San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles

The mission of the San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles is to promote the art, craft, and history of quilts and textiles. The Museum advocates on behalf of quilts and textiles as a distinctly accessible and unifying visual, sculptural, and kinetic art form pioneered and practiced by people worldwide for thousands of years to create objects of beauty, use, and meaning.

Core Values

We celebrate quilts and textiles as forms of artistic and cultural expression that are at the core of human experience and that can be created, appreciated and enjoyed by all people.

We marvel at the resourcefulness and inventiveness that people show in using a tremendous diversity of fibrous materials-vegetable, animal and synthetic--and devising a wealth of fiber art making techniques-spinning, dyeing, felting, weaving, quilting, crochet, knitting, lacemaking, coiling, digital printing, etc.-to add beauty and give meaning to our lives.

We embrace both the fiber art that interprets established community traditions, aesthetics, and values, and that which seeks to express a uniquely personal aesthetic and set of values.

We honor quilts and textiles as women's and people of color's remarkable contributions to the history of art, culture and science.

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