The International Quilt Study Center is an academic program of the Department of Textiles, Clothing and Design in the College of Education and Human Sciences at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Alzheimer’s: Forgetting Piece By Piece is an exhibit created by the Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative organization to raise awareness of the plight of 5 million Americans who suffer from Alzheimer’s disease.

Ami Sims, founder of the Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative and curator of this show, began contacting professional quilters in 2005 with the idea of a traveling exhibit. To her surprise many of her colleagues had also experienced Alzheimer’s in a very personal way. They were eager to use their talents to make a difference, to tell their stories and to comfort others.

The result is an exhibit of 52 art quilts, each unique to the quilter’s style and the story told in fabric and thread. Each tribute is accompanied by the artist’s statement.

Alzheimer’s: Forgetting Piece By Piece will be on exhibit in in Abilene’s The Grace Museum in Galleries A, B and C through February 28, 2008.

The Grace Museum is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday; and from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. every Thursday. Admission is free Thursday evening after 5 p.m.

For more information visit The Grace Museum website.

Image: Cheryl Lynch, Leaving Us

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.