2025-2026 Exhibition Season: Quilting Connections
Parallel Lines: Quilts and the American Landscape
Lynn Mecklenburg Textile Gallery
September 3, 2025 – May 15, 2026
Parallel Lines: Quilts and the American Landscape explores the parallel processes of quilt making within the American home and placemaking 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.
Small Matter
Nancy Nicholas Hall Entry Cases
December 3, 2025 – November 1, 2026
Soccer is the world’s most popular game, but experiences of the game are remarkably different around the world. When children do not have the luxury of affording a mass-produced soccer ball, they take to the streets to make their own balls from cheap, discarded objects. Small Matter exhibits makeshift rag balls made by children in Kano, Nigeria. Rag balls are common in many parts of the world where access to branded balls is limited. Rag balls are made of found materials including, but not limited to: pieces of fabric and string, plastic bags, mosquito nets, fishing nets, used socks, rubber bands, and broken doll’s heads. They demonstrate compelling practices of creative reuse and repurposing within street cultures of craft and play.
Where do we go when we make?
Ruth Davis Design Gallery
April 22 – May 10, 2026
Where do we go when we make? exhibits collections by 15 graduating artists and designers at the culmination of their undergraduate work. This exhibition explores the liminal third space that makers enter when they move between the material and immaterial dimensions of creation: a space where time begins to soften, memories surface, and identities form. Collections feature various techniques – apparel design, weaving, papermaking, and more – and investigate themes of storytelling, identity, and memory.