Inside what initially seems like a well-appointed quilt shop with bolts of fabrics and quilt-making equipment are a few rooms devoted to the museum-quality display of quilts.
It’s there that, on April 21, a nine-quilt exhibit created 30 years ago will go on display.
“So this exhibit is the 30th anniversary of this 1995 project that was done by the Japanese American women,” said Pati Sauter, a board member of the Japanese American Resource Center of Colorado.
The exhibit is entitled “The Colorado Japanese American Women’s Quilt Project.” It consists of nine quilts, each with eight panels that tell personal stories. The quilts they made were initially shown at the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities in 1995 and have been in storage ever since.
Each quilt was created as a way to memorialize and record “memories of the evacuations, incarcerations, and restrictions surrounding WWII,” according to the booklet that accompanies the exhibit, which opens on Monday and will have a reception next Friday.
Well-cared for since 1995, the nine quilts are all rectangular, about two feet by three feet in size, and they contain eight panels, each about seven inches square, each created by a different person — over 80 of the quilters were women, and one man. The quilters are from Colorado, Nebraska and Wyoming.
What makes the quilts different from decorative quilts with starbursts or other designs is that each panel on the quilt tells a story. Each square on the sample Sauter showed had a crest that was used to identify the family.
One family crest panel is stitched onto dark blue fabric, into what looks like blue origami cranes with Japanese stitching.
”It’s called Sashiko – it means little stabs in Japanese,” Sauter said of the technique in which each stitch is placed in an identical way to the other, with a short length of thread. Another panel has two very small photos that were silk-screened onto the fabric, and another is of lavender flowers on a peach-toned background.
“They encouraged all of the quilters to tell their family stories, or if they just made it a very kind of diverse theme ... it's storytelling,” said Millie King, another JARCC board member. “Each of the blocks tells a story about their families or a story about an experience, memory that they had, experience of their businesses that they started when they came to Colorado. Some are mementos of gratitude to the older generation, just thanking them for their perseverance through camp and all that kind of stuff.”
The organizers of the exhibit aren’t the only ones focusing on it. Gov. Jared Polis also weighed in with a letter that said: “Your accomplishment of having 9 storytelling quilts showcasing family experiences of 84 women and 1 gentlemen from CO, NE and WY is incredibly admirable, along with JARCC’s mission to preserve, celebrate and share the Japanese and Japanese American experience in Colorado.”
The exhibit will be up until the middle of July, according to Shirley Esher, the exhibits coordinator for the museum.
