The art of Amish quilts is highlighted in a Smithsonian American Art Museum exhibition running through Aug. 26 in Washington, D.C.

“Pattern and Paradox: The Quilts of Amish Women” is accompanied by two public lectures in May.

The exhibition celebrates a gift announced in 2021 of Amish quilts to the museum by Faith and Stephen Brown.

The Browns began collecting quilts in 1977, four years after encountering Amish quilts for the first time at the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery.

The 50 quilts featured in “Pattern and Paradox” include 39 from the museum’s collection and 11 promised gifts. Around 100 additional quilts from the Browns’ collection are promised to the museum as a bequest.

“Faith and Stephen Brown assembled this extraordinary collection with care and devotion over some four decades after a revelatory visit to the Renwick Gallery. It comprises the largest and most widely representative group of Amish quilts ever to be acquired by a major art museum,” said Stephanie Stebich, the Margaret and Terry Stent director.

In the late 19th century, Amish women adopted an artform already established within the larger American culture and made it distinctly their own, developing community and familial preferences with women sharing work, skills and patterns.

The quilts in “Pattern and Paradox” were made between 1880 and 1950 in communities united by faith, values of conformity and humility and a rejection of “worldly” society.

No specific guidelines governed quilt patterns or colors, so Amish women explored uncharted territory, pushing cultural limitations by innovating within a community that values adherence to rules.

Styles, patterns and color preferences eventually varied and distinguished the various settlements.

By the mid-20th century, Amish quilts were being shown in museums, a development that the Amish were not necessarily comfortable with.

“These objects traveled into the art world in the late 20th century, but the Amish women who made them never intended them to be seen as artworks,” said Leslie Umberger, curator of folk and self-taught art.

“Audiences and collectors responded to the striking color combinations and inventive abstract patterns, but the Amish were uneasy with the idea of having made and possessing museum- worthy, valuable artworks and began divesting of these quilts.

“Seen here, hanging on the gallery walls like paintings, they prompt us to consider the subjectivity of words like ‘artist’ and ‘art’ and how cultural perspective can transform one’s understanding of an object.”

Janneken Smucker, professor of history at West Chester University in Pennsylvania, is the primary author of the exhibition catalog book and contributed to the exhibition. She is a fifth-generation quiltmaker of Amish Mennonite heritage.

Smucker will give a lecture on Amish quilts May 23 and a gallery talk with Umberger May 24.