Asheville, North Carolina, February 19, 2013
The nonprofit Quilt Alliance welcomes a new board member, Pauline Macaulay, a British educator and oral historian. She joins a dynamic group of 21 board volunteers, who include noted quiltmakers, historians, curators, journalists and top quilt industry executives.  | | Pauline Macaulay |
Pauline Macaulay's career includes more than 20 years of leadership and management experience as a primary teacher and head teacher in state schools in inner London. She has a doctorate in social anthropology and education from the Institute of Education, University of London. A longtime member of the Quilters' Guild of the British Isles,Pauline is a quilter who has pursued an interest in oral history and quilting by attending training courses in oral history, digital editing and archiving at the British Library, London. Recently, she has been working on a project to collect, save and archive the stories of individuals active in the U.K.'s quilt revival. This project is modeled, in part, on the Alliance's oral history project, Quilters' S.O.S. - Save Our Stories, which is archived at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. "As a passionate quilter with an abiding interest in quilter's stories, I am thrilled to join the board of the Quilt Alliance with its shared vision of preserving and disseminating the stories of quilts and quiltmakers," says Pauline Macaulay. "As a 'Brit' I am particularly delighted to join at a time when the quilting community is increasingly a global quilting community sharing its diverse interests, interpretations and inspirations." Pauline is the second international board member of the Quilt Alliance, joining Alex Veronelli, product manager for Italian thread company Aurifil. Having changed its name last year from the Alliance for American Quilts, the Quilt Alliance has been embracing the increasingly international flavor of this craft. The story of quilts is spreading, and the Alliance is spreading with it.
This global change is reflected in various Alliance projects, including The Quilt Index, www.QuiltIndex.org, which is run in partnership with Michigan State University Museum and MATRIX: Center for Humane Arts, Letters and Social Sciences Online at MSU. The Index includes images of and information about more than 54,000 quilts in museums, state documentation
projects and private collections. Recently, the Index added quilts
from Canada and South Africa,
as part of a project to turn it into
an international resource. Since it was founded in 1993, the Quilt Alliance has had a mission to document, preserve and share the stories of quilts and their makers. Passionate and committed board members such as Pauline Macaulay are instrumental in that work. |
