WBR Museum exhibit features needlework

• By ROBIN MILLER
• Arts writer
• Published: May 11, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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The trouble with this quilt show is it generates inspiration.

And from inspiration comes a messy sewing room — so messy that order may never return.

Oh, but the ideas are endless, and one can’t help wondering if Paul Pilgrim’s best designs arose from chaos? Well, Evva Wilson isn’t speculating about that right now.

Her thoughts are wandering back and forth between the sight of Pilgrim’s quilts hanging at the West Baton Rouge Museum and that of her ransacked sewing room.

For that’s exactly what she did upon returning from Blending the Old with the New: Quilts by Paul D. Pilgrim, an exhibit of quilts from the Museum of the American Quilter’s Society. That Paducah, Ky., museum is  known to quilters worldwide, as is Pilgrim’s name.
But Wilson has yet to make it to Paducah, so hanging the quilts in the West Baton Rouge Museum exhibit was her first up-close and personal encounter with Pilgrim’s work.

And now she stands in the middle of her own hurricane of orphan blocks, thinking of ways to turn a quilt into art. That’s what Pilgrim was after all, an artist. He died in 1996, but his quilts have a way of making viewers stop, look, then think.

“A lot of the ladies in the quilting clubs wondered why he decided to piece certain colors together,” Lauren Davis said. “It’s not that they didn’t like his ideas; they just hadn’t thought of doing it in their own work.”

Davis is the museum’s curator. She was joined by members of the River City Quilters, Patchwork Pelicans and Patchwork Calico in hanging this show.

These are all quilting groups, as indicated by their names. And though Wilson isn’t a member of a quilters’ group, her expertise was handy in the installation.

Wilson has worked as the textile and apparel specialist for the LSU AgCenter and taught courses in textiles, entrepreneurship and basic sewing construction at LSU. Her mother was an expert quilter, and since retirement, Wilson herself has become a quilter.
“But I like making art quilts,” she said. “And the quilts in this exhibit are art. Paul Pilgrim was an artist, and you can see it through his work.”

The volunteers from the quilting groups could see it, too. Which is why they didn’t hesitate in answering Davis’ call for volunteers.
Twenty-nine pieces in this traveling exhibit were coming to the museum. They had to hang on wood slides, and those slides had to be brushed with polyurethane.

“They came here ready to work,” Davis said.

And afterward, when the quilts were ready to hang, Davis looked to them for advice.