Millefleur quilt, Virginia Randles

Exhibition Label:
“Quilting Time and Space,” Jun-2010, Chassica Kirchhoff
Virginia Randles was an acclaimed fiber artist and quilt designer whose work demonstrates her wideranging interests through the layers of meaning present in her compositions and titles. The title of this quilt, Millefleur, literally means “thousand flowers,” and refers to a decorative tradition that encompasses objects as disparate as medieval tapestries, Persian carpets, and Venetian blown glass that incorporate a dense array of tiny flowers into their design. Millefleur designs reflect exchanges across cultures and media throughout history, and some scholars suggest that their popularity in tapestry designs, such as the Spencer Museum’s Leopard Hunt, is related to densely floral European manuscript illuminations, as well as to an influx of Persian and Mughal miniature paintings from Central Asia and India.

Randles’ quilt incorporates this decorative lineage into a centralized form. The concentric circles and serene, cloud-like center are reminiscent of both Buddhist mandalas and the radiating star patterns that were popular in American and Native American quilts from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Millefleur was created as part of a series called Paperweights, and it refers to the Venetian
tradition of trapping elaborate constructed floral
patterns, called millefiori, under a thick lens
of glass to create brightly colored paperweights.

Exhibition Label:
"Quilts: Flora Botanica," Jun-2008, Barbara Brackman and Susan Earle
In the 1970s Virginia Randles was one of a group of artists in Athens, Ohio, who recognized the need to showcase textile arts based on the quilt’s form. With Nancy Crow and Françoise Barnes she organized Quilt National, a juried exhibition for quilts designed to be viewed on a vertical plane-textiles generally called “art quilts” today.

For her Paperweight Series she drew from traditions in Italian glass. The millefiori or millefleur paperweight is a glass globe embedded with shapes and colors reflecting a “thousand flowers.”

Archive Label 2003:
Virginia Randles graduated from the University of Kansas Medical Center in the 1930s. She was one of the founding members of Quilt National, the prime juried exhibition of art quilts in the United States. Originally a weaver, Randles turned to making quilts in the 1970s.

Millefleur, which refers to an all-over pattern of small flowers, is an example of the artist’s interest in the color theory of Joseph Albers and in precise geometric patterns.