Rearranging Stars August 1- December 31, 2025 Jennifer Leutzinger, Delia Touché, And Brittney Denham Whisonant

This exhibition began casually, with a knowledge of each artist’s working practice in print and bookmaking. Through conversation, it was revealed that each had an additional artmaking focus of repurposed and mended contemporary quilt making that is engaged, experimental, and uproariously fun. Quilting is a medium for personal and community histories, as well as individual expression. As settler colonialism spread westward in the late 1800s, missionaries from the Dakota Presbytery introduced the art of quilt making to the Northern Plains tribes on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation. Native women eventually made the star quilts their own by using colors and designs that were traditional to them.

According to tribal historians, as bison quickly disappeared due to U.S. Government starvation policies, star quilts became a cultural replacement of the buffalo robes. Just as buffalo robes were valuable gifts of honor, the star quilt became the honored gift in these Native cultures. The language of abstract art is embedded in histories of sewing, weaving, quilting, making, women’s time and labor — think, for instance, of the quilters of Gee’s Bend in the antebellum South. Pattern and repetition, or disruption, make for some of the most inherent and satisfying visual experiences. Star quilts are a cross-cultural language. Each artist approaches this language uniquely, as if they were speaking a dialect or in a particular stylistic manner while sharing commonalities. All are using the star as a point of connection and departure.