Karey Patterson Bresenhan and Nancy O'Bryant Puentes had been bringing thousands of quilts to the International Quilt Festival in Houston every year since 1974, and the same frustration recurred annually: the work hung for a few days in a convention centre and then went home to closets and beds. They wanted somewhere the quilts could stay up long enough for people to make a journey to see them, and be looked at as art rather than as bedding. They found two nineteenth century buildings on the square in La Grange that had lost their lustre badly, restored them over two years with an architect known for exactly this kind of repurposing, acquired the building next door partway through, and opened in 2011. The result is more than ten thousand square feet of exhibition space across three galleries, with shows changing several times a year. The Pearce Memorial Library and Material Culture Study Center holds more than eleven thousand publications for research, and the Koval Antique Textile Collection allows the study of fabric samples dating from 1775 to 1875, which is the period that most surviving American quilts drew their materials from. On the outside wall there is a mural thirteen feet high and eighty five feet long showing traditional nineteenth century quilt patterns, the designs that everything in the galleries is ultimately built on. It can be seen without going in, on a corner of the historic square.
Getting there
29.9064, -96.8780
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