Find Your Quilt

Name: Find Your Quilt
Start: 2025-10-08T00:00:00
End: 2026-03-02T00:00:00
Location: UW Nancy Nicholas Hall-Ruth Davis Design Gallery

Oct 8, 2025 to Mar 1, 2026

UW Nancy Nicholas Hall-Ruth Davis Design Gallery 1300 Linden Dr., Madison, Wisconsin 53706

July 11, 2025

3:13 PM

photo: Dakota Mace/courtesy of Nancy M. Bruce Center for Design and Material Culture

A section of a 1920s-'30s era quilt in the "Find Your Quilt" exhibition.

media release: October 8, 2025 @ 10:00 am - March 1, 2026 @ 4:00 pm

The galleries will be off view for Legal Holidays on December 24, December 25, December 31, and January 1. The galleries will be on view during all other regular gallery hours throughout winter break. Regular gallery hours are listed on our website.

Find Your Quilt invites visitors to make their own personal connections to the quilts on display by offering a range of ideas and perspectives about the meanings of quilts. This bright and bold exhibition presents quilts and quilted objects that span the globe, materials, and time periods, showcasing the breadth and variety of this form. Intended for the quilt-enthusiast, the quilt-curious, and the quilt-skeptic alike, this exhibition explores how we define and then redefine what quilts are, have been, and could be in the future.

Find Your Quilt draws from the remarkable holdings of the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection, with key loans from contemporary makers. The gallery is filled with traditional and iconic examples of quilting, including a calamanco whole cloth stitched in careful rows, dyed with madder, and quilted with wool, and a vibrant and enigmatic Amish Sunshine and Shadow pattern. These quilts are shown alongside unexpected works, including quilts made of leather or paper, sculptural and mechanical quilted forms, and even a quilt designed by Amy Wendt, professor of electrical engineering, who uses her complex computing practice to design patterns that make complex theories visible and meandering stitches based on fractals. Considering how quilts may be biographical, political, erotic, sculptural, and more, the audience will be invited to chart their own path through the gallery, ultimately selecting their favorite from the exhibition, making their own interpretations of works on view, or finding novel ways of thinking about quilts in their own life.

This exhibition is curated by Dr. Sophie Pitman, the Pleasant Rowland Textile Specialist and Research Director for the Center for Design and Material Culture. Support for this exhibition comes from the Anonymous Fund.