Fall 2021 Showcase Koshenina

Greta Koshenina
Mama’s Quilts

Mama’s Quilts is a documentary short focusing on quilter Ruby Marzette Adams through interviews with her daughters Mae Adams Shelby and Ruth Adams Ball. One of Ruby’s quilts is featured in a current exhibition at the University of Mississippi Museum in Oxford, Mississippi. Ruby’s quilts are dynamically colored and stitched with the greatest attention to detail. This documentary is part of an ongoing Oral History project with the University Museum. The museum houses a vast collection of Southern Folk Art, but there is often little to no information about the artists, especially women artists. Quilters have often been overlooked in the art world, and this documentary gives Ruby’s craft the spotlight.

I am interested in delving into the lives of women Folk Artists, learning not only about their lives as artists but also their place in the world. The universality of textile art links humans throughout time and space, serving not only aesthetic purposes but also functional purposes.

Greta Koshenina was raised in Water Valley, Mississippi. In May of 2020, she graduated from the University of Mississippi’s Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College with a B.A. in classics and minors in mathematics and Italian. Greta began working at the University of Mississippi Museum the summer of 2018 as a Collections Undergraduate Assistant. There, she worked mainly with Mediterranean antiquities, but she quickly found that her passion was folk art. This led her to the Southern Studies Masters program. Through interviews, she will collect oral histories of folk artists and their family members; these stories will be documented through video and audio recordings, creating biographies of artists featured in the museum’s collections.