Wild by Design: Two Hundred Years of Innovation and Artistry in American Quilts is a quilt exhibit hosted by the Memorial Art Gallery at the University of Rochester, New York, January 19 – March 16, 2008

Many people think of quilts primarily as somewhat rigorous, repetitive exercises in geometrical patterning. But a great free-wheeling tradition exists in quiltmaking in which improvisation, asymmetry, and experimentation are the norm. This creative impulse goes back to the early years of quiltmaking in our country. For at least 200 years, American women artists have made quilts in which off-beat color placement and manipulation of printed textile patterns have combined with bold experimentation in block formation and applique. This lively exhibit, which was organized by the International Quilt Study Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, presents quilts from the early 1800s to the present day that explore innovations in color, abstraction, figuration, and other modes of expression. The selection of 25 works in the exhibition affirms that American quilt artists’ greatest aesthetic legacy is that their work is, in every sense of the term, wild by design.

Selected by Janet Berlo, University of Rochester professor of art history, from the collection of the International Quilt Study Center, these quilts explore the once-radical proposition that some 19th-century American women were “painting with fabric.” Ranging in date from about 1825 to 1989, the quilts were made by artists both known and unknown, all of whom share an essential quality: the desire to push the boundaries of their medium in their own time.