San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles (San Jose, CA)

General

• Mission:

The mission of the San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles is to promote the art, craft and history of quilts and textiles. The Museum advocates on behalf of quilts and textiles as a distinctly accessible and unifying visual, sculptural, and kinetic art form pioneered and practiced by people worldwide for 10,000+ years to create objects of beauty, use, and meaning.

VISION
The San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles aims to be the premiere fiber art museum, promoting and provoking greater awareness, understanding, and appreciation of artwork created with fiber media.

CORE VALUES
• We celebrate quilts and textiles as forms of artistic and cultural expression that are at the core of human experience and that can be created, appreciated, and enjoyed by all people.
• We marvel at the resourcefulness and inventiveness that people show in using a tremendous diversity of fibrous materials—vegetable, animal, and synthetic--and devising a wealth of fiber art making techniques—spinning, dyeing, felting, weaving, quilting, crochet, knitting, lacemaking, coiling, digital printing, etc.—to add beauty and give meaning to our lives.
• We embrace both fiber art that interprets established community traditions, aesthetics, and values and that seeks to express a uniquely personal aesthetic and set of values.
• We honor quilts and textiles as women’s and people of color’s remarkable contributions to the history of art, culture and science.

• History:

Founded in 1977 by the Santa Clara Valley Quilt Association (SCVQA), the Museum was the brainchild of a group of forward-thinking women who—inspired by the back-to-the-land movement, the women’s movement, and the Bicentennial—sought to create an institution where quilts and textiles, and the lives of the mostly women who made them, would receive the attention and respect that they deserved. The Museum became a 501(c)(3) public-benefit corporation in 1986. After several decades of occupying a sequence of rented spaces, in late 2003 the Museum partnered with East Bay venture philanthropists to purchase and renovate an historic 13,000-square-foot 1923 building. After renovation, it opened in September 2005 as the Museum’s permanent home. SJMQT is now an anchor institution in SoFa, the burgeoning arts and entertainment district on South First Street in downtown San Jose.

• Year established:1977

Registration

• Organization type:Grantseeker
• Country of registration:United States
• Year established:1977
• Tax Determination Letter:Received Determination Letter
• IRS Section:501(c)(3)
• IRS Subsection:509(a)(2)