CANTON -- "Warmth, Remembrance, and Art: 200 Years of Quilts and Comforters in Northern New York" opens at The TAUNY Center, 53 Main St., on April 2 with a reception from 1 to 3 p.m.

Curators Jill Breit and Hallie Bond will make opening remarks and be available for discussion.

"Quilts are powerful symbols of rural living. They embody American ideals of endurance, resourcefulness, and commitment to home and family," says TAUNY executive director Jill Breit.

In late 2014, Breit, a folklorist, and Bond, a historian, began a 14-month journey to study quilts and comforters old and new made in the North Country to learn more about the people who have made and continue to make quilts in the region. The two spent time in the Adirondacks, the Tug Hill Plateau, the St. Lawrence River Valley, the Thousand Islands, and the Lake Champlain Basin. They hosted quilt documentation days, visited museum collections, viewed family collections, attended quilt shows and had conversations with dozens of quilters throughout the region. Photographs and interviews collected during this period have been added to TAUNY's research collection. The research was supported by a grant from The Coby Foundation.

The exhibition is the distillation of what Breit and Bond discovered in the region. In addition to dozens of quilts and comforters, the exhibition includes photographs, interpretive text, and other objects that tell the history and continuing story of quilting in the North Country.

"The range of quilts in this exhibit is breathtaking and wraps you up in the North Country from the early 1800s to the present," says TAUNY communications director Aviva Gold.

The exhibition runs from April 2 through October.

Funding for the exhibition comes from The Coby Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts.