Don’t bother asking Ken Burns to go deep on the background of, say, a Star of Bethlehem or Log Cabin quilt. Sure he can speak to such things, but for the award-winning filmmaker, whose six-part documentary The American Revolution recently hit four billion minutes of streaming, quilts are less an intellectual fact-finding pursuit than a visceral experience.
Ken spent much of his childhood under a quilt lovingly stitched by his grandmother, who was instrumental in raising him after his mother died when he was 11. “She took over in a way and became very central in my life,” he says of the 4-foot, 11-inch “powerhouse of a person” who got a Ph.D. in science from Yale University in the early 1920s, when such things simply weren’t done.
“I was born in 1953, and I can remember her giving it to me, so it might have been in the very early ’60s,” he says. “I slept under it literally every day until I started to see that the backing was fraying when I was in my 20s, and so I repaired it.” To this day, he keeps it right next to his bed in his 1820s New Hampshire farmhouse. “It connects me to this remarkable woman,” he says.
It’s quilts like that—crafted by everyday Americans, usually women—that he finds most moving. “The quilts I’ve been collecting for half a century are made by women, all of them,” he says. That may seem surprising for a filmmaker who has produced documentaries about everyone from Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Franklin to Mark Twain, but perhaps that’s precisely why he chooses to spend his downtime differently: “The history that we are mainly given is a kind of top-down history; it’s mostly the story of ‘Great Men’—capital G, capital M—and it often neglects what is a much more direct expression of an American character.”
Ken notes that even his most recent passion project postulates that we wouldn’t have a country without George Washington, and he says it “is true and exhilarating to have that sort of top-down version verified. But it’s also true that it doesn’t happen without a myriad of people I’d never heard of when I began the project 10 years ago. And I would wager that most people had never heard of them before—teenagers and Native people and free and enslaved Blacks, and also women, who represent half the population.”
While Ken admits that he’s in the dark about the provenance of many quilts he owns, he embraces the uncertainty. “I meet a lot of women who are very excited that I have such an extraordinary collection, and they start talking, and immediately they go into the details,” he says.
While he acknowledges that he can wax on about the differences between a Star of Bethlehem and a Log Cabin and a Postage Stamp “and all of that,” he insists that he is not primarily interested in the study aspect. “I’m interested in having a relationship with these things that have become, in a way, my friends,” he says. “Like, why did you decide to be friends with your best friend? You may know what the circumstances are, but your head didn’t decide. Your heart did.”
These “friends” of Ken’s now number well over 100, and he’s not a big fan of long-distance relationships. “Periodically museums come and take [the quilts] away for touring exhibitions, and I miss these people, these quilts,” he says. “I remember a couple of years ago when a whole bunch came back from a touring exhibition after being gone for a year and a half. I left them out on a long 15-foot library table for six months just to go, ‘Hi, you’re back.’”
Most of the quilts in his collection are in rotation, but a handful are mainstays, including his first quilt purchase from the mid-’70s. “I was in Lewes, Delaware, which is an old Dutch fishing town on the Delaware Bay that predates even English colonization. There was a little antiques store, and there was this orange quilt. It was so spectacular, the stitching and the quilting were so amazing, that I got it. I hung it up. It’s never moved from its location,” he says.
Many of the others are stored in his New Hampshire barn. “I don’t have any more wall space,” he admits. “But there are several farm ladders over each rung of which are draped as many quilts as can be, and then a couple of glass cabinets that are filled with folded quilts that you can see almost like a library. We of course take them out and refold them and put tissue paper between them and protect them, but a lot of them are just hanging on wooden rods and dowels, almost like curtain rods, from every available wall that I have in every place that I rest my head.”
You’ll find an Amish crib quilt with blue, red, and a little bit of black; a Gee’s Bend quilt; centennial quilts; an African-American alphabet quilt; and a Mennonite Star of Bethlehem that’s “just phenomenal.” His oldest one likely dates to the 1820s or 1830s. “Nobody knows for sure,” he says.
One of the things Ken appreciates about quilt collecting is the accessible economics of it. “We think of art now as a commodity, as something to sell. What causes art to go on the front page of the newspaper is not how spectacular it is—it’s how much money it went for, and that’s missing the whole point,” he says.
“I work at PBS,” he adds, perhaps jokingly. “I can’t buy expensive paintings, but quilts are the truest expression of an American art. I can’t even call it a hobby, because they all have such meaning.”
Those who’ve gotten wind of Ken’s passion—a 2018 exhibition at the International Quilt Museum let the cat out of the bag—will occasionally send potential purchases his way. “We hold them up in the office, and I’ll go, ‘Nope’ or ‘I’ve got something similar,’ and it’s just like catch-and-release,” he says. “There’s not a not bad one in the lot. I’m just trying to make this collection as eclectic and wild and as [waiting] to get stopped in your tracks by a beautiful work of art.”
Such efforts include visits to quilt-centric destinations all over the Northeast and beyond. “It evolved to where I would travel farther afield, making a trip to meet a quilt dealer in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania; New York; or Maine,” Ken says. But he acknowledges that even those quilt dealers rarely know the origins of their quilts.
“You may know it was stitched by Hannah, but you don’t know if she was 18 or 28 or 88...was she happy or sad, [was she] married? Did she do this together with other women or alone?” he says. “In my work, I’m restlessly not accepting of the historical mysteries, but in this case I let it go. Unlike my day job, which is trying to solve mysteries, this just works. Quilts are just a beautiful thing, like a sunset or a sugar maple ablaze with red and orange—one of those things where you just sort of shake your head and realize how insignificant we are in the face of creation. Quilts remind us of something bigger than ourselves.”
