When the first Quilt National exhibition was mounted at The Dairy Barn Southeastern Ohio Cultural Arts Center in Athens, Ohio in 1979, no one imagined that this biennial would become the institution that it is today in the world of so-called "art quilts." The brainchild of Nancy Crow, Françoise Barnes and Virginia Randles, all quilters residing at the time in Athens, the first iteration of this juried competition was modest by today's standards, but it immediately became a focal point for experimentation with the quilt as a tradition-bending form. The energy and interest that it generated right out of the gate has never waned in the forty-five years since.

Nancy Crow and I began corresponding in 1976 but had not yet met in person. We shared a missionary's zeal when it came to promoting alternative views of what quilts could be. While we were both visionaries in terms of our own studio work and what we hoped that might become, Nancy and her artist colleagues took those visionary impulses one step further. Quilt National '79 was the result. To my delight and ongoing gratification, they invited me to serve alongside gallerist and art consultant Renee Steidle, and university art professor Gary Schwindler, on the inaugural jury of the show. The experience resonates with me still, more than four decades distant.

Above and below, scenes from the jurying of the first Quilt National exhibition in Athens, Ohio in April, 1979. To my right in the photo above are jurors Gary Schwindler and Renee Steidle, and seated in the background is one of QN's founders, Nancy Crow. Today QN is fully international in range and breadth, with adherents and exhibitors in most parts of the world. During that first jurying day, none of us anticipated the importance that QN would assume over time.

It's been too long to recall much of the content of the discussions we jurors and organizers had that day, but I do recall that they were weighty, and there wasn't much hilarity punctuating them. We took our jobs seriously, part of that deriving from the seriousness that was modeled for us by the organizers. There had been a very good response to the exhibition's call for submissions, as the ten slide carousels visible in the above photo attest. Whatever parameters the organizers had set at the time, we understood that they sought only what we believed was the best work that had been submitted, work that embodied new ways of thinking about quilts and what quilts could say and mean.

A dinner discussion in progress at the end of the jurying of Quilt National 1979. Nancy Crow sits to my left, and juror Renee Steidle is in the foreground. We couldn't know at the time how impactful that exhibition would be, but we did understand that a new and large constituency had coalesced in the three years since the US Bicentennial celebrations. That group of makers had brought vivid imagination and new energy to quiltmaking, and this show would bring it to a wide public.

One of the highlights for me of that first-ever trip to Athens, Ohio in April of 1979, was the opportunity to visit Nancy Crow in her studio, to see in person the space where her creative drive played out most palpably. I'd recognized from the moment I first saw a Nancy Crow quilt that she was motivated by ambitions similar to my own, and that she had the chops to realize them. We were both impatient with traditional ways of thinking about quilts and we were beginning to understand that a true movement springing from maverick impulses was burgeoning.

In Nancy Crow I felt I had an ally, a colleague who was working toward many of the same possibilities that I was. Over the course of the nearly half century that we've known one another and admired one another's creative output, I think we've each made singular and important bodies of work following our respective inspirations. I can't speak for Nancy, but for myself, knowing that we were on different but parallel trajectories, that we were both dedicated to realizing our respective visions, was affirming and reassuring.

I took this photo of Nancy Crow in her attic studio in Athens, Ohio in April 1979, at the time of the jurying of the first Quilt National exhibition. On Nancy's pin-up wall was the start of her great early quilt March Study, a piece that I find as compelling today as it was to me then. I hadn't yet moved into the studio that would become my own creative center – that was still under construction when I went out to Ohio – so Nancy's space seemed wildly grand to me then. I was still working in the small living room of a four-room apartment, very modest by comparison. All this said, it did feel great to have a peer, an artist colleague as dedicated to her own creative journey as I was to mine.

Below, March Study, full and detail views.

About a year later, in May of 1980, Nancy Crow made a fairly long road trip from her Ohio home to our then new home and studio in southeastern New England. She came for a long weekend, and with one primary objective. We'd each been invited by Paul Smith, then directing the American Craft Museum in New York City, to provide quilts for the exhibition Art for Use that the museum had organized to coincide with the Lake Placid Winter Olympics. After the installation at Lake Placid, the museum reprised the show at its Manhattan location. We drove down and back together that early May Sunday from Somerset, MA, a round trip of eight hours. And we both reveled in seeing our work hung in such august quarters. March Study was given pride of place at the entrance to the museum, facing out onto West 53rd Street. That piece could not have had a better or more well-deserved placement.

Above, Nancy Crow's March Study magnificently installed in the American Craft Museum's 1980 exhibition Art for Use, in the museum's West 53rd St. location. Nancy is at the left, facing the camera; behind her is my late wife Judith James; at right center is our son Trevor, seven years old at the time. Visible inside the museum, below Nancy's quilt, are quilts by Wenda von Weise (nearer the vitrine) and by Susan Hoffman (her monotone "Hourglass Infinity" from 1974). We were so proud to be part of the mix in such an important venue. Studio quilts were very much off and running!