Featuring textiles from the Kentucky Museum and Kentucky Historical Society,
Whitework: Women Stitching Identity explores the significance of early white embellished textiles that have been largely ignored, undervalued, and misinterpreted.
Whitework holds a “special place” within the cultural geography of textile making, connecting regional textile making with broader narratives of American women’s lives, political participation, and self-expression during the formative years of the Early Republic.
What is Whitework?
Disregarded for years as an exaggeration of American colonial self-sufficiency or as fancy work made for a future home, recent research has shown that whitework textiles are elaborate both in make and meaning. In make, the textiles are often an elaborate arrangement of intricately stitched motifs expressed in large scale. Some are created as “whole-cloth” quilts from two layers of woven cloth stitched together, typically with a loose cotton filling