How do you look at a quilt?

That question was put to me by a co-worker the day before I headed out to the new International Quilt Study Center and Museum for a look at its first show.

I put the query to curators Carolyn Ducey and Marin Hanson. They had a ready answer:  “Quilts in Common,” one of the IQSC’s first two exhibitions, is designed to do just that — teach something about understanding quilts as an art medium.

“We’re anticipating this is going to be an introduction to quilts to a lot of people,” Hanson said. “This is a show about what is a quilt and why are quilts important.”

The show also brings out some of the masterpieces of the center’s collection and highlights its historical breadth, stylistic depth and international scope — a perfect way to demonstrate what all the buzz is about.

After all, a beautiful new building wouldn’t mean much if there wasn’t something even more dazzling inside, would it?

The installation wasn’t complete during my tour a couple of weeks ago. The blue tape used to position the quilts was still on the walls. The lighting hadn’t been set. And there were no wall labels to explain the groupings.

I certainly didn’t need the latter. I had the curators to fill me in.

The first grouping of three quilts inside the south gallery door is titled “The Individual Mark.”

Utilizing an early 20th century Welsh quilt, an Indian quilt made from recycled fabric and a piece by contemporary quiltmaker Dorothy Caldwell, the grouping highlights the quilting stitch, the basic tool of every quilt maker.

In much the same manner, “Dynamic Lines” looks at hard-edged zig-zag patterns, linking a late 19th century American crazy quilt and traditional log cabin blocks in a Norwegian quilt of the same era with Michael James’ “Bias Cut,” a 1986 piece.

With “Concentrated Color,” the exhibition looks at the use of indigo, providing dramatic contrast between the op-art of the pulsating “Star of Bethlehem” quilt from 1845, a contemporary Japanese quilt and a meticulously created resist-dyed early 19th century quilt, the fabric of which, Ducey says, turns up in a painting by Henri Matisse.

An even more direct connection with modern art appears in the “Universal Shape” grouping. It displays three square-in-a-square patterned quilts next to a Joseph Albers square-in-a-square painting loaned by Sheldon Museum of Art.

The Albers painting is one of a handful of objects from Sheldon, the Lentz Center for Asian Culture, the Nebraska State Museum and the University Libraries Special Collections that are included in the exhibition, making explicit the connection between quilts and other art forms and between UNL museums and collections.

Like paintings, sculpture, ceramics and other media, quilts can also be examined in terms of subject matter and theme.

“Quilts in Common” includes a grouping devoted to depictions of the tree of life, from early 19th century India to a heavily layered, highly pictorial contemporary quilt. There’s also a look at mysteries in a trio of Baltimore album quilts from the late 1800s.

But the most compelling of the thematic groupings is called “Expressions of Identity.”

It features Lucinda Ward Honstain’s “The Reconciliation Quilt,” an 1867 quilt that is the museum’s prized possession, the IQSC equivalent of Sheldon’s Edward Hopper painting.

With 40 highly detailed evocative images, the pictorial quilt provides a view not only of post-Civil War reconciliation but of Honstain’s life, family and Brooklyn environs.

It is flanked by very contemporary works. To its left are three small quilts from Barbara Watler’s “Fingerprints” series, to its right “The Women: Mask Face Quilt #1” by Faith Ringgold.

The fingerprint quilts are just that, the personal yet universal fingerprint blown up onto fabric. Ringgold’s quilt, painted on canvas with fabric borders, puts faces and torso in a pattern like a sliding square puzzle, making clear that we can move and choose the identities we project to others.

That grouping also illustrates the thing I find most fascinating about the museum — the contrast and connection between traditional quilting and contemporary studio works.

If you’re a quilt fan, you’ll want to get out to see each of the IQSC’s exhibitions.

Because of their fragility, quilts can’t be exhibited constantly like paintings. That means that after a few months on view, it’s back into the box downstairs in the climate-controlled storage vault for every quilt.

The IQSC has a virtual library that can be viewed on a large-scale video projection system and studied on computer. According to the center’s professionals, those projections will reveal details that wouldn’t be seen if the quilt was on the gallery wall.

But, in my view, it’s always better to see any art object right there in front of you.

I’m certainly far from a quilt expert. But I think I’m beginning to catch on to a few things. One of them is that “Quilts in Common” is a fine place to start learning about how to look at a quilt. Question answered.

Reach L. Kent Wolgamott at 473-7244 or kwolgamott@journalstar.com.