QUILTS: UNCONVENTIONAL KENTUCKY STITCHWORK
QUILTS: Unconventional Kentucky Stitchwork on view* at Outsider Art Museum & Gallery.
*Up through May 15, 2026.
Photo via Outsider Art Museum & Gallery. (Artist credits coming.)
After navigating the yarnball of highways that run parallel to the Ohio River, or proceeding through a pattern of numbered streets between Louisville's Portland neighborhood and its downtown, the soft yellow lights and welcoming green façade of Outsider Art Museum & Gallery (OMG) come into view. Sections of Portland feel like timestamps, a patchwork of individualized architecture that weaves together a river city’s history. Faded advertisements appear as tattered fabrics, threading old bricks together and telling of the lives that once occupied each building. What a fitting site for the exhibition, QUILTS: Unconventional Kentucky Stitchwork.
Photo via Outsider Art Museum & Gallery. (Artist credits coming.)
Curator Alex Huninghake has brought together a collection of quilts that consider Kentucky’s cultural history while reimagining it with contemporary whimsy. QUILTS is a thorough exhibition that spans generations of the state’s great fiber artists, featuring work by Susan Zepeda, Denise Furnish, “Sunshine” Joe Mallard, Janet Estes, Tom Pfannerstill, Rebekka Seigel, Penny Sisto, Karen Abney, Terri Burt, and a group of University of Louisville fiber arts students. What may at first feel like a disparate array of work comes together throughout the exhibition to challenge what can be considered a quilt and how these objects may continue honoring and reinventing this time-consuming and tender practice.
Photo via Outsider Art Museum & Gallery.
Upon entering the gallery, visitors are first greeted by Susan Zepeda’s zany quilt, Homenaje a Rudolfo Morales which hangs behind the gallery’s welcome desk. Based on a painting by the Mexican muralist, Zepeda’s quilt features a diverse female musical ensemble. Dogs rest at the feet of these women as some look out, engaging with the viewer mid-song while others stare with concentration around the quilt's serape-style frame. There are three other picture quilts by Zepeda positioned on varying walls throughout the show. They are inspired either by family photographs or the work of other artists: Child is Father to the Man, Pioneers, and A Jockey for LaVon (another homage, this time to the Kentucky woodcarver LaVon Van Williams). A carving by Williams is featured in the show along with an assortment of sculptures by artistic and life partners, Twyla and Lonnie Money. Additionally, three functional folk-art chairs made by the Moneys speckle the gallery floor, adding a reminder of the slow-paced domesticity to the practice of quilt making.
Photo via Outsider Art Museum & Gallery. (Artist credits coming.)
Like the title suggests, a majority of QUILTS is focused on work that challenges the bounds of quiltmaking tradition and simplicity. Works like the painted quilts of Denise Furnish feel more akin to Robert Rauschenberg's 1955 work, Bed, than the quilt you might find upon your own mattress. Even where the notion of convention still finds footing in the names and assemblage of traditional patterns within Furnish’s work, other quilts, such as Terri Burt’s O.M.G. I (2026) force a new imagining of what a quilt is. Burt’s O.M.G. II (2025) states a disclaimer: “Disqualified from the 2025 KY State Fair for ‘not incorporating three layers of fabric,’” a fun quip about a quilt that is made up of thirty-five squares, each layered repetitively in fabric, pipe-cleaners, and various three-dimensional plastic objects. The end result reads like a strung-together set of Valentine’s Day cards. In a similarly patched fashion, a quilt made by sixteen students from UofL’s fine arts program recreates a painting by Kentucky artist, Ceirra Evans. In the depicted scene from Evans’, Hard to Kill, a white-tailed deer jumps over barbed wire as an oblivious hunter in orange walks into a forest of pink light. The layers of the group quilt include buttons, sequined beading, and the dissected packaging of both Ale-8-One and Trident Gum. Both the imagery and materials hold nostalgia for the Kentucky viewer familiar with traditions of deer spotting and regional ginger beer.
Tom Pfannerstill, Star of Bethlehem Quilt, 2025. Photo via Outsider Art Museum & Gallery.
If this exhibition sets out to explore what unconventional Kentucky stitchwork is, then it feels safe to claim these are narrative works that, using a variety of threading techniques, hold scraps of textiles together–even if sometimes that textile is a sliced-open soda can or an empty bag of chips. There are exceptions, such as Minnie Adkins’ Red Fox Quilt (1990) or Alma Lesch’s Stamp Quilt (not dated), that remind visitors quilts have always had an eccentric nature even in their simplicity. This simplicity is mirrored with Tom Pfannerstill’s exceptionally contemporary, Star of Bethlehem Quilt (2025). Here the artist weaves and staples aluminum cans to create a traditional Lone Star quilt but one that stretches untraditionally past its border, an insinuation that like its anthropic material of choice, this quilt will shine on forever.
After one has visited QUILTS, what seems to reside in memory are the beautiful colors and fluidity of a quilt. Bonded and boundary-less, they seem to grow more so as the layers adapt to the materials of the modern day. Perhaps quilts that appear unconventional to us now are ushering in a future of quiltmaking techniques that shy away from presupposed restrictions. Expect to leave the gallery inspired to reimagine the textiles that make up the materiality of the everyday or to simply pull the heirloom blanket out of the closet and be happily reminded of the timeless act of quilting.