A Quilt Exhibit Pieces Together a Story About American History
Download MP3 (Right-click or option-click the link.) Welcome to
THIS IS AMERICA in VOA Special English. I'm Steve Ember. And I'm
Shirley Griffith. This week on our program, we visit a quilting
exhibit at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art
Museum in Washington, D.C. Quilts are colorful bed coverings
made by sewing together pieces of cloth into different designs.
These finely crafted works of art celebrate the creativity and
skill of generations of women. The Renwick exhibit is called
"Going West! Quilts and Community." It includes fifty quilts
made from around the eighteen thirties to the nineteen thirties
in the area of what is today the Midwestern state of Nebraska.
Robyn Kennedy is the chief of the Renwick Gallery. She says the
guest curator of the exhibit, Sandi Fox, wanted to look at the
quilts that settlers in a certain area of the United States
brought with them, then later made. Sandi Fox looked at more
than two thousand qu