I curated About Place: Quilts from Vermont Museums in fall 2024. This small but powerful exhibition brought together historical and contemporary quilts from the Fleming’s collections with loans from the Shelburne Museum and the Middlebury College Museum of Art. Collectively the quilts invited consideration of personal and shared experiences of place, as well as reflection on the many ways that notions of place find expression in material culture and daily life. 

Quilts, whether made for domestic use or public display, often convey a sense of place and offer insights into the emotional, cultural, and historical dimensions of real places. Quilts made from beloved hand-me-down clothes can, for example, be material reminders of home and family. Similarly, the distinctive patterns and motifs on quilts can reveal their maker’s (or makers’) ties to living cultural traditions and vibrant communities. And even a quilt’s most basic element, the stitch, can connect its imagery to places, layered with childhood or collective memories.