In his introduction to Charged Sites, Radka Donnell's 2008 retrospective at the San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles, Bob Shaw wrote, "Radka Donnell is one of the most important quiltmakers of the past forty years. She was one of the first academically trained artists to adopt the quilt as her medium, and she has pioneered in exploring what quilts can mean and look like, challenging both traditional quiltmakers and the fine arts establishment with her visually powerful and emotionally expressive work."

Donnell trained as a painter and art therapist. She also became a champion for women's rights and for quiltmaking as a healing art. "Quiltmaking politicized me," she noted. In her lectures and writings, she eloquently articulated the expressive possibilities of the quilt and made a powerful case for the quilt as "the associative field of the body, " a direct link to the most primal human needs and acts. "By its original closeness to a person's body, the quilt can become an icon of personal feeling and hope," she wrote in 1977. "This is its nature, invoking no absolutes, but open as to a human embrace."

While Donnell's designs are decidedly modern, the meanings she finds in quiltmaking are deeply traditional. She has said that quilts are "good objects" which symbolize and embody human touch, warmth, comfort, and the primal bond between mother and child. She says quilts "are, and also stand symbolically for... the pleasures of closeness with a desired object. They provide a full and lasting though silent embrace." Like all traditional bedcovers, Donnell's quilts are intended to heal and connect people.

Techniques: Machine pieced, machine quilted
Culture: American
Geographic Location: North and Central America, United States
Credit Line: Gift of Mary Ann Bruegmann and the South Valley Quilt Association in memory of Kathleen Underwood