Quilt Top, Crazy pattern

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

By the mid-1880s, crazy quilts were so popular that enterprising manufacturers offered them in ready-to-sew kits, which often included appliqués. This practice explains the strangely uniform quality of many crazy quilts, and makes those crazy quilts that are not formulaic seem all the more extraordinary. Each block of this quilt top is designed with unusual patterns, and the blocks seem to be composed of real scraps. There are some commercially produced elements, such as the cats and some of the embroidered motifs, which were probably marked with patterns, but the original aspects of this piece make it stand apart from the run-of-the-mill crazy quilts that exist in great numbers today.

The American Wing

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The American Wing's ever-evolving collection comprises some 20,000 works of art by African American, Euro American, Latin American, and Native American men and women. Ranging from the colonial to early-modern periods, the holdings include painting, sculpture, works on paper, and decorative arts—including furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, silver, metalwork, jewelry, basketry, quill and bead embroidery—as well as historical interiors and architectural fragments.

Metropolitan Museum of Art