COURTESY OF ART
Author and quilt historian Janneken Smucker has been named co-winner of the 2023 New Deal Book Award for her latest book, A New Deal for Quilts.
Smucker’s book, to be published in 2023 by the International Quilt Museum (IQM) and distributed by the University of Nebraska Press, shares this year’s award with author Brooke L. Blower for her book Americans in a World at War: Intimate Histories from the Crash of Pan Am’s Yankee Clipper.
The award is presented annually by the California-based nonprofit Living New Deal. Officially founded in 2007 at the University of California, Berkeley, Living New Deal’s goal is to document the legacy of the New Deal. The organization’s book award was launched in 2021 to recognize and promote nonfiction books about U.S. history during the New Deal era.
Submitted works are reviewed by a rotating committee of academics and New Deal historians from across the United States. Subjects run the gamut, from biographies and essay collections to art histories and political analysis.
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“‘A New Deal for Quilts’ offers a new perspective on how the policies to combat the Great Depression shaped the daily lives of ordinary Americans — especially women — and how, in turn, domestic customs like quilting influenced those very policies,” wrote Scott Borchert in Living New Deal’s review of Smuckers’ book. “Smuckers’ clear prose and expert knowledge, combined with the book’s sumptuous visual design — with many striking black-and-white photographs from the 1930s alongside color images of the quilts themselves — make this an exceptional contribution to the study of the New Deal.”
Smucker’s book examines the U.S. government’s use of quilts and quiltmaking in response to the economic and financial turmoil of the Great Depression. The government promoted the comforting symbolism of quilts, along with the frugal aspects of their manufacture, to publicize New Deal initiatives and strengthen the vocational skills of impoverished women.
The release of A New Deal for Quilts coincided with an exhibition of the same name featuring select quilts from the 1930s in the Gottsch Gallery at IQM. A virtual tour of the gallery is available at internationalquiltmuseum.org/exhibitions/past-exhibitions.
Smucker is a history professor at West Chester University in Pennsylvania. She hosts and co-produces “Running Stitch – A QSOS Podcast” in collaboration with the national nonprofit Quilt Alliance, drawing on oral histories of contemporary quilters.
Copies of A New Deal for Quilts are available online from the University of Nebraska Press. For more information about the book and Smuckers’ research project, visit newdealquilts.janneken.org.
Founded in 1941, the University of Nebraska Press is the largest university press between Chicago and California. UNP publishes scholarly and general interest books (with more than 6,000 titles in print and an additional 140 new titles each year). In addition to the Nebraska Press, the press also publishes books under the imprints Bison Books, The Backwaters Press, and Potomac Books, and publishes the books of the Jewish Publication Society.
The International Quilt Museum houses the world’s largest publicly displayed quilt collection, with objects from over 65 countries dating back to the 17th century. Founded in 1997, the museum was anchored by a donation of nearly 1,000 quilts from Ardis and Robert James to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
For more information about the museum and current exhibitions, visit internationalquiltmuseum.org.
