Shelly Zegart's love of American antique quilts began in the mid 1970s when she discovered quilts to use as art on the walls of her newly built contemporary home. From the first night she was shown a large group of quilts for sale, an intense and ever expanding passion for quilts, their history and the stories they tell was born. Reared in quilt- rich western Pennsylvania, Zegart settled in 1968, in Louisville, Kentucky, another area where quilting has long been practiced with skill and passion.

Co-founder and driving force behind The Kentucky Quilt Project, the first state quilt documentation project, she has gone on to collect, curate, lecture and write about quilts for more than 25 years. She was an organizer in 1991-1992 of Louisville Celebrates the American Quilt a group of events, exhibitions and publications planned to illustrate and further the developments in the field over the twenty years since the beginning of the current quilt revival.

She has curated many exhibits here and abroad, including an exhibition of Kentucky quilts in Australia in 1987 for the Womens' Committee of the National Trust of Australia. In 1999 she curated Kentucky Quilts: Roots and Wings, a traveling exhibition and catalogue organized by the Kentucky Folk Art Center at Morehead University that examined the Kentucky quilt mystique past and present. . In 2001 she co-curated three quilt exhibitions titled "A Heritage of Genius: American Master Quilts Past and Present" in lobby galleries of the Durst Organization buildings in mid town Manhattan and wrote the accompanying catalogue. She was the sole consultant to the author and publisher of the Phyllis George book Living With Quilts, (1999). Most recent exhibitions, publications and consulting projects include The Quilts of Gee's Bend publications (2002); and Mosaic Textiles: In Search of the Hexagon (an international comparative exhibition representing nine countries) Rouen, France. (2003)

Nihon Vogue of Tokyo published her book American Quilt Collections: Antique Quilt Masterpieces (1997). In 1998 she was an invited lecturer at World Quilt '98 in Tokyo, Japan.

Articles by and about Zegart have appeared in Country Home magazine, Country Living magazine, Travel and Leisure, the Courier- Journal newspaper, and many other publications.

Zegart was a panelist for choosing the 100 Best Quilts of the 20th century and three of her antique quilts were among those chosen for the honor for an exhibition and publication produced by Primedia in 2000.

She was a founder in 1993 of the not for profit The Alliance for American Quilts a 501 C3 not for profit organization (1993). Currently, as President of the Board of Directors she coordinates the activities of its University and Museum partners.

A member of the Appraisers Association of America for more than twenty years, Zegart has appraised quilts for insurance, charitable donation, business, and estate evaluation purposes. She has appraised quilts for a number of not-for-profit institutions and private collections across the country. In 1997, she wrote a two-part article, "Understanding Appraisals" for the IQA Journal, International Quilters Association, Houston, Texas, Fall 1997. She has lectured on the topic of appraising quilts at New York University and for the national meeting of the Appraisers Association of America as part of a panel on "Art in Volatile Markets". She was a panelist at the seminar "Appraising Your Quilts: From Antique Quilts to Art Quilts", at the International Quilt Festival in Houston in 1998.

Zegart's background includes more than fifteen years as a board member of the Louisville Visual Art Association, a not for profit contemporary art center where she served as Chairperson of the organization and headed many of the standing committees.

She collects and studies both contemporary art and antique quilts. Zegart has built private and corporate quilt collections around the world. With her website, www.shellyquilts.com, Zegart has taken her love of quilts to the internet.

Several Qquilts from her private collection have recently been acquired by The Art Institute of Chicago. An exhibition of those quilts will is planned to open at The Art Institute in March 16,of 2004 and be on display until the end of September 2004.Shelly will speak at the opening .Her topic is: American Quilts: A Patchwork of Meanings, Purposes and Origins.

| Splash | Home | About Shelly | Consultant | Broker | Appraiser | Lecturer | Curator |
| Author | Quilts | How to Order | Contact Us | E-mail | Guest Book |

©Copyright 2000-2003, Shelly Zegart Quilts, Etc, All rights reserved.