Global quilts is topic for international symposium April 2-4

The symposium "The Global Quilt: Cultural Contexts" is attracting scholars and artists from Great Britain, Australia, Germany, New Zealand, Japan, France, India, Ireland and Korea to join U.S. counterparts in Lincoln April 2-4. They will share papers and presentations, and network at the academic gathering hosted by the International Quilt Study Center. The symposium's purpose is to explore the full context in which the quiltmaker's art is expressed and transmitted among and across cultures.

Quilts communicate cultural values and serve as a medium for social connection. The topics to be explored during the three-day event cover the spectrum from geometry found in African American quilts to the Japanese importing of colonial American nostalgia via quiltmaking. Registration for the symposium is still open. A full schedule of papers and presentations is available online at www.quiltstudy.org.

As part of the symposium Jennifer Harris will speak on "Innovation and Tradition in Contemporary Craft Practice," at 7 p.m. April 2 at the Quilt Museum, 33rd and Holdrege streets. Harris is the Deputy Director/Curator of Textiles at the Whitworth Art Gallery which is part of the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom. She has most recently curated the major exhibitions "Take 4: New Perspectives on the British Art Quilt," and "Indigo: A Blue to Dye For." She holds an MA in History of European Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, and a Ph.D from University of Manchester. Harris is the author of numerous books including the title "5000 Years of Textiles," published by the British Museum Press in association with the Whitworth Art Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum. She is an Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a Trustee of the Crafts Study Centre, Surrey Institute of Art and Design. Admission is $10 for members or $15 for non-members. Doors open at 6 p.m. A reception will follow the lecture.

Jacqueline Atkins will speak on "Innovation and Tradition in Contemporary Craft Practice," 11 a.m. April 4 at the Holiday Inn-Downtown. Atkins, a textile historian, is the Kate Fowler Merle-Smith Curator of Textiles for the Allentown Art Museum, Allentown, Penn. She lectures and writes on American and Japanese quilts, textile history, and American folk art. Her most recent books are "Quilting Transformed: A History of Contemporary Quilting in the United States," and "Wearing Propaganda: Textiles on the Home Front in Japan, Britain, and the United States, 1931-1945," based on her exhibition of the same name. Recipient of a 1995-1996 Fulbright Research Award to Japan, where she studied the impact of Western quilting in Japan, Atkins holds master's and bachelor's degrees from Columbia University and a Ph.D. from the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture. Atkins is a board member of Studio Art Quilt Associates and has been a judge for the Japan Quilt Grand Prix in Tokyo for six years. The lecture is open to symposium registrants.

The International Quilt Study Center is an academic program of the Department of Textiles, Clothing and Design in the College of Education and Human Sciences at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.