EAST LANSING, MI –Ready-set-sew! "Ugly Quilt" Day comes to the MSU Museum on Saturday, March 29, 1-3 p.m.
"Ugly Quilts" are sleeping bags made from scraps of old clothes, bedspreads, ties and any other kind of scrap fabrics someone may have tucked away in a closet at home. Quilters make these inexpensive quilts and then distribute them to the homeless in their surrounding cities. Nationally, more than 100,000 "Ugly Quilts" have been given away to people in need.
An "Ugly Quilt" can be made in less than a day and a group can make one in an hour. The MSU Museum hopes to produce six or more quilts. No previous experience is necessary to participate in this event, which is presented free of charge. The event is sponsored, in part, by MSU’s Residential College in the Arts and Humanities.
"Ugly Quilt" Day is presented as part of the national Sleeping Bag Project and coincides with the MSU Museum’s "Quilts and Human Rights" exhibit, which reveals how traditional art forms are used to convey powerful beliefs, values and experiences related to social-justice issues.
Learn more at http://museum.msu.edu and http://thesleepingbagproject.org/ .
In advance of "Ugly Quilt" Day, community members can donate clean, gently used blankets, mattress pads, sweaters, sheets, clothes or other fabric or new polyester batting to make into ugly quilts. A donation box is located in the MSU Museum’s Main Gallery. Donations of toiletries, warm socks, hats and gloves are also welcome, and will be distributed with the ugly quilts to local homeless people.
"Making quilts has always been a good reason for people to come together for a cause. The museum staff is excited about supporting the Ugly Quilt project featured in the exhibit, by coordinating an effort to make quilts for the homeless in our area," notes Lynne Swanson, MSU Museum cultural collections manager and one of the "Ugly Quilt" Day organizers.
The 40 quilts included in the "Quilts and Human Rights" exhibit honor champions of human rights, such as Rosa Parks, Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela, as well as other individuals who have struggled, been punished or tortured and even lost their lives in their fights against injustice. Other textiles document events and experiences in contemporary history and show the creative act of quiltmaking as a means of coping with oppression. Another section of the exhibit looks at how quilts and quiltmaking can be the cornerstones of projects designed to raise awareness about social issues, like the national NAMES Project with AIDS victims, domestic violence and the Ugly Quilt project.
The MSU Museum is home to the Great Lakes Quilt Center, with a collection of more than 500 historic and contemporary textiles, research and archival documents. The Great Lakes Quilt Center has evolved from the sustained and significant quilt-related activities and resources at the Michigan State University Museum and the museum’s long-standing interest in and commitment to preserving and presenting traditional arts history. Many of the quilts in this new exhibit come from MSU Museum collections and others are award-winning special collections on loan from the U.S., Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and other destinations.
"Quilts and Human Rights" is part of a year-long look at human rights. Also at the MSU Museum through Aug. 10 is "The International Print Portfolio: Artists’ Expressions of Universal Human Rights" in the West Gallery, created by the MSU Museum’s Traveling Exhibition Service. The exhibit and this related program are supported in part by funds from the MSU Office for Inclusion and the Intercultural Initiatives, the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs, the Michigan Quilt Project Endowment and MSU’s Residential College of Arts and Humanities who is providing all the sewing machines for the program. For more information on human rights visit http://museum.msu.edu/Exhibitions/Current/. The exhibit runs through Aug. 24.
