2025-2026 Exhibition Season: Quilting Connections
Parallel Lines: Quilts and the American Landscape
Lynn Mecklenburg Textile Gallery
September 3, 2025 – May 10, 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.
Find Your Quilt
Ruth Davis Design Gallery
October 8, 2025 – March 1, 2026
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.
Design Studies MFA Exhibition: Mothaígh Thú Uaim — Feeling You From Me
Ruth Davis Design Gallery
March 18 – 29, 2026
In Irish Gaelic, there is no direct way to say “I miss you” or “I miss ___.” Instead, the language prioritizes the act of feeling and the object of that missing over the primary subject. It highlights the distance between the person feeling the loss of another. Utilizing nets and lace to create an installation around the abstraction of grief and memory, Noa Rickey creates a space showing the distance between an individual and the person, place, or thing that they are missing. How does time abstract the memories of a person long past? How many layers of grief are there covering the incident? What images remain and which ones are left behind? Through large-scale works and small-scale lace, Noa’s work asks and answers these questions.
Textiles and Fashion Design Student Exhibition
Ruth Davis Design Gallery
April 22 – May 10, 2026
Information forthcoming.
Bring your class/group to the textiles and fashion exhibition