To young art enthusiasts in the late 1960s and 70s, Amish quilts were a “discovery”— a new, authentic art form that fit into the visual culture of modern art, with which they were already well versed. The quilts’ resemblance to paintings of artists like Mark Rothko and Josef Albers along with their convenient apartment-wall size and relatively low price, made them appealing to urbanites eager to hang a work of abstract art on the wall. When Jonathan Holstein and Gail van der Hoof, a couple who formed one of the foremost collections of Amish quilts during the 1970s, bought their first one in 1968, they were not alone in their appreciation of the aesthetic merits of old bedcovers. Beginning in the 1960s and increasingly in the 1970s, artists, art critics, antiques dealers, exhibition curators, feminists, and other cultural entrepreneurs reinterpreted quilts as art objects. This new perception was part of a larger cultural conversation about tradition, craft making, and aesthetics occurring among both urban and rural people both inside and outside of academic and art world circles.