California’s Early Piece Makers

“Quilts came early to California,” says curator Sandi Fox. Then she ticks off the ways: “They came by wagon, on the backs of adventurers’ horses, on ships around Cape Horn and on mules across the Isthmus of Panama. Eventually, when railroad tracks reached the West Coast, they arrived by train as well.”

That’s only the beginning of a little-known aspect of California’s cultural legacy, but Fox spins much more of the tale in an exhibition, “Quilts: California Bound, California Made 1840-1940,” and its profusely illustrated catalog. Opening Oct. 1 at the FIDM Museum-Galleries, at the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising in downtown Los Angeles, the show offers 38 examples of well-traveled imports and works produced in California.

The state’s pioneers “all came from somewhere else, and so did the quilts they brought with them,” Fox says. “Those and the quilts they made after they arrived became California’s quilts.” That richly diverse, patched-together legacy provided the impetus for her current project, she says.

The story unfolds in visual form in the exhibition, through the quilts themselves. Text on labels and gallery walls is amplified in the catalog with a short, lively essay on each piece. Many questions remain about the history and provenance, but Fox and other researchers cited in the catalog provide considerable insight into an art form that is anything but static.

For anyone who knows just a bit of quilt history, the variety of works exhibited is astonishing. Made of cotton, wool, silk, satin, velvet and ribbons, the quilts are embroidered, inscribed and embellished with paint, ink, leather and photographs. “Soldier’s Quilt” is adorned with military badges, miniature flags and photographs of four American presidents--Lincoln, Grant, Garfield and McKinley. “Cigar Ribbons Quilt” is laboriously constructed of recycled silk ribbons that were stamped with brand names and tied around bundles of cigars.

Made to celebrate special occasions, tell family stories or raise funds in war time or for political causes, as well as to provide warmth and domestic decoration, the quilts encompass a multitude of designs. “Rose of Sharon Quilt,” made by two sisters in Missouri in 1857, is an impeccably crafted ode to patriotism that combines white-on-white American bald eagles with a red, pink and green floral motif. In sharp contrast, a crude wool quilt made in the Sacramento Valley during the late 19th century is sparsely decorated with rough shapes of livestock brands.

The quilters are also a diverse lot. A newly married couple, William and Rosina Widman, started an appliqued quilt of red buds and green leaves around 1855, partly to pass the time on ships that carried them from the East Coast to the Isthmus of Panama and on to San Francisco. Five children who lived on a farm in Oakland made a quilt as a Christmas gift for their grandmother in 1893, embroidering images of plants, animals and farm equipment on velvet and satin squares. About the same time, a grandmother who lived in New York made a crazy-quilt storybook for her grandchildren, and included vignettes from “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” “Little Women,” “Uncle Remus” and “Heidi.”

Faced with all of these textile creations, family stories and historical facts, Fox is in her element. A former curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art who specializes in 19th century quilts, she has organized a dozen major exhibitions of quilts and written widely on the subject. The current show began with an invitation from fashion historian Margaret Pexton Murray, former director of the FIDM Museum-Galleries, who died last year.

“When Maggie asked me to do this, I realized that there is much more to it than quilts made in California,” Fox says. “What came to California is equally fascinating.” Combining the two components let her lengthen the timeline of the show and include a greater mix of styles than might be expected.

The oldest work, made in the early 19th century, is the elaborately detailed “Chinoiserie Quilt.” Constructed of English block-printed cottons, it reflects a craze for Far Eastern decorative arts, inspired by the Dutch and East Indian trading companies. The newest item, “Laguna Beach Quilt,” a pastel idyll produced around 1940, portrays a cozy seaside bungalow on a perfect summer day.

“These compose California’s quilting legacy,” Fox says, looking around the galleries as the quilts and a few dresses made of similar materials are positioned in an installation orchestrated by Bernard Kester, design consultant for exhibitions at LACMA. Borrowed from 17 public and private collections, they include 10 quilts from LACMA, four from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and one each from the Autry Museum of Western Heritage, the Oakland Museum of California and the San Diego Historical Society.

The show and book are laid out thematically, in roughly chronological order, to show a progression of styles and palettes. “Chinoiserie Quilt” is followed by a group of works brought from New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and the Delaware Valley. Not surprisingly, considering the sweep of their origins, these works are made of everything from vivid starbursts to subdued plaids to floral chintz cutouts.

“Botany was a terrific preoccupation in the 19th century,” Fox says, strolling into a section that focuses on plants cultivated and observed by the quilters, both in their original homes and in California. “When you read women’s diaries and journals, you see that they carried traditions with them,” she says. “When women set foot in California, they picked up their needles, but they didn’t invent a California quilt. They established the familiar in new territory.”

Early quilts are often works of “uncommon sophistication,” Fox says, because they were made by women who lived in relative comfort and had access to expensive materials. They gave way to sturdier pieced quilts, produced by settlers under more difficult circumstances, but that didn’t prevent the quilters from turning out works of striking graphic quality or unfathomable difficulty.

“Broken Dishes Quilt,” for example, is the sort of textile composition that art aficionados sometimes equate with abstract painting. Made around 1900, it is composed of 13,260 pieces of delicately patterned cotton cloth. Flickering light plays across the main body of the quilt, which is constructed of tiny triangles. The borders, made of larger rectangles, anchor the composition with graphic clarity.

“It’s a textile triumph,” Fox says, but she doesn’t describe it in terms of painting. “I don’t consider quilts painterly. I consider them as quilts,” she says. “There’s a certain vocabulary of design that quilters use.” In this case, the composition is a precursor to the “broken dishes” pattern that became a fad in the early 20th century.

A completely different approach to textile art appears in “Cowboys Quilt,” displayed in a section on western motifs. It’s composed of 24 pictures of cowboys on horses, traced from covers of western magazines and re-created in cloth. Assembled as a picture gallery, the rectangular illustrations are presented in neat rows bordered by gold sateen.

Yet another odd example of needlework, “Hollywood Bedcover,” appears in the final section. At first, it looks like a pastiche of figurative line drawings in blue ink, but it’s actually an embroidered tribute to 205 Hollywood celebrities. Made by an unknown artist around 1931, it seems to be the work of “a star-struck fan,” Fox says, noting that the images are based on movie posters and stills.

Summing up the exhibition, Fox says the stories behind the quilts are intriguing, but that wasn’t her only criterion for selecting the works. “Some quilts that have wonderful historic qualities don’t have aesthetic qualities, so those were not included,” she says. “I try to balance the historic with the aesthetic.”

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“QUILTS: CALIFORNIA BOUND, CALIFORNIA MADE 1840-1940,” FIDM Museum-Galleries, Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising, 919 S. Grand Ave., L.A. Dates: Oct. 1-Dec. 6. Open Tuesdays-Saturdays, 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Admission: Free. Phone: (213) 624-1200, Ext. 2224, or (800) 409-3436, Ext. 2224.

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Suzanne Muchnic is a Times staff writer.