Contributors

Michigan State University Museum/Great Lakes Quilt Center
Michigan Quilt Project and MSU Museum Collection
MQP website | View Quilts

Faculty and staff of the MSU Museum's Great Lakes Quilt Center have provided a key partnership role in developing, piloting, and evaluating the Quilt Index.

The Michigan State University Museum was established in 1857 as a collections-holding unit primarily for research and academic teaching unit. Beginning in the 1970s the museum has aggressively sought ways to make its collections accessible to a much wider public and to engage the non-campus public in all phases of museum research, collection development and care, exhibition, and educational activities. It is now recognized by Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs as one of a handful of Michigan anchor museums and is one of five cornerstones of the Center for Great Lakes Culture. The museum now also regularly engages in regional, national, and international activities including a range of cultural heritage initiatives in South Africa.

It is now recognized as a center of quilt-related activities and its various quilt collection development, research, exhibition, publication, and education activities are now consolidated under the Great Lakes Quilt Center, a unit of the museum. It has played a key role in the Michigan Quilt Project, an effort that involved individual and organizational volunteers around the state to document, preserve, and present Michigan's quilting heritage, and has documented 9,023 quilts. The museum's own quilt collection numbers more than 500 and includes historical and contemporary examples from around the world, with special emphasis on African-American quilts, Native American quilts, and quilts with special ties to Michigan. It also houses the Mary Schafer Quilt Collection (the collection of a nationally-acknowledged quilt historian), quilt blocks, sewing equipment, historic fabric, and quilt-related materials. Quilt research projects on North American Indian, African-American, and general Michigan quilting have generated over 100 tape-recorded interviews with quilters, photographs of quilters and quilting activities, field notes, and ephemera.

The Michigan Quilt Project (MQP) was established in 1984 to document, preserve, and present Michigan's quilting history. Through fieldwork, archival research, and a series of community Quilt Discovery Days, project staff work with students and volunteers to locate, document, and collect information and material on Michigan quilts and quilters. Tape-recorded interviews are conducted with Michigan quilters in their homes and quilting activities such as auctions, exhibits, contests, and bees are also documented.

Michigan Quilt Project has revised its documentation form as the project has grown and matured. 
View current form: miquiltform.pdf