Curator’s Corner: Quilts on a Roll, or How We Store Textiles

Lauren Wolfer, Associate Curator of Special Collections & Archives

Storing paintings and prints is as easy as hanging the works on a rack system or laying them in a flat file, but what about textiles? How does FWMOA house over 70 handmade Amish quilts, among the many other textile works? What happens to Liz Whitney Quisgard‘s dazzling pieces when they aren’t on display? Today we’ll discuss this, and share exciting news regarding our textile collection.

At home, you may have a closet full of blankets or a stack of quilts folded in a corner, but how do museums store larger textiles? At FWMoA, our Amish quilts and many other textile works are rolled on a long tube, placed on a racking system, and wrapped in a delicate archival paper to keep dust from getting on the surface. You can see a glimpse of the pattern through the delicate paper (image below); they look similar to a spring roll! Textiles are sometimes put into a box (image below), then periodically re-folded in a different direction to prevent settling that causes creasing or damaging to the fabric over time.

Recently, FWMoA installed a new textile storage system (image below) to organize our collection and process what we have. Our previously used system, above, instead of being anchored along the wall featured two large, rolling storage units which ate up a lot of floor space. While moving the textiles onto the new shelves, Suzanne Slick, Collection Information Specialist, and I took time to photograph and document information on each. About 80% of our Amish quilt collection is prepared for display, each have a Velcro strip sewn on the backside used for hanging. With the textiles that aren’t prepared for display, Sue and I, in some cases, had never seen them before because they were acquired prior to our employment and the museum database didn’t contain all the pertinent information. This kind of cataloguing and documentation allows us to budget and plan for the future to prepare them for exhibiting.

It was an interesting and exciting process to discover the full breadth of textiles in the museum’s collection. Here are some of the interesting pieces we found along the way.

Included in the mix of quilts is a small collection of Native American textiles. These are usually made of wool, a heavier, stiffer fabric than the quilts. With wool pieces, they are wrapped on the same tubes as the quilts but the ends are left open to allow the fabric to “breathe” and held together with cotton ties. 

With smaller pieces, like clothing or Liz Whitney Quizgard’s mosaic-like works, we are able to store them in an archival box (see below) and put them on a shelf. The goal is to let them rest flat so that when they are exhibited they are ready to install; otherwise, if any are curled from being rolled, they must rest to flatten out before being installed. 

Similarly to works on paper, textiles are a delicate surface that can be affected by light. This means they can’t be on display long-term without suffering damage, so are often in storage, exhibited every few years. (This is another reason proper documentation is key, we need to know when a work was last exhibited to ensure it is safe to put on display). It’s amazing to see how bright and bold the colors are considering their age and use prior to joining the collection. If the colors are dull, they probably used to be a bright but faded over time. Deep reds and greens are the most susceptible to fade, turning to a brown coffee color. The quilts we inherited that have light damage were kept for their expert draftsmanship, having unique stitching or patterns. To exhibit the quilts, a Velcro strip is added to the top of the backside. We then attach the Velcro to an equally long piece of wood mounted to the wall. A few of the textiles are comforters, made from a much heavier and thicker material, which can’t be hung on the wall but are exhibited flat.

Currently, you can see a quilt on display in Beyond Face-Value: Portraits from the Permanent Collection, on view until January 28th, 2024. 

The museum owes a special thank you to Linnéa Bartling, Mark and Chris Rupp, & Wayne and Linda Boyd for their contributions allowing us to purchase the new textile storage unit. It is donations like these that give us the opportunity to advance, update, and improve our collection management as well as purchase new artwork! Please consider giving to our annual fund.