Quilt study center.(Current and coming)

The names Ardis and Robert James are probably familiar to most quilt aficionados--in 1979 they began assembling what would become arguably the most important collection of quilts in the world, including some one thousand American and international examples dating from the late 1700s to the present. In 1997 the Jameses made headlines when they donated the collection, along with a sizable financial endowment, to the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, with the intention that the collection would form the nucleus of an institution devoted to the interdisciplinary study of all aspects of quiltmaking and to fostering the preservation of the quiltmaking tradition. On March 30 their vision will come to full fruition with the opening of the International Quilt Study Center on the campus of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The new glass and brick building is designed by Robert A. M. Stern Architects of New York City and houses the centers public galleries, research facilities, and climate-controlled storage rooms.

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Over the course of the last ten years, the center has formed the largest public collection of its kind, containing more than twenty-three hundred quilts and including the Robert and Helen Cargo collection of African-American quilts, the Kathryn Berenson collection of French quilts, and the Jonathan Holstein collection, which includes the group of sixty quilts shown in a 1971 exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. Holstein also donated the extensive ...