Quilts and other fiber arts have traditionally been considered inferior decorative arts compared to painting and sculpture due to a historical hierarchy that valued art forms created primarily by men over those created by women. However, the feminist movements of the 20th century challenged this aesthetic hierarchy and helped elevate fiber arts to be appreciated more as fine arts through the work of pioneering artists like Gunta Stolzl, Anni Albers, Miriam Schapiro, and many others from the 1970s onward.

1. WOMEN and QUILTS
More Than Just Decorative
by Jeanne Aird
for Professor M. Deyasi
Art 508
Department of Art and Design
University of Idaho
2009

2. There is a hierarchy in
the arts: decorative art
at the bottom, and the
human form at the top.
Because we are men.
—Le Corbusier and
Amedee Ozenfant,
1918

3. Fiber art in general and art quilts specifically,
are considered inferior to painting and
sculpture because of an aesthetic hierarchy
that has deemed certain forms of art, those
usually created by men, as dominant over
those art forms created primarily by women.

4. Portrait of an Old Man with a Boy by
Marietta Robusti Tintoretto, c. 1585

5. Gunta Stolzl & Anni Albers

6. Old Mistresses, Women, Art and Ideology

7. e First Wave of Feminism

8. Second Wave of Feminism

9. Project Womanhouse

10. Miriam Schapiro’s Femmages

11. Third Wave of Feminism

13. Fiber Art of the 1970’s

14. Quilts as Art