Join curators Marina Moskowitz and Sophie Pitman as they share a few insights into objects on view in the 2025-26 exhibitions on view in the Nancy M. Bruce Center for Design and Material Culture.
First up is
Find Your Quilt on view October 8, 2025 - March 1, 2026 in the Ruth Davis Design Gallery. Curated by Dr. Sophie Pitman, Pleasant Rowland Textile Specialist and Research Director of the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection
, Find Your Quilt invites visitors to do just that with the objects on view. quilt can be artistic and designed, scientific and mathematical, political and personal. Quilts offer windows into the past, or hopes for the future. Find Your Quilt celebrates this diversity by displaying a bold and vibrant selection of historic quilts from around the world, drawn from the rich holdings of the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection, alongside innovative contemporary quilts, some made for this exhibition. Intended for the quilt-enthusiast, the quilt-curious, and the quilt-skeptic alike, Find Your Quilt
explores how we define—and continually redefine—what quilts are, have been, and could be.
Then we head over to the Lynn Mecklenburg Textile Gallery to see Parallel Lines: Quilts and the American Landscape, on view September 3, 2026 - May 10, 2026. This exhibit is curated by Dr. Marina Moskowitz, Professor of Design Studies and the Lynn and Gary Mecklenburg Chair in Textiles, Material Culture & Design, and explores the parallel processes of quilt-making within the American home and place-making on the American landscape. Featuring nineteenth- and twentieth-century American quilts drawn from the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection, the exhibit examines some of the most familiar quilt forms – such as nine-patch squares, eight-pointed stars, and “log cabin” blocks with cloth strips surrounding a central square “hearth”– as the basis for individual creativity and innovative design. Visitors will be encouraged to view American quilts through a new lens, by comparing these geometric motifs and strong linear compositions to the boundaries, pathways, and structures of the built environment.