"Flag Quilt" by Brent Ruka Click photo for larger image.

A multicolored crazy quilt casually draped across a light green Victorian-era sofa speaks to a time when quilting was a domestic craft -- born of necessity, embellished by personal aesthetic and practiced by women.

But nearby quilts on the walls of the same room at Meadowcroft Museum of Rural Life, in Avella, Washington County, tell another story.

They're contemporary works by members of the Fiberarts Guild of Pittsburgh, and one suspects they would have caused quite a stir among the anonymous Victorian quilter and her friends. While traditional material, patterns and methods inform many of the 21 works by 12 exhibiting members -- one of whom is a man -- they also illustrate the break that craftspersons in all media have made with historic constrictions.

Jean Thomas' delightful "Gobble Gobble" was based on a drawing her granddaughter Saskia Berrios-Thomas made when she was 5 years old. A turkey with an enormous star-covered red body, polka-dotted head and neck, beaded purple feathers and stick legs has all the immediacy and warmth that children's art projects.

At the other end of the expressive spectrum are conceptual pieces by Camilla Brent Pearce and Tina Williams Brewer.

Pearce's works, comprising antique fabrics, have a wistful fragility that suspends them in the dimension of memory. Evocative "Antimacassar" includes one of the small cotton cloths found unfinished at a garage sale. The artist has surrounded it with intricately stitched silk fragments of her grandmother's nightgown upon which she's insinuated the two eyelets missing from the incomplete cloth.

"Gobble Gobble" by Jean Thomas Click photo for larger image.

Brewer thoughtfully orders her visual vocabulary of symbols, often layering surface and idea by attaching found objects, to present observations on ancestry and heritage that are anchored in fiber, femininity and family.

Sylvia Leo's expressive and personally inspired "Migraine" and Shawn Quinlin's "Pink Lady," whose face dominates or recedes beneath a swirl of sensuous plump stitched spirals depending upon vantage point, introduce a psychological component. ("Lady" will appear on HGTV's "Simply Quilts," an episode about male quilters exhibited at the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum.)

His "Quilt Behind Bars" and Terry Carmen's "My Christmas Quilt" are two extraordinary works among many exceptional fiber pieces that exude their makers' skill and patience. The placement of the piecings in Quinlin's two-sided multitudinously patterned quilt sets up a lively visual rhythm. Saturated color and brazen pattern converge harmoniously in Carmen's intensely bold and beautiful work.

Narrative quilts have handsome representation in the bountiful flower-filled composition of Mary Jordan's "Meade Place Gardens," a work that winningly tweaks perception through its combination of quilt and garden gestalts; Sandra German's fanciful "Peaceful Lagoon," populated with a lustrous jellyfish flotilla and a spangled sea snake among other fauna, that carries an underlying environmental message; and two by Brent Ruka, who uses her home as a point of departure to present wholesome snippets of Americana, including "Flag Quilt," which was made in response to 9/11.

Sharon Wall's mysterious "Milagros Tree" successfully connotes ritual from its iconic dyed and appliqued body parts to the irregular black threadwork border that clings to the scene, suggesting that it will soon dissipate into the night.

	"My Christmas Quilt" by Terry Carmen Click photo for larger image.

Sandy Kephart and Patricia Murphy experiment with abstracting compositions, most interestingly in pieces influenced by new media, "Chaos From Order" (photography) and "Picture This, Picture That" (film) respectively.

The exhibition is one of a commendable record number in venues as far afield as Kent State University, Ohio, that complement the ongoing Guild-sponsored Fiberart International (see www.fiberartinternational.com for a complete list). A second Guild show closed earlier this month at Brew House Space 101.

The exhibition building also houses information about Albert and Delvin Miller, who co-founded Meadowcroft on farmland settled by their Irish immigrant great-great-grandfather George Miller Sr., in 1795.

Albert, who discovered the Meadowcroft Rockshelter, a human settlement occupied 16,000 years ago, also took more than 14,000 photographs of rural Southwestern Pennsylvania, and several of them are displayed. Delvin was a noted harness racer, and two rooms of archives include his uniform, trophies and a certificate of induction into the Saratoga Harness Hall of Fame in 1995.

The exhibition continues through June 27. Meadowcroft will be open from noon to 5 p.m. Memorial Day in addition to its usual schedule, noon to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday and 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday. Admission to the Village or the Rockshelter is $6.50, $3.50 ages 6-16, free under 6; a combination ticket is $10 and $5. For information call 724-587-3412 or visit www.meadowcroftmuseum.org.