits that will highlight the quilt collection.

The center’s archives have burgeoned recently with the addition of 4,000 slides of quilts and 3,500 research files from the California Heritage Quilt Project. Over the past five years, this nonprofit group had conducted a search to find and document quilts that had either been made in or brought to California before 1945.

Photographs were taken of each quilt, and some family history was recorded. “This was valuable research because much of it was raw data,” said Fox, who was a member of the project’s advisory board.

Aware that the information gathered is of historic importance, the project’s board of directors invited proposals for placing the research. “We chose the American Quilt Research Center because Fox is extremely knowledgeable in the field, and because the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is an established organization here in California,” said Helen Gould, former president of the project’s board.

“We were particularly pleased with her plan to make the material available to non-scholars, especially quilters, as well as scholars.”

With the research data also came a monetary pledge from the project to be used to enhance those files. The museum is developing a software database so that the project’s research will be on computers and available for evaluation.

Fox is pursuing the story behind the Boardman quilt. She will give the names of the women who signed it to a genealogist in Salt Lake City, who will search census, birth and death records from the Philadelphia area. “I’ll find out if the church records still exist and where they are, and then I’ll make a research trip to Philadelphia,” she said. “Hopefully, there will be a mention of the quilt and its presentation, and that one or more ladies whose names are on the quilt have left papers or a diary that might speak about the group that made the quilt.

“It is not only women’s history that is written into the quilts. It is simply history that has become very important to Americans.”

The American Quilt Research Center at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is open to the public by appointment only. (213) 857-6083.