Sponsored by Eleanor Bingham Miller
Shelly Zegart's love of American quilts began in the mid-1970s when she was looking for quilts to use as art in her new home. Since then, she has been a passionate collector, curator, author and lecturer on both antique and contemporary quilts. She has helped to build quilt collections in Kentucky and around the world. This exhibition features about 2 dozen quilts from her personal collection that are of particular significance to her because of their relationships to family, particular artists, specific exhibitions and significant local collections.
The exhibition also highlights her contributions in the wider quilt world. Among her most significant contributions came in 1993 when she was a founder of The Alliance for American Quilts. She coordinated the efforts of its university and museum partners to preserve and share the nation’s quilt heritage through projects such as “Quilt Treasures” and “Quilters’ S.O.S. - Save Our Stories” and The Quilt Index, which is a searchable database of images and records that can help to inspire and inform the work of quiltmakers, aficionados and scholars now and for the future.
Zegart, a zealous advocate for quilt scholarship, was co-founder and the driving force behind the Kentucky Quilt Project, an effort initiated in 1980 to survey the state's quilts. The first project of its kind, it set the standard for all the state, regional and national quilt projects that followed. The seeds planted by the Kentucky Quilt Project have flourished not only nationally but also internationally.
She has curated many exhibits here and abroad, most recently an exhibition of antique Log Cabin pattern quilts for the Tokyo International Great Quilt Festival 2008 and antique Schoolhouse pattern quilts for the Tokyo festival in 2005. Her first international project was a 1987 exhibit of Kentucky quilts for the Women’s Committee of the National Trust of Australia.