A Hawai’i Living Treasure, Meali`i Kalama was a teacher who did not work from patterns, instead designing her own quilts and encouraging her students to do likewise. Kalama was a lay pastor at Kawaiaha`o Church in the 1960s when Nelson Rockefeller asked the church’s quilters to make thirty quilts for his hotel on the big island of Hawaii. This predated the 1971 “Abstract Design in American Quilts” exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which is credited with launching the Hawaiian Quilt Revival.
Image courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts
