The College of Arts and Science is now home to the nation's first regional Center for the Quilt, designed to document, preserve and share the history and stories of quilts and quilt makers.

Formed in cooperation with the Alliance for American Quilts, the quilt center is part of the College's Center for American Material Culture Studies.

"The power of quilts in American culture is scarcely understood," Bernard Herman, Edward F. and Elizabeth Goodman Professor of Art History and director of the material culture center, says. "We are excited by the prospect of working in partnership with the alliance to bring the stories of quilts, quilters and quilting to the fore."

Staff at the Center for the Quilt will participate in a number of projects, including the region's first Boxes Under the Bed project, in which local researchers will identify and rescue such quilting artifacts as templates, paper piecing patterns, pin cushions, show programs and other quilt ephemera "that got lost over time," Herman says.

He notes that the Center for American Material Culture Studies already has played a role in developing and implementing a key alliance project, the Quilters Save Our Stories project, or QSOS. In this project, an easy-to-duplicate methodology allows local quilt guilds and other students of quilts to record oral histories of quilt makers. These oral histories, with photographs, now are available on the web at [http://www.quiltcenter.org].

The regional Center for the Quilt at UD will continue to coordinate the collection of oral histories nationally while working with five other mid-Atlantic states to incorporate their state quilt project information in a newly developing online resource, The Quilt Index.

The regional center also will serve as a repository for quilt documentation that results from Boxes Under the Bed and other projects. Herman says antique quilts will not be stored at the University, but their history and role in American life will be preserved.

The Center for American Material Culture Studies is an interdisciplinary and collaborative venture dedicated to the documentation, preservation, interpretation and exhibition of all aspects of American material culture.

It "promotes learning from and teaching about all the things people make and the ways people act upon the physical and visible world," Herman says. It encompasses the fields of art history, decorative arts, anthropology, history, visual communications, early American culture, consumer studies and museum studies. An undergraduate minor in American material culture studies is offered.

Formed in 1993, the Alliance for American Quilts works to document the nation's quilt heritage in partnership with such institutions as the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress, Michigan State University Museum, MATRIX: The Center for Humane Arts and Letters Online at Michigan State University, the Illinois State Museum, the University of Texas Center for American History, the University of Louisville Archives and Records Center and the University of Nebraska International Quilt Study Center.

--Cornelia Weil