The American Quilter’s Society refused to show two artworks in an exhibition centered around the color red after claiming they could be controversial, according to the artists and the Studio Art Quilt Association (SAQA), the nonprofit that organized the show. One quilt could be interpreted as depicting female anatomy, while the other references abortion access.
The juried exhibition, Color in Context: Red, debuted at Houston’s International Quilt Festival in 2023 and toured several fairs in Australia last year. The American Quilter’s Society, which claims to be the “world’s largest quilting membership organization,” signed a contract with SAQA last August to exhibit Color in Context at quilting shows across the country. Through this partnership, the works were slated to travel to Florida, Missouri, Kentucky, Michigan, and Pennsylvania between mid-February and September.
But last month, just before SAQA planned to ship the works, the organization was notified that two quilts would be removed: “Origin” (2023) by Yvonne Iten-Scott and “Your Mother. Your Daughter. Your Sister. Your Grandmother. You.” (2022) by Laura Shaw Feit.
SAQA Executive Director Martha Sielman, who organized the traveling exhibition, told Hyperallergic that the American Quilter’s Society “said that they were concerned that the two pieces ‘could be considered controversial.’” She added that SAQA’s board president met with the owner of the American Quilter’s Society to attempt to keep the two works in the show, including by offering to add warning labels, but was unsuccessful.
“They refused,” Sielman said. “The America Quilter’s Society said that they would either show the exhibition without those two pieces or return the entire exhibition to us.”
In response, SAQA withdrew from all of its scheduled American Quilter’s Society exhibitions, notifying members on February 2 in an email that was later posted on its website.
The American Quilter’s Society has not yet responded to Hyperallergic’s request for comment.
Iten-Scott, who is based outside of Toronto, told Hyperallergic that she believes “Origin” was targeted because it was “representational of a part of a woman’s body.” However, she added that the work was not intended to specifically depict female anatomy. The sculptural quilt combines a copper frame with layers of wool fabric, silk, and beads in various shades of red.
“It could be many things: a volcano, the beginning of the Earth, an explosion, a cell,” Iten-Scott explained. “Sure, it could be a part of the human body as well.”
Feit, who is based in Oregon, described her own embattled quilt as a “dissolving red cross” in a phone interview with Hyperallergic. “There’s a long history of women protesting and showing how they feel about things through quilting,” she added.
In her artist statement accompanying the quilt on the SAQA website, Feit referenced the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, writing, “I felt the need to work through my anger and frustration knowing that a fundamental human right to essential health care was soon to be lost for millions of women.”
“I’ve worked for women’s reproductive rights my entire adult life,” Feit told Hyperallergic. “And I was just so just dismayed and upset because I knew women are going to die … And this quilt just came out of me.”
The two artists discovered that their works had been subject to the same call for removal when Feit spoke out in a widely shared Instagram post on January 29, just days before SAQA announced the exhibition’s withdrawal from the American Quilter’s Society events.
The rejection of their pieces from the American Quilter’s Society was not a first for the organization, which Feit pointed out in her Instagram post. In 1994, the late Jonathan Shannon entered his quilt “Amigos Muertos (Dead Friends),” dedicated to artists who had died from AIDS-related complications, to an American Quilter’s Society show in Kentucky and was rejected. He had won a best-in-show award for another quilt at the previous year’s exhibition, and claimed a juror told him that his 1994 work was too “upsetting.”
“I have no problem with being rejected for design or workmanship. But I have a big problem in being rejected for content,” Shannon told the Marin Independent Journal in 1994.
In 2016, Kathy Nida’s quilt “I Was Not Wearing a Life Jacket” was removed from an American Quilter’s Society event in another traveling SAQA show People & Portraits, according to the artist.
“My piece was pulled because apparently, a viewer saw a penis in it (there isn’t one),” Nida wrote in an email to Hyperallergic.
Though Nida expressed support for SAQA’s decision to cancel part of Color in Context’s tour, the artist added that such shows can be a bridge between different corners of the quilting world.
“I’d love to have my work in front of the quilt show audience too, just so they can see what’s possible in fabric and thread,” Nida said.
