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Scene at MIT: Beautiful, intricate, creative quilts

The MIT Quilt Show, featuring more than 40 quilted projects from 20 members of the MIT community, drew almost 1,000 visitors over three days.

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Jane Halpern describes a hanging quilt to an onlooker in Lobby 13
Jane Halpern describes “That Escalated Quickly,” a quilt by Associate Professor Tess Smidt, to an onlooker in Lobby 13. Visitors to the MIT Quilt Show voted on their favorites in multiple categories. “That Escalated Quickly,” which won the Viewer’s Choice Award, was hand-sewn over the course of a year and a half using a technique called English Paper Piecing.
Photo: Heidi Erickson

The MIT Quilt Show, put on as a collaboration between the Crafters’ Circle, MIT Makerspaces, and the MIT Women’s League, and funded by the Council for the Arts at MIT, ran for three days in Lobby 13 Oct. 5-7 and drew 950 visitors.

“We got wonderful feedback throughout the show, and it was tremendously gratifying to see the MIT community turn out en masse to support this art form,” says Jane Halpern, show organizer and communications officer for the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

A small quilt that says "slop"
“Slop,” a quilt by Remi Harrison ’24, is a timely work referencing “AI slop,” or low-quality content created by generative artificial intelligence systems. Made out of discarded fast fashion (the highly disposable “slop” of the garment industry), the piece features a repurposed swimsuit that was itself printed with an AI “newsprint” pattern littered with non-words.
Photo courtesy of the MIT Quilt Show
A woman looks at several quilts hanging from the ceiling indoors. The foreground quilt features images from astronomy and physics. The small one she looks at looks like the emergency test screen of old TV
Individuals from the MIT astrophysics community collaborated on an astronomy-related quilt (foreground) assembled by graduate student Swati Ravi.
Photo: Jane Halpern
Quilts depicting paparazzi photos of Taylor Swift and Nicole Kidman
“Roman Empire” by Jane Halpern juxtaposes two famous paparazzi photos featuring Taylor Swift and Nicole Kidman at equal, yet opposite, moments in their lives.
Photo: Kimberly Allen
Two quilts hang in the background, one a sunflower theme and one a U.S. flag theme, and a quilted dress is on a manequin in the foreground
The show included not only traditional quilts, but other works of art that used quilting techniques — such as Naomh Fairweather’s patchwork dress, made for contra dancing, and Anh Vu Sawyer’s collaborative American flag, decorated with embroidered artworks made by refugees.
Photo: Kimberly Allen
Colorful quilts hang from poster displays in MIT Lobby 13
Organizer Jane Halpern contributed multiple quilts to the show. At left, “Jean Reese’s Ripple Effect” pays homage to a childhood neighbor who was a master quilter. At right, “Beasley Hollow” is a colorful gift to welcome a new baby.
Photo: Kimberly Allen
Several quilted pillows on a table. Two rectangular ones feature abstract scenes of a house and the MIT Dome using geometric shapes.
The MIT Dome made an abstract appearance on a quilted pillow by Lee Zamir; the pillow now lives in the office of MIT President Sally Kornbluth.
Photo: Conor McArdle

The exhibit featured around 40 quilts and quilt-adjacent works from about 20 members of the MIT community, plus collaborative works such as an astrophysics community quilt, assembled by graduate student Swati Ravi, and an American flag featuring the embroidery work of refugees, assembled by Anh Vu Sawyer MBA ’20 and her husband Philip.

While the quilt show was a one-time event, Halpern encourages MIT community members who are interested in adding more quilts to their lives to join the Crafters’ Circle Slack channel; check for class listings in the Makerspaces; and visit the New England Quilt Museum in nearby Lowell, Massachusetts.

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