Kansas Windmill quilt, Virginia Jean Cox Mitchell

Exhibition Label:
"Personal Geometry: Quilts by Yoshiko Jinzenji and Virginia Jean Cox Mitchell," Feb-2014, Susan Earle and Cassandra Mesick
This quilt features the Kansas windmill quilt block and tells a story about Kansas summers and the artist’s memories of the ranch her family rented near Cunningham, Kansas. She would go out and count the cattle in the pasture after Sunday school, a memory suggested here by the Hereford cow musing among the sunflowers. After the cattle were accounted for, the young artist would eat watermelon from the garden, kept cool in a tank near the windmill. She included the state bird (meadowlark) and various animals and insects, as well as a rooster fancifully sitting on a weathervane. The rooster is reminiscent of a cast-iron windmill weight in the Spencer Museum collection, which Mitchell helped to catalogue in the past. This quilt serves dual function as a cape and includes buttons for over-the-shoulder wear.

Exhibition Label:
"Kansas Quilts," Jul-1996, Nancy Corwin
For many years my father rented part of the Sears Ranch near Cunningham, Kansas, and after Sunday-school in the summer we would go out to the pasture to count the cattle. Its predominant feature was a windmill, which I have depicted with its sails in the Kansas Windmill quilt pattern. The rooster is similar to a cast-iron windmill weight in the collection of the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas, altrhough he's fancifully located on the vane. Our mother told my sister and me the names of all the wildflowers growing in the buffalo grass: cone-flower, prairie rose, daisy, gaillardia. Daddy's brand "22" is on the Hereford which, Ferdinand-like, is smelling a black-eyed susan. Perched on the sunflower is our state bird, the meadowlark, while a bee, our state insect, is about to alight on the daisy. There was only one tree on all those acres, a snag of a willow, growing by the stock tank; a viceroy butterfly is feeding on its leaves. A dragonfly searches for some water while two iridescent beetles swim around in it. A red-tailed hawk watches a jack-rabbit that looks something like a chocolate bunny, symbolizing the fact and fancy of which memories are made. Daddy bought stock salt from the Carey mines in Hutchinson; a cake of it is by the tank. In an arid part of the pasture, where several kinds of cacus grew, there was a prairie-dog town. After the cattle had been accounted for we could cut a watermelon from Momma's garden, which had been cooling in the water tank by the windmill. With the sun high in the Kansas sky, it was always hot!
Virginia Jean Cox Mitchell