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Winedale - Center for the Quilt
The Winedale Center for the Quilt (WCQ) is a Center for American History (CAH) program that works in partnership with the Alliance for American Quilts to acquire, document, preserve, and present information about quilts and quilt history. The nonprofit Alliance for American Quilts, founded in 1993, is a network of scholars, curators, quilt artists, librarians, archivists, and others from around the country dedicated to recognizing quilts as works of art and as pieces of history with stories to be documented and preserved. The Winedale Center for the Quilt is one of three regional centers with which the Alliance has formalized partnership arrangements. The other two are the Center for American Material Culture Studies at the University of Delaware and the Center for Great Lakes Quilts at the Michigan State University Museum.
Winedale Center for the Quilt activities support CAH's mission to facilitate research and sponsor programs on the historical development of the United States by acquiring, preserving, and making accessible research collections and by sponsoring exhibitions, conferences, symposia, oral history projects, publications, fellowships, and grant-funded initiatives. The Winedale Center for the Quilt especially participates in two national Alliance projects:
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| Crazy Quilt, 1888 (detail) | Mariner's Compass Quilt, 1818 (detail) |
Boxes Under the Bed™, a quilt history documentation project. WCQ identifies, acquires and makes accessible for research regional collections documenting quilt history
The Quilt Index, a growing online research and reference tool designed to provide access to information and images about quilts held in private and public hands. The WCQ adds descriptive information about and photographs of quilts in its and other collections to this index.
The Winedale Center for the Quilt annually sponsors quilt-related public programs and exhibitions at CAH's Winedale division, a complex of historic structures and modern conference facilities located in rural south-central Texas. Winedale's Decorative Arts Collection contains some 85 quilts, including a group of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Texas quilts and a group of nineteenth-century quilts collected by noted Texas philanthropist Miss Ima Hogg (1882–1975). Quilt history collections are housed at CAH's Research and Collections Division in Austin, where they are available for research.