Arts One Presents is exploring Springdale’s intercultural identities by collaborating with community crafters and organizations to create barn quilts that highlight established places of cultural importance to the diverse making communities in Downtown Springdale.

Once completed, the Springdale Barn Quilt Project will add stops to the NWA Barn Quilt Trail in Springdale, connecting the trail from Fayetteville to Rogers along the Northwest Arkansas Greenway.

Arts One Presents has registered these new Barn Quilts to the Arkansas Quilt Trail registry for the public to discover and enjoy. Each Barn Quilt represents and celebrates aspects of their designer’s respective craft and culture from their community’s traditions and practices found within the region.

It is our mission to use the Springdale Barn Quilt Project as a mechanism with which to explore and discuss this intersection in the context of the diverse, established communities in Springdale.

As this town continues to develop, Arts One Presents looks to amplify local creative conventions and engage with our neighbor's cultures to create a body of works that carry old traditions with new meanings while identifying pre-existing communities, their cultures, and crafts, while investing in their sustaining existence as community places.

We view this as not only an opportunity to invest in the sustaining of culturally-critical places in downtown Springdale, but also connect the area to the greater Northwest Arkansas Barn Quilt Trail and the larger national public art and open-air museum movement.

We are expanding the traditional barn quilt movement to represent the identities, places, and crafts that create the diversity of modern Ozark homes in 2023.

Springdale is a patchwork of intersecting communities that each have their own distinct traditions and visual styles that are informed by their history, place, and native materials.

Like a quilt, the complete product made from combined individual pieces creates a sense of belonging, home, and comfort. Quilts, textiles, and their enduring patterns carry a cultural significance and personal meaning to their creators and beholders that often surpass monetary or market value.

The barn quilt was officially established as a vernacular outdoor community art practice in the early 2000s in Appalachian Ohio by Susan Groves to honor her mother’s lifelong dedication to the craft of quilting.

The plywood squares are decorated with geometric patterns of bright colors hang on the sides of buildings (conventionally barns) and stand at the intersection of art, craft, public place, and personal identity. As families throughout rural counties and states installed a hand-painted quilt square to their own barn, barn quilt trails developed and now create a network of community-contributed art and open-air museum viewership.

For the public art project, fiber and textile crafters from across Northwest Arkansas responded to a call for qualifications in early 2023 for the opportunity to design and paint a barn quilt that expresses their craft’s tradition, culture, and community.

Applicants were diverse in age, medium, cultural background, experience, and county. Their work considered topics ranging from climate change, capitalism, and family. A panel of community stakeholders selected four applicants who are representative of the craft’s presence in Northwest Arkansas.

These barn quilts now hang at places of significance for historic and contemporary communities in Downtown Springdale. Look out for these quilt panels around the Razorback Regional Greenway and Emma Avenue and maybe even paint your own!

Arts One Presents is excited to have the opportunity to collaborate with the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History to display a collection of textile & fiber arts created by makers who responded to the Springdale Barn Quilt Project call for qualifications in conjunction with their new exhibit, Ozark Home, Beyond the Frame. The works are just a small sample of the wide variety of textile and fiber crafts made in Northwest Arkansas and are an interesting examination of when making tradition meets contemporary topics.

Read More: Ozark Home, Beyond the Frame