Textiles are definitely trending
Re: last week's post
Textiles are not only showing up in interior design and in homes but in museums. Quilt specific exhibits have been around for years. There is a wide variety of quilt specific exhibits and they feature a wide variety of types of quilts. They include everything from handwork, contemporary, sculpture, and traditional. In the last year and a half, I’ve had quilts in Form, not Function, Quilt National, QuiltCon, and Quilts=Art=Quilts. These are all incredible exhibits that I’m honored to have work included in.
But I am also passionate about Quilts being on the same footing as other craft and fine art. I’ve started submitting my work to shows that are open to any medium. It is an amazing feeling to see quilts and other textiles hanging in an exhibit with paintings, photography, and sculpture, to name a few. I have a piece (Fluid Dynamics 2) accepted in the Made in VA biennial at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art and I am thrilled that the jurors considered textiles in their selection of works!
Beyond local exhibits and exhibits like CraftForms, larger museums are acknowledging that textiles have a place in their halls and collections.
From April 20 – September 13, 2025, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) held an exhibit titled “Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction.” The exhibit had more than 150 works displayed and covered a diverse spectrum of techniques.
“Threads were among the earliest transmitters of meaning,” the artist Anni Albers wrote in 1965.
Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction reveals the links between this art form and abstraction. Incorporating basketry, apparel, and more than a century of other textile works that challenge accepted divisions between fine art and craft, this exhibition broadens the story of abstraction, suggesting that not only ideas but materials—like woven, knotted, and braided fabric—are crucial to its understanding and success.
Narrower in textiles scope than the MoMA exhibit, The Smithsonian has a National Quilt Collection with some on display at the Renwick and Gallery and African American Quilts at the Anacostia Community Museum.
The Smithsonian’s dedication to the quilt art form is commendable with 100s of quilts in the collection.
The National Quilt Collection at the National Museum of American History reveals how a useful practice can represent artistic, cultural, and historic storytelling.
The American Folk Art Museum also recently held an exhibit from September 26, 2025 to March 1, 2026 titled “An Ecology of Quilts: The Natural History of American Textiles”. This exhibit featured 30 works from the museums 600 piece collection. 600!
Speaking not only to the work of individual American quilters but also to the contributions of countless artisans and laborers around the globe, quilts survive as powerful material metaphors for human relationships and entanglements within the natural world.
It is exciting to see these exhibits and the quilts in them recognized as art. I look forward to seeing how other museums will feature quilts in their collections and exhibits. I know I will continue to submit my quilts to exhibits and make the jurors consider them.