Deeds Not Words: Celebrating 100 Years of Women’s Suffrage
Our current exhibit, Deeds Not Words: Celebrating 100 Years of Women’s Suffrage, comes to us from co-curators Dr. Sandra Sider, Curator of the Texas Quilt Museum, and Pamela Weeks, Binney Family Curator of the New England Quilt Museum.
This exhibit has toured the country for the past 2 years and has finally landed in our gallery, the last opportunity to see this touring exhibition of studio art quilts commemorating the one-hundredth anniversary of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, granting women the right to vote. Twenty-eight award-winning artists from across the United States accepted the invitation to create new works celebrating women’s suffrage, along with one artist whose 1995 quilt on the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments is included.
The subjects of the works include many of the women who are well known for their work in the century-old fight for the vote for women, but many more of the women the artists chose to commemorate are less well known. Jane Burch Cochran chose Martha Wright as her subject. Wright was one of the organizers of the historic 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, but her work was overshadowed by her sister, Lucretia Mott, and the now famous Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Alice Beasley’s work centers on Ida B. Wells, an African-American suffragist who was nationally known as a journalist, lecturer, and for her anti-lynching campaign. When she traveled to Washington, DC, in 1913 to march in the suffrage parade, she refused to follow instructions given to the black delegates to march at the back of the parade, and stepped into her place with the other delegates from Chicago.
The national tour is sponsored by eQuilter.com, with additional support from Karey Bresenhan and Nancy O’Bryant Puentes.
This exhibit runs from January 24, 2022 to April 10, 2022.