by Suzi Parron, Donna Sue Groves and Donna Sue Groves
Ohio University Press, 2012
eISBN: 978-0-8040-4049-5 | Paper: 978-0-8040-1138-9
Library of Congress Classification NA8230.P36 2012
Dewey Decimal Classification 7253720973

ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC
ABOUT THIS BOOK

The story of the American Quilt Trail, featuring the colorful patterns of quilt squares painted large on barns throughout North America, is the story of one of the fastest-growing grassroots public arts movements in the United States and Canada. In Barn Quilts and the American Quilt Trail Movement Suzi Parron takes us to twenty-five states as well as Canada to visit the people and places that have put this movement on America’s tourist and folk art map.


Through dozens of interviews with barn quilt artists, committee members, and barn owners, Parron documents a journey that began in 2001 with the founder of the movement, Donna Sue Groves. Groves’s desire to honor her mother with a quilt square painted on their barn became a group effort that eventually grew into a county-wide project. Today, quilt squares form a long imaginary clothesline, appearing on more than three thousand barns scattered along one hundred and twenty driving trails.


With more than eighty full-color photographs, Parron documents here a movement that combines rural economic development with an American folk art phenomenon.