A new initiative pieced together by the National Quilt Museum, along with professors at Murray State University, is using the fiber arts to teach K-12 students about geometry and other mathematical principles.
Built off of New York quilter and educator Victoria Findlay Wolfe’s “Option Expedition” exhibit – which just ended its run at the Paducah museum – the program equips teachers with lesson plans and visual aids to help their students engage with quilts and recognize real-world applications of mathematical ideas.
Wolfe’s work that inspired the program takes basic shapes – squares, circles, triangles and parallelograms – and arranges them in playful, abstract ways to emphasize space, scale, alignment and color. She arranges and rearranges the exhibit to create new patterns and interplay between her quilts in each new location where it goes, opening it up to new interpretations.
Wolfe joked that quilting is “all math” and said she originally created the works in the exhibit to help show quilters how elementary shapes can be used to create powerful displays, developing hundreds of designs in the series by cutting, stretching and rearranging shapes.
“The exhibit started out really because of teaching and turning it into not just an exhibit but an experience,” the quilter said. “So whether little kids are coming in and learning about identifying circles, squares and parallelograms in the work, another quilter might be coming in and be able to [discern] texture, movement, color, contrast, all of these other terms.”
NQM director of learning and engagement Becky Glasby agreed, saying that math and art often – unexpectedly – go hand-in-hand.
“We don’t always like to think about math in our art all the time,” she said. “A lot of artists may not be thinking about equations or ‘math class’ type math but we’re thinking about [questions like] ‘how many pieces do I need to cut?’, ‘how big do those pieces need to be?’, ‘how much yardage of fabric do I have to buy?’, ‘how big is the quilt going to be?’ and ‘how many shapes do I need to create it that big?’ So we’re doing the math, what I like to call ‘quilt math.’”
This unique initiative came to life after museum leadership reached out to MSU’s math department.
Claire Fuller, the dean of the Jones College of Science, Engineering and Technology at the school, said she was excited for the opportunity to combine forces with the museum to create a program that engages students in both math and arts simultaneously.
“You think of art and science as so different but in fact they play off each other, they feed into each other,” she said. “This helps people realize that but it also just gets kids excited about it.”
A pair of MSU math teachers – Cindy Kramer and Molly Williams – teamed up to stitch together the curriculum using the principles at play in Wolfe’s work after hosting a brainstorming session where math faculty went through the exhibit.
Williams, an associate professor in MSU’s Mathematics and Statistics department, said the quilts were “very mathematical in their design” and easily lent themselves to “generative” lesson plans that would allow teachers to mold the program to suit students from kindergarten on up through high school.
“We took those ideas and we figured out … some common themes for K-12 teachers to look at and say, ‘Hey, oh, okay, so if I've got a bunch of second graders, here's some really good ideas. Here's some good mathematics questions. Here's potentially what questions you might ask in the beginning. Here's how you might connect these ideas,’” Williams explained. “So we created these lesson plans for each of these groups because we knew that what teachers are really good at is that they're really good at working with their students.”
Once Kramer and Williams had sketched out the lesson plans, they invited teachers around the region to bring classes to the museum and test it out.
Justin Wynn, a geometry and math instructor at Paducah Tilghman High School, had one of his classes participate in those test runs in the spring and brought another back in August. He said getting to see the quilts first-hand at the museum is a far better visual aid for students.
“When they see it actually being applied it does actually help. We try to do that in the classroom but this gives us a better opportunity to do it,” he said. “It’s kind of like construction but on a smaller scale, I guess. It really can show [kids] … ‘well I might not build a house but I might quilt one day or I might be an artist one day and I may have to use some of these skills.’”
Williams echoed Wynn’s point, saying that interacting with the building blocks of design and geometry through art like this can help to broaden people’s understanding and spark joy.
“We do want students to see [that while] you're learning about parallelograms and squares and rhombuses in your classroom, they do exist naturally out in the world,” she said. “It's intended for elementary age kids, just identifying shapes. But these quilts are so rich that, like, you could take anyone at any age, and actually you can see the joy and people going, ‘Oh yeah … now see these parallelograms and I didn't see this as a parallelogram over here. It's really kind of fun.”
Glasby this type of program is ideal to help kids connect classroom concepts and ground them in reality.
“It’s that real-world application coming together in a way that’s so clear with this exhibition but then also a way to go, ‘Oh, well other art, other quilts, other types of things might utilize math in different ways’ and where else can [they] see that in their own lives, in their world around them,” she said.
Though Wolfe’s exhibit has wrapped up its run in Paducah, the museum has plans to continue the initiative. Glasby said that her team is working with Wolfe – who is creating a pair of half-size replica versions of two of her works – to set up versions of the program that can be done on-site at the National Quilt Museum and off-site in Kentucky schools and in institutions across the country.
Though the program wasn’t a surprising development to Wolfe, she does hope that it can make a difference for some kids that go through it.
“Hopefully it can plant a seed in young people that quilts have an artistic value,” she said. “And who knows, maybe it’ll turn them into quilters or [help them] find their creative side by using math.”
