National Quilt Museum
Paducah, Kentucky
Quilting: The very word conjures images of a grandmother sitting on the couch, cutting scrap fabric for a crazy quilt or putting together blocks for the Wedding Rings pattern.
“Quilting has a stigma attached to it; it’s misunderstood,” said Fowler Black, sales director for the Paducah Convention and Visitors Bureau. “These are not your grandmother’s quilts. These are championship quilts. It’s art — just in the fiber medium.”
Paducah, a city of about 25,000 in western Kentucky, is to quilting what Hollywood is to movies. Paducah is a designated UNESCO City of Crafts and Folk Art, headquarters of the American Quilter’s Society and home to the National Quilt Museum, where two new quilting workshops are just being launched.
The city’s quilting shops and fabric stores have long offered quilting workshops, but those were geared toward enthusiasts, Black said. The CVB and museum are now launching two hands-on experiences for the general public to learn about quilting and try their hand at it. Although both programs offer participants hands-on opportunities, one is more immersive, he said.
During the less-in-depth experience, a guide takes them “behind the scenes” of several quilts at the museum, talking about their makers and the techniques they used. Visitors also get to handle quilting tools, learn about miniature quilts and listen to audio clips of the quilt makers explaining the piece.
During the immersive program, visitors also get to make their own quilted pieces: either an art card or a “mug rug.” Guests choose their colors from precut fabrics and put together their patterns. They then use sewing machines, fusing, irons and backing material to create their own quilted pieces of art.
“That’s where you get into the actual work to get the creativity flowing,” Black said.
Crocker Art Museum
Sacramento, California
The Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, California, is home to one of the most preeminent California arts collections in the country, a collection that spans the state’s gold-rush years and continues to modern times.
One of the museum’s most noted pieces is “Sunday Morning in the Mines,” an 1872 painting by German immigrant and California gold-rush miner Charles Christian Nahl. The collection also features contemporary California artists Wayne Thiebaud, Clayton Bailey and Gregory Kondos.
The buildings also embody the past 150 years of California history. The original museum building dates to the1870s; next door is the museum’s modern 125,000-square-foot expansion that opened in 2010.
“On one side, you get a peek into the Sacramento gold rush and the Sacramento boom town; then, all the sudden, you’re in this very open, very modern and very stark gallery,” said Maria Robinson, director of marketing and communications.
The Crocker offers several hands-on art experiences for groups during its Tour + Art programs that are available for groups of 25 people. The most popular is the mixed media collage class that allows participants to learn about, make and take home their own collage, Dorn said. During a ceramics workshop, guests design an image and paint it on a small vase, and a drawing instructor takes visitors into one of the galleries during the Tour + Sketching workshop.
The museum will customize tours for groups of 10 or more, Robinson said. The Crocker will also offer its Date With a Docent program during the upcoming Toulouse-Lautrec exhibit, which opens February 1. The program allows groups of up to 25 to tour the museum, then have lunch or dinner with the docent and “continue the conversation about art,” Dorn said.
