There are numerous blogs showing pictures of the winning quilts from QuiltCon, so if you want to see them go to Houzz or the MQG blog here and here. Lots of interesting quilts to see.  Here are some of my thoughts:

Fill the Void by Cinzia Allocca

First, I was very happy to see that Fill the Void, by Cinzia Allocca, won a prize in the handwork category.  This was one of my favorite quilts at the Vermont Quilt Festival last year, and the hand quilting really is beautiful.

I was happy to see some of my friends’ quilts in the show.  Here is Jean with hers:

Jean Larson with “Floating”, her QuiltCon show entry

And here is Amy’s entry in the Michael Miller spring challenge.

The New New, by Amy Anderson

That really WAS a challenge for most of us who don’t often use pastels, but Amy met the challenge with a nice design, so I was glad to see it at the show.

There were several quilts that obviously drew from mid century modern art, though that was not referenced in the show notes.  Here are two designs that were especially striking.  They are Ethos by Natasa McFadyen and Amazonia by Nathalie Bearden.

To me, these look like mid-20th Century art, especially Mark Rothko.

There were several quilts that drew on common forms from mid-century graphic design. I thought this one was fun:

Bowls and Balls #2, by Rachel Kerley

Finally, I loved this quilt by Luke Haynes, which he frankly states is a re-working of the Andrew Wyeth painting “Christina’s World”.  It’s a great example of how good design is good design, regardless of the medium.  I particularly like that, although he has changed a number of details to make it his own, the reference is immediately recognizable to anyone who knows the original painting.

{The American Context #16} Christina’s World, by Luke Haynes

In view of a lot of this, I was interested to see in the newsletter from one of the modern guilds that they want to focus on “modern quilts, not art quilts”.  Obviously the definition of “modern quilt” isn’t yet settled despite much discussion.