“All my quilts have meaning,” says Brittany Bowen Burton (BS ’02). “I can still remember what was happening in my life when I made them. When I see them or snuggle into them, I recall that. Each quilt has a role and place.”
Burton grew up in Salt Lake City amid her mother’s and grandmother’s quilting frames. She sewed her first quilt, a Christmas present for her sister, as a preteen. Instead of a big trip for her high-school graduation, she asked her parents for a sewing machine. In college Burton mourned a difficult breakup by spending a weekend making a quilt.
Burton says quilting has been liberating for her, whether she is creating works for comfort or for high art. She likes to test her own improvisational limits, and her artistry has received acclaim, including an award from the Modern Quilt Guild for her piece Madonna. “[Quilting has] long been marginalized as women’s work,” Burton says. “But today quilts are being recognized as works of art and great skill.”
