Shelly Zegart: Passionate About Quilts - Challenging Assumptions, Creating Change, Making Connections exhibit, at the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, will highlight her more than 30 years of contributions to the world of quilts and beyond. Featured will be quilts from Zegart’s collection that are important to her because of their relationships to family, particular artists, specific exhibitions, and significant local collections. The exhibit, part of the museum’s Kentucky Collectors Series, is sponsored by Eleanor Bingham Miller and will be held from September 5 – October 26, 2008. The opening reception is Thursday, September 4th from 5:00 - 7:30 p.m. A public lecture, Passionate about Quilts by Zegart, is on Tuesday, September 16, 2008 beginning at 6:00 p.m.
Zegart’s love of American antique quilts began in the mid 1970s. Reared in quilt-rich western Pennsylvania, Zegart settled in 1968, in Louisville, Kentucky, another area where quilting has long been practiced with skill and passion. She has collected, curated, lectured and written about quilts for more than 30 years. She has helped to build quilt collections in Kentucky and around the world.
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.
Among her most significant contributions came in 1993 when she was a founder of The Alliance for American Quilts. From 1993-2006, she led and coordinated the efforts of its university and museum partners to document, preserve and share quilt heritage on the web through projects such as The Quilt Index, Quilters’ S.O.S. – Save Our Stories and Quilt Treasures.
She was an organizer in 1991-1992 of Louisville Celebrates the American Quilt a group of events, exhibitions and publications planned to illustrate and further the developments in the field over the twenty years since the beginning of the current quilt revival. The Quilt Index was launched at this event.
Zegart has curated many exhibits here and abroad, including an exhibition of Kentucky quilts in Australia in 1987 for the Women’s' Committee of the National Trust of Australia. In 1999, she curated Kentucky Quilts: Roots and Wings, a traveling exhibition and catalogue organized by the Kentucky Folk Art Center at Morehead University, which examined the Kentucky quilt mystique past and present. In 2000, she was a curator for the 100 Best Quilts of the Twentieth Century exhibition and publication three antique quilts from Zegart’s collection were among those selected. Zegart traveled to Rouen, France in 2003 for Mosaic Textiles: In Search of the Hexagon, an international comparative exhibition representing nine countries, for which she served as consultant and wrote part of the catalog. In 2005, Zegart curated the exhibition Three Faces of Gee s Bend for the three mid-town Manhattan lobby galleries of the Durst Organization. Her first Durst project was the 2001 exhibit and catalog A Heritage of Genius: American Master Quilts Past and Present. Most recently she has curated three exhibitions of antique quilts for the Tokyo International Great Quilt Festivals in 2005, 2007, and 2008 in Japan. A number of quilts from Zegart’s personal collection have been acquired by the Art Institute of Chicago.
