Author(s): Suzi Parron (Author), Donna Sue Groves (Author)
Publisher: Swallow Press
Publication Date: February 1, 2012
Edition: 1st
Language: English
Print length: 244 pages
ISBN-10: 9780804011389
ISBN-13: 9780804011389
Book Description
The story of the American Quilt Trail, featuring the colorful patterns of quilt squares writ large on barns throughout North America, is the story of one of the fastest-growing grassroots public arts movements in the United States and Canada. In Barn Quilts and the American Quilt Trail Movement Suzi Parron travels through twenty-nine states and two Canadian provinces to visit the people and places that have put this movement on America’s tourist and folk art map.
Through dozens of interviews with barn artists, committee members, and barn owners Parron documents a journey that began in 2001 with the founder of the movement, Donna Sue Groves. Groves’s desire to honor her mother with a quilt square painted on their barn became a group effort that eventually grew into a county-wide project. Today, registered quilt squares form a long imaginary clothesline, appearing on more than three thousand barns scattered along one hundred driving trails.
With more than fifty full-color photographs, Parron documents a movement that combines rural economic development with an American folk art phenomenon.
When German immigrants arrived in America, they brought with them a passion for brightly colored geometric patterns that they stitched into quilts that kept them toasty on frigid winter nights. They also decorated their otherwise plain barns with hex signs serving as talismans or as purely exuberant decoration. A decade ago, an enterprising Ohioan combined these traditions and mounted outsize quilt patterns in bright colors on old barns. Others quickly followed suit, and now many Midwestern and Eastern states have “quilt trails” that tourists pursue in outdoor “museums” of folk art. Parron and Groves have documented these trails with full-color photographs that show how imaginative many artists have become, incorporating butterflies, horses, flags, and other natural and man-made designs within the more abstract geometries of traditional barn quilts. The text profiles many of the artists whose work dazzlingly enlivens America’s farm country. –Mark Knoblauch
Review
“The book printed on high quality paper with dozens of captioned photographs is everything that a lover of traditional folk culture could desire. Author Suzi Parron and barn quilt pioneer Donna Sue Groves take the reader to the origins of the Quilt Trails in Appalachia and then to other states, particularly those of the Heartland. The reader meets the dozens of local heroines (and heroes) who organized the Trails in their communities.” –National Barn Alliance
About the Author
Suzi Parron is a quilter, backwoods traveler, and avid collector of folk art. She holds a Master of Arts in English from the University of Florida, with a concentration in the literature of the American South.She teaches English at Lakeside High School in Atlanta.
Donna Sue Groves launched the Ohio Quilt Barn Project in 2001. She was formerly the Southern Ohio field coordinator for Ohio’s Appalachian Arts Initiative and the Southern Ohio field representative for the Ohio Arts Council. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2010 Ohio Governor’s Award for the Arts in Community Development and Partnerships.
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