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Mary Bywater Cross

Mary Bywater Cross

As a quilt historian, Mary Bywater Cross has been working at the leading edge to take the awareness of quilts as visual records of women's history beyond the confines of the traditional quilting world to the broader expanse of public education.

Since 1981, she has studied and traveled extensively visiting national museums, historical areas, and resource people. During her tenure on the American Quilt Study Group Board of Directors, she created and launched the Regional Coordinator Program designed to help area members become acquainted with one another and support the organization.

Her research work has won national recognition including an Award of Merit from the American Association of State and Local History and the Benjamin Franklin Award from the Publishers' Marketing Association. Her 1993 Book Treasures in theTrunk: Quilts of the Oregon Trail, has reached new audiences for quilt and women's history. Materials from the text have been used in religious sermons, grade school reports, and graduate-level degree presentations.

Her newest publication is Quilts and Women of the Mormon Migrations: Treasures of Transition. As a non-LDS scholar, she was given access to study the quilts and life stories of women who migrated west to Zion from around the world between the years 1830-1900. From there, these women moved out to settle the Inter-mountain West and serve as missionaries in church colonies. This book has served as inspiration for numerous presentations including a creative dance program in Flagstaff, Arizona.

She has curated numerous exhibitions. Two, which featured contemporary and traditional quilts of current quiltmakers, traveled internationally under the sponsorship of Visual Arts Resources. The Oregon Trail Quilt Project exhibit "The Pattern of the Journey" featuring her historical research also won an AASLH Award of Merit. In 1998, she created "The Tie That Binds" exhibition and symposium celebrating Methodism in America for Portland's First United Methodist Church's 150th Anniversary. In 2000, she curated a special exhibition on quilts as visual records of human experience for the 5th Women West Conference at the Washington State University.

Her curatorial work has led to opportunities to judge, evaluate and comment on both historic and contemporary quilts. She served as a judge for the premier Great Pacific Northwest Quilt Show. She served as guest curator for a special exhibition "Pieced and Quilted Fabric Gardens," in conjunction with a traveling SITES exhibit on America's historic gardens, at the Museum of the Oregon Territory in Oregon City.

She has lectured widely on various quilt-related topics over the last seventeen years. Her audiences have included members of museums and historical societies, school groups, and women's groups. Her presentations, especially tailored for the audience, have been made in sites from church parlors, barns, and shopping malls in the Pacific Northwest to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. The state humanities councils across the West have recognized her work as an independent scholar, granting numerous awards though their affiliation with the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Her on-going assignments include serving as the historic quilt consultant for educational programs at all levels, directing the Annual Columbia-Willamette Quilt Study Group Retreat, and conducting workshops for owner enhancement of quilts. She designs and makes woolen quilts which she markets directly. Her award-winning designs are in private collections worldwide.



© Information and photograph provided by Mary Bywater Cross

Latest Revision: 18 September 2002    

Oregon Council for the Humanities
This show is sponsored in part by a grant from the Oregon Council for the Humanities.

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