The mission of the San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles is to promote the art, craft, and history of quilts and textiles. The Museum advocates on behalf of quilts and textiles as a distinctly accessible and unifying visual, sculptural, and kinetic art form pioneered and practiced by people worldwide for thousands of years to create objects of beauty, use, and meaning.

Core Values

• We celebrate quilts and textiles as forms of artistic and cultural expression that are at the core of human experience and that can be created, appreciated and enjoyed by all people.
• We marvel at the resourcefulness and inventiveness that people show in using a tremendous diversity of fibrous materials—vegetable, animal and synthetic--and devising a wealth of fiber art making techniques—spinning, dyeing, felting, weaving, quilting, crochet, knitting, lacemaking, coiling, digital printing, etc.—to add beauty and give meaning to our lives.
• We embrace both the fiber art that interprets established community traditions, aesthetics, and values, and that which seeks to express a uniquely personal aesthetic and set of values.
• We honor quilts and textiles as women’s and people of color’s remarkable contributions to the history of art, culture and science.