The quilts exhibited in the Nancy Donahue Gallery range in age from the early 1800s to the 1970s.

This selection demonstrates the remarkable evolution of textile dying techniques used to create the color green--Quercitron was extracted from the bark of the North American Black Oak tree; two-step or overdyed processing involved the use of multiple colors like yellow and blue; and synthetic dyes introduced in the last quarter of the nineteenth century have taken many decades to perfect. For a color so closely associated with the natural world, green has been a notoriously challenging, and often poisonous, color to manufacture.