Category: Identity Heritage

Hungarian Harvest Festival Quilt, 1930-1949

Mary Gasperik, born in Hungary, embraced American quilt making, producing about 100 quilts in the 1930s through 1950s, 66 of which won prizes. 

“Hungarian Harvest Festival” straddles Mary Gasperik’s old and new countries, with its dancers in traditional folk costume appliquéd onto a cotton ground. Her extensive use of embroidery on her quilts—unusual in 20th century quilting—also shows the influence of her Hungarian textile heritage. Gasperik also embroidered and appliquéd clothing for her daughter and granddaughter, and embroidered many household textiles in traditional Hungarian techniques.

Lent by The Elmer Gasperik Collection, Heirs: Michael, Robert, and David Gasperik and Kathryn Gasperik Jacobs

2: Mary Gasperik with her granddaughter Susan Salser in a dress with appliqués, made by Gasperik. Courtesy Susan Salser. 

3: Maria (Mary) Mihalovits, later Gasperik, at left, wearing traditional Hungarian dress in Chicago about 1905-6. Courtesy of Susan Salser.

Ke Kahi O Ka’iulani, 1920s

Hawaiian quilts are currently being considered through a lens which looks more fully at the Hawaiians’ existing textile traditions: their structure, design, and cultural meanings. In this context, a richer history of the distinct Hawaiian appliqué quilt is revealed, and indigenous Hawaiian quilters given more agency in developing their approach to quilting. Hawaiians adapted appliqué quilting to suit their own aesthetics which were influenced by their tradition of layered beaten barkcloth or “kapa,” which had decorated top layers similar to quilts. The word kapa became the Hawaiian word for quilt, and other words for barkcloth’s layers and surfaces were applied to quilts as well. 

This quilt’s pattern is Ke Kahi O Ka‘iulani, or “Comb of Kaiulani,” and honors Princess Ka’iulani, the last monarch of Hawaii, overthrown by the United States in 1893 (the islands were forcibly annexed to the United States in 1898). The design incorporates tortoiseshell combs apparently associated with Princess Ka’iulani and “a suggestion of the Hawaiian royal crown,” both motifs being greatly abstracted and combined with foliate designs.  The nation’s loss of independence, and the young Princess’s death in 1899, would have occurred within the living memory of many living in the 1920s, possibly including this quilt’s maker. The existence of many monarchy-related quilt design titles, and the continued popularity of quilt designs featuring the Hawaiian flag, suggest that these quilts expressed Hawaiian identity and political statements about the nation’s assimilation into the United States.

DAR Museum 2023.6

Sassy Sankofa, 2023

This quilt honors African American quilters by using African fabrics, a crown symbolizing the “richness and glory of African American culture,” and ankle bracelets of shells and a chain, along with a sewing bobbin and scrap of fabric held in “Sassy’s” beak. “Our quilts are an expression of our experiences told through cloth and in stitches,” Swain states, emphasizing that “our stories [must be] told, written, created, and stitched by us,” not “dictated by others according to their interpretations…when they are not living in our skin.” 

Cotton, metal, and shells. Lent by Rose Swain

Colonial Revival Piano Scarf, 1916

Mary Waite Allis Hurlburt of Hatfield, Massachusetts embroidered a hundred-year-old sheet—spun by her grandmother and woven by her mother—to commemorate her family’s colonial-era heritage. The text (detail 2, one end of the scarf) honors her family’s home-based textile production in the preindustrial “age of homespun,” while the central floral design copies crewel work by Hurlbut’s grandmother’s neighbor Rebecca Dickinson, whose 18th century bed hangings were well-known locally (detail 3, opposite end, inscription citing Rebecca’s design).

Inscriptions:

Detail 2: Spun by Mary Hastings Wait 1820/Woven by Content Hastings 1824 

Detail 3: Designed by Rebecca Dickinson 1763/Embroidered by Mary Waite Allis Hurlbut 1916

Linen with linen and silk embroidery. Lent by Hatfield Historical Museum, Hatfield, Massachusetts

Beaded Wool Felt Purse, 1860s

The double spiral motif is traditional to art of the Northeast Woodland (Iroquois or Haudenosaunee) nations of upstate New York. In the 1800s, members of several nations made purses and other objects for sale to tourists in the Saratoga Springs resort and Niagara Falls regions. By the 1840s, floral designs influenced by Euro-American needlework were added for commercial appeal. Beadwork continued (and continues) to be an important medium for self-expression within Native communities in many regions.

Wool felt, silk ribbon, glass beads. Gift of Helen S. Cartledge 1613.4