D.C. IN TEXTILES (Cheri)

I found my pictures!

I love pictorial quilts and architecture, and I'm fascinated by urban planning, so seeing the exhibit "The Nation's Capital" at the Mid-Atlantic Quilt Festival in February and March was a joy for me!  The quilters in this group chose public and public/private spaces to interpret in both literal and abstracted quilts.

The quilt below memorializes the Library of Congress:

The quilt at the top of the page shows a guard tower at the former Lorton Reformatory, a "prison farm" called the Occoquan Workhouse.  The Wikipedia page about the location includes a very interesting discussion about how thr grounds have been converted into many uses, including a cultural arts center, sports fields, and a museum honoring a suffragette.

This quilt honors the "Price of Freedom" exhibit at the National Museum of American History:

Many different concepts of freedom are featured:

A striking work which takes on the soul of Union Station:

A couple of quilts reflecting memorials to our military:

Of course no exhibit reflecting D.C. architecture would be complete without the White House:

I'll be posting more quilts from this exhibit, focusing on the ones inspired by the public/private spaces in the D.C. area.

I couldn't find a good source of information about the group of quilters that made these works of art, other than that it was arranged by Donna Marcinkowski DeSoto. 

She has organized at least five group exhibits on various topics, each of which was published in a resulting book.  I saw another of her group exhibits in South Carolina a couple of years ago, and included some of the quilts in this blog post.

It seems that many of the quilters are from the Virginia, and the group that she works with must be quite large, as there were 103 quilts in this exhibit alone, but I haven't seen any reference to a formal name for the quilters as a group.