Along with Jean Ray Laury, Radka Donnell (1928-2018) was one of the first formally trained artists to embrace quiltmaking as a primary medium. Trained as a painter, Donnell began using fabrics in her quilt art by the mid-1960s. Her wide swaths of energetic prints reveal her painterly aesthetic. An ardent feminist, she became even more politicized through creating quilts, associating that process with women’s lives and bodies. Although Donnell viewed quilts as art forms, the sizes and proportions of most of her work suggest the bed as a human nexus.