The Alliance for American Quilts (AAQ) was established in 1993 with the expressed purpose to document, preserve, and share our American quilt heritage by collecting the rich stories that historic and contemporary quilts, and their makers, tell about our nation’s diverse peoples and their communities.

The Alliance brings together quilt makers and designers, the quilt industry, quilt scholars and teachers, and quilt collectors to to promote the understanding of the quilt as an important American grassroots art form, to disseminate the story of this heritage broadly, and to educate Americans about the importance of documenting quilts and quiltmakers so that their stories will not be lost.

One of the important projects of the Alliance is “Quilters’ Save our Stories,”which creates, through recorded interviews, a broadly accessible body of information concerning quiltmaking, both present-day and in living memory, for scholarship and exhibition. This grassroots project continually captures the voices and stories of quiltmakers and posts the transcribed interviews here.  Our archive for the original audio recordings and photographs is the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.

I recently met online Diana Bracy, who was interviewed for the Quilters’ Save our Stories project. Diana explains her quilt art technique, but her story and the reason for making her piece, “Living the Dream,” reflects what so many have felt as Americans. Her feeling that politicians “…were just so far away from me that if I said ‘hello,’ they would never hear my voice.” But an encounter changed that and was the inspiration for her art quilt, pictured here.

Coming soon – More about this art quilt and others submitted to “President Obama: A Celebration in Art Quilts,” an exhibition sponsored by the Crafritz Foundation Arts Center.