Find Your Quilt

This exhibition invites you to Find Your Quilt. A 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.

Find Your Quilt is curated by Dr. Sophie Pitman, Pleasant Rowland Textile Specialist and Research Director for the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection. This exhibition and its related programs are made possible with support from the Anonymous Fund and many generous donors and partners who share the vision of the Nancy M. Bruce Center for Design and Material Culture. The center creates meaningful opportunities for students, faculty, and the broader community to engage with textiles, design, and material culture.

On view in the Ruth Davis Design Gallery from October 8, 2025 – March 1, 2026

Research and writing by Erin Dowding and Sophie Pitman, 2025.

South African artist Rennie Zulu created the quilt Sixteen Women who were in the Forefront of the Struggle against Inequality and Racism in South Africa in 1999. That year, South Africa was reckoning with its past and transitioning to the future. From 1948 to 1994, under the ruling National Party, a set of laws and regulations known as apartheid formalized racial categories in support of the dominant white Afrikanaar’s interests and supremacy. South African apartheid included institutionalized segregation, miscegenation laws, and restrictions on movement for Black and Multiracial South Africans. While there was popular resistance through the 1970s and 1980s, it wasn’t until April 27, 1994 when the country held its first fully democratic election that the African National Congress (ANC) won over 60% of seats in the National Assembly and millions of South Africans elected Nelson Mandela as the president. In 1999, the Deputy President of the African National Congress Thabo Mbeki peacefully succeeded head of state President Nelson Mandela, and the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission completed its first phase of hearings including witness testimony about past human rights abuses.

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Draped on beds, hung on walls, used as room dividers or to soften floors, quilts are designed to solve human needs for comfort, beauty, and privacy. Quilts have long been interactive architecture.
But this prototype quilted wall will literally interact with you. Professor of Design Studies Dr. Mengni Zhang asks us to “imagine if the walls of your home were soft, quilted, layered, and interactive, able to respond to your emotions. Wouldn’t that deepen your connection to your room? Could architectural elements become companions, rather than just static structures?”
Though unconventional, this wall meets most definitions of a quilt: it is formed of three layers stitched together with thread. When you pass a hand over its sensors, changes in light cause motors to pull on threads, creating triangles on its surface. Patterns emerge that remind us of many of the historical quilts in this room and demonstrate the essential aesthetic and technical role of triangles.

Learn more about Mengni Zhang’s work, and help his research by answering a survey about your experience interacting with this work.

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