The first art quilt gallery in New York City
A
s the owner of a quilt shop for the past 20 years, I have been to the Houston Quilt Market many times. It’s the place to find out what’s new, what’s trending, meet other store owners, and gather general knowledge of the quilting world. However, what kept me going over and over again were the quilts. Quilts, Inc., the sponsor of Quilt Market, exhibits more than 1000 of the most beautiful quilts in the world in any given year, and I could never spend enough time looking at them. Year after year, I would go to Houston and look at these magnificent quilts. I realized that outside of the quilting community, relatively few people knew about this amazing art form. Because our store, The City Quilter, was located in the heart of Manhattan, it always seemed to me that we would have a built-in audience and maybe even
10 | SAQA Art Quilt Collector
by Cathy Izzo
a market for these incredible works of art. However, opening a gallery always seemed like too big a leap and running the shop was more than a full-time job. Then the store next door to ours became vacant, and our landlord, wanting to fill it quickly and easily, approached us with a pretty good deal. We had expanded once already, so we were not really thinking of getting more space, but we decided to take advantage of an offer that would not come again. We didn’t have a lot of time to prepare, but I knew that I wanted to try to bring art quilts to New York City. Suddenly the possibility of opening a gallery became real and quite exciting. During the next six months, we not only planned the store addition, but also constructed a gallery and made many decisions about things like hanging sys-
