Uncovering the Quilt
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Robert and Ardis James have lived in Chappaqua, N.Y., for more than 30 years, but when they were looking in the 1990s for somewhere to donate their remarkable collection of antique and contemporary quilts, they mostly looked outside the New York area. New York was too busy and too expensive, Mr. James said; he wanted to find someplace where he could create “the Metropolitan Museum of Art of quilts.”
In the end, the Jameses donated their collection of 950-plus quilts to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The university established the International Quilt Study Center, which, besides maintaining and adding to the collection, holds quilt symposia, hosts visiting scholars, and offers a distance-learning master’s degree course in textile history. For the last 10 years, the museum has done all this without a permanent building of its own. Now, with some help from the Jameses, and a design by a New York architect, Robert A.M. Stern, the quilt center is finally on its way to having a home that lives up to its stellar collections.
The brand new IQSC will open March 30, 2008. It has a bowed glass façade, designed to make the building bright and welcoming, while shielding from natural light the internal areas where the quilts will be stored and displayed. Between 40 and 60 quilts (out of a collection of some 2,300) will be on exhibit at all times. There will also be a virtual gallery, where a visitor who is interested in a quilt that is not on display can see an image projected at full-scale onto a wall — which is “the next best thing to seeing it in the cloth,” the center’s director, Patricia Crews, said.
There was a major rediscovery of quilts and quilting in the 1970s, spurred by the development of women’s studies, the national bicentennial, and a 1971 exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art of quilts collected by Jonathan Holstein and Gail van der Hoof, called “Abstract Design in American Quilts.” (The Jonathan Holstein collection is now at the IQSC.) The numbers of people both quilting and collecting quilts surged, and the Whitney exhibition traveled around the world, including to Japan, where there is strong interest in the art of American quilts.
Studio Art Quilt Associates, a national organization of so-called studio or art quilters (meaning quilters who consider their quilts to be fine art, rather than handicraft or a way to stay warm in winter), has more than doubled its membership in the last three years, to 1,850. A survey compiled last year by Quilts, Inc., a company that produces quilting festivals and trade shows, estimates that Americans spend $3.3 million annually on quilting supplies, from quilting magazines to fabric to sewing machines.
The high end of the market for antique quilts is thriving, the head of the American folk art department at Sotheby’s, Nancy Druckman, said. The most expensive quilt ever sold at auction is a Civil War-era quilt known as the Reconciliation Quilt, which the Jameses bought for $264,000 at Sotheby’s in 1991, and which is now at the IQSC.
In an interview, Mr. James, who was in the CIA briefly in the 1950s, before going into the oil business and then building shopping malls, said that he and his wife wanted a hobby to share after their children left home. “She’d had a shop for couturier fabrics, and she made a few quilts, [so] we started this together.”
At first, they just bought what they liked, but soon they became more serious. They hired people to shop for them. “I had my own Berenson,” Mr. James said, referring to Bernard Berenson, the art historian who served as an art adviser to Isabella Stewart Gardner and other Gilded Age collectors. They looked for museum-quality quilts and aspired to a comprehensive collection — like that of the Metropolitan Museum, where, as Mr. James said, “Not everything they have is the greatest thing in the world, but they have something from all over.”
As the shopping mall business improved and Mr. James had more cash on hand, “Finally my wife and I looked at it and said to ourselves, we could build the greatest collection of this genre in the world — and we can do it for $5 million,” he said. “And that got to be a real driver.”
When they decided to give their collection away, they considered the American Folk Art Museum in New York, but felt that, because the museum is relatively small and not exclusively devoted to quilts, their collection wouldn’t be on exhibit enough. Colonial Williamsburg was interested in acquiring the historical American parts of the collection, but not the contemporary or the non-American quilts. The Jameses finally decided on the University of Nebraska-Lincoln; both Mr. and Mrs. James, who are 83 and 82, respectively, are originally from Nebraska.
Mr. James wanted the IQSC to continue to collect, so he decided to tie the transfer of title to the collection to certain fund-raising benchmarks, as well as to match the dollars the university raised. He said he also always believed the center would need a home of its own, but he waited for the university to come around to the idea. When the university proposed hiring a local architect, Mr. James said he would give the money necessary to hold a competition and hire someone of international standing. From the beginning, he liked Mr. Stern, he said. “He looked like the kind of guy who would build a pretty good building and get it done on time,” he said.
Mr. Stern said his goal was “to design a building that, on the one hand, met the very rigorous demands of the display and all the curatorial aspects of quilts and, on the other hand, [was] open and sparkling and a kind of lantern.” Visitors entering the museum will ascend a stepped ramp just inside the glass wall, from which they will have a view over the university campus. At night, the building will glow from the light within. Metal mesh curtains and other filters will gradually reduce the light level as the visitor progresses toward the gallery, where no natural light enters at all.
Mr. James said that, because quilts are so deeply interwoven with American social history, they hold an appeal for almost everyone. “Everybody’s mother or grandmother made quilts,” Mr. James said. “Nobody’s afraid of quilts.”