Bedcover (Feather-Edged Star Quilt) 1880

Curator: This is the "Bedcover (Feather-Edged Star Quilt)," crafted around 1880, attributed to Nancy Margaret Crow Mooney, and held here at The Art Institute of Chicago. It’s a beautiful example of American folk art. Editor: Whoa. Staring at it feels like I'm looking into infinity, with these hypnotic patterns. It makes me want to trace every seam with my fingers. Is it all handmade? Curator: Precisely! These bedcovers represented not just warmth but also artistic expression, particularly for women. Quilts provided an outlet at a time where women were restricted in other spheres of life. Each piece and the repetitive design would be stitched painstakingly by hand. Editor: There's a certain dedication in this detail that can be overlooked these days, but I feel it. You know? Almost meditative in a way. It connects us to history so strongly through a simple domestic object. I wonder what conversations happened around its making. Curator: Undoubtedly, quilting bees, or social gatherings, played a crucial role. Making bedcovers would allow people, mainly women, to convene and to create social networks. These provided necessary resources for women to share advice and solidarity. Quilts, like this one, transcend domestic objects to become significant artifacts in community-making. Editor: Makes you rethink how history is made, doesn’t it? Not just the big wars and treaties, but everyday life meticulously stitched into fabric. Also, there's a lovely tension between chaos and control. Each point in those stars, those radiating feathered edges trying to burst out of a contained geometric form... Curator: The piece falls somewhat under what later was named pattern and decoration, in that it displays elaborate, repeating patterns as a principal aesthetic, and, to me, a challenge to the perceived hierarchy of art at that time. Editor: Absolutely! So what started out of a simple bedcover now opens so many other avenues: of labor history, material cultures, gender studies, the nature of creativity itself! Thank you for shining a light on it for me. Curator: The pleasure's mine. I hope our listeners consider the stories sewn within the textiles around them a bit differently.