Nancy Crow: Quilting the seventy-five thousand dollar quilt
Sometimes you catch things reading local news that just throws you for a loop. A Baltimore, Ohio woman named Nancy Crow has made quilts that she has sold for $8,000 – $75,000
While studying fine arts at Ohio State in the late 1960s, she says she wanted to be a potter but became allergic to clay dust.
Now her quilts sell for prices ranging from $8-thousand dollars to $75-thousand dollars and have been displayed in museums around the U-S, including the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian is Washington DC.
Okay, for someone who accidentally fell into quilt making, this is amazing.
Now, I am one of those people who never really took quilting seriously until I began reading fellow b5media blogger, Mary Emma Allen’s blog, Quilting and Patchwork. Quilting is one of those things that is very stereotyped as well. We think of little old ladies who collect scraps of fabric from over the years and sew them together and give them away to family.
While these are precious to us and priceless in their own right, my granny never sold one and paid for a house or my college education off of the income of a quilt. But then again her name wasn’t Nancy Crow. Nancy tells a little about her creative process on her site.
When I work on a quilt, I put away all thoughts that are not helpful and channel my energies towards relaxing and becoming one with my fabrics. Since I work intuitively, this is absolutely important. I begin to see shapes in my head and think about how to cut them out of my huge palette of colors that I have hand-dyed in my basement dye studio. Never, ever do I think about what others expect or want or what will sell, but rather I look at my time in my studio as a process of discovery. I love being inside my brain and pushing myself to think in ever more complex ways because I know the ideas are there for the taking. It’s all about being focused and disciplined and making use of one’s abilities. And about being alone, in solitude, so one can think and feel deeply without interruption. I have definitely grown far closer to myself rather than to others because I see my quiltmaking as my experience which has nothing to do with other people.
Dang it, if I want to make money from my art, maybe I should sit down and make a quilt instead…lol.
5 Comments
[...] Lehman, at Artist Hideout, called my attention to his post about renowned quilter Nancy Crow. He had discovered a story about her in his local news which told how her rather accidentally [...]
Great post, William. I mentioned it at Quilting and Patchwork. Nancy Crow has interested me since my early quilting days in the 1970s.
Ah, I wish it were that simple William
Nancy Crow is at the top 1% of her field, and like “fine” artists can command those prices. I came to art quilts through a background in fine art & it’s just as challenging to make a living in 
I sure love it though…
Part of making the big bucks is first growing a reputation and then knowing how to market your pieces. I’m sure it doesn’t happen over night.
Yes, I don’t think it does either. I am curious though if quilts are easier to sell then other types of art?