Truck Rest

Along the Merrimack River, thirty miles outside of Boston, you’ll find Lowell, Massachusetts, a city designed and planned as a complex for manufacturing textiles in the 1820s.  Within thirty years, it had become the biggest industrial center in America.  It’s life as a city waxed and waned for years, falling into difficult times during the Great Depression in the 20th Century, and reviving as the home of Wang Laboratories in the 70s.  While Wang Laboratories went bankrupt in the early 90s, the city remained a strong cultural center for people via the Lowell National Historical Park and the Lowell Folk Festival (occurring in July, one of the biggest free folk festivals in the country).  The annual festival brought new life into the city, allowing it to build a new ballpark and arena, and bring in two minor league teams, the Lowell Spinners and the Lowell Devils.  Over the decades, museums were established to explore Lowell’s heritage in the Industrial Revolution of the 19th Century, museums that examined the life of the textile worker and immigrant of the 1800s, in places such as the Boott Cotton Mills Museum, the American Textile History Museum, and the National Streetcar Museum.
 
Each of these museums are worth a visit, but if you’re a history buff and coming to stay overnight in one of the hotels Lowell has available for its travelers, then don’t overlook the New England Quilt Museum.
  
Through February 25, 2010, the museum is currently exhibiting Masters: Art Quilts, which examines the state of the art in quilting.  Martha Sielman, guest curator, has arranged for works to represent master art quilters, and so has on display quilts from international artists, such as Australia, Japan, Israel, South Africa, Denmark, the UK, France, and Belgium.  If you go, you’ll see work by Noriko Endo, whose quilts feature realistic and detailed landscapes, and Jane Sassaman, whose work consists of strong, waving designs.  You’ll see what’s possible in the world of quilting, and it goes far beyond what you might consider — there’s portraits, sculpture-like works, narratives, still lifes, and so on — indeed, there’s as much diversity in art quilting as there is in painting or sculpture!

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