Event celebrates art, history of quilting

Bill Robinson

BEREA — With temperatures in the 80s, summer is time to put quilts on display, learn how to make them or hear about their history.

All that is available today as the Berea Arts Council’s fifth annual Quilt Extravaganza continues for a second day.

To find the most quilts in one place, go to the Berea Community School gym. More than 40 quilts will be on display there from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

A special display there by the Kentucky Organ Donors’ Association (KODA) features three quilts that memorialize organ donors, including at least one from Berea.

A square dedicated to Matt Ross, an athlete who died at age 20, is part of one quilt.

“Matt’s mother was by this morning,” said KODA’s Charlotte Wong. “This was her first time to see the quilt.”

The exhibit also includes information about the state’s organ-donor registry along with registry sign-up sheets.

In addition, members of Project Linus, which donates quilts to children who are critically ill or are victims of abuse, are displaying quilts and demonstrating their craft in the gym.

Joyce Cooper of Berea worked Friday afternoon on an appliqué quilt with bright colors and “fanciful” heart-shaped patterns.

“This is a cheery quilt for a child who may need cheering up,” she said.

Cooper also showed off a teddy-bear quilt that she had finished earlier in the day.

In 11 years, the organization has made and donated more than 6,000 quilts to sick children, said Joan Lorna Bowe of Richmond.

Quilt displays also can be found at shops in Old Town, on Chestnut Street on the College Square, the Boone Square Mini Mall, at the Kentucky Artisan Center off Exit 77 of Interstate 75 and at Battlefield Park on US 421.

At the Action Folk Center on Jefferson Street, vendors have for sale anything a quilter would need, from fabric and sewing supplies to instruction books and display racks.

From 10:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., quilts can be taken to the Berea Intergenerational Center behind the folk center to be listed on the state registry by the Kentucky Heritage Quilt Society.

At the artisan center today from 10:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., Janet Serrenho of Lexington will be encouraging visitors to create a quilt block using her antique Singer Featherweight sewing machine.

On Friday, Joanne DeWitt of Owenton demonstrated hand-sewn appliqué at the artisan center as she created Kentucky Star patterns.

She said the pattern was first published by Hearth and Home magazine in 1907, probably based on submissions in response to the publication’s call for new designs.

The six points are formed by six triangles that surrounding two oblong diamonds.

Award-winning quilter Pat Chesire Jennings will chronicle her quilting journey in the BCS gym today with a 2 p.m. lecture, “Transition from Traditional Quilter to Art Quilter.”

On Friday, bell hooks, Berea College distinguished professor in residence, lectured about her family’s quilt heritage, starting with the great-grandmother from whom she took her pen name.

In addition to family quilts, she displayed portraits of her grandmother and great-grandmother as she talked.

Among the guests were her Great Aunt Ellen of Louisville.

While her great-grandmother saw quilts as utilitarian rather than objects of beauty, according to family lore, “She had beauty all around her.”

Some scholars view the quilts of black women as means of escape from poverty or oppression, but hooks said they also were sources of family pride and celebration.

Quilts were created to commemorate weddings, births and deaths, as well as other family events, and supplemented the family histories told by elders.

In recent years, hooks said historical research has documented that slaves brought their knowledge of textiles to America from Africa, with some quilt stories going back that far.



Bill Robinson can be reached at brobinson@richmondregister.com or at 624-6622.

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