It’s Not Easy Getting Green

Selections from the Permanent Collection

On View June 24 through September 20, 2025

The quilts exhibited in the Nancy Donahue Gallery range in age from the early 1800s to the 1970s.

This selection demonstrates the remarkable evolution of textile dying techniques used to create the color green--Quercitron was extracted from the bark of the North American Black Oak tree; two-step or overdyed processing involved the use of multiple colors like yellow and blue; and synthetic dyes introduced in the last quarter of the nineteenth century have taken many decades to perfect. For a color so closely associated with the natural world, green has been a notoriously challenging, and often poisonous, color to manufacture.

Hexagon Mosaic, circa 1845 - Sara Ellis Clark Ide · Milford, MA - Gift of Natalie Dickinson Valiton and Dana L. Dickinson, 2018.07

Valley of the Mississippi, circa 1850 - Vincy Ann Miller Birdsey · Meriden, CT - Gift of John R. Reese, 1999.05

Grandmother’s Flower Garden, c 1930 - Anna Kane · North Adams, MA - Gift of Rhea Teves-Cate, 2013.39