In the eight months since she became executive director of the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, Nancy Bavor has tried to get one message out to the public: “This is not your grandmother’s quilt museum.”
Regulars in downtown San Jose’s art scene certainly know that the museum — which first opened in 1977 — regularly explores cutting edge work in textile art, showcasing cultural pieces that illustrate how much our world really is connected by threads. But it’s a harder message to get out to the general public, Bavor says, which often thinks of quilts as something quaint that you curl up under on the couch or find hanging in a craft fair.
