REAGAN LIBRARY HAS CONTROVERSIAL QUILTS REMOVED.

Byline: Associated Press 

Quilt critics claimed Sunbonnet Sue was too violent, and the Spirit of St. Louis sported a Nazi look.

That's why the two Kansas-made quilts were pulled from a national exhibition, said the director of the Reagan Library.

``We don't want the message of this exciting and unique quilt show to be overcome by any kind of controversy,'' said Mark Hunt, director of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum.

``We think it's so preposterous,'' Sarah Fayman told the Journal-World in Lawrence, Kan. She owns Sarah's Fabrics, where the Sunbonnet Sue quilt was stitched by 20 local quilters.

It was designed as a parody ``because we disliked the pattern so much,'' Fayman said.

Sunbonnet Sue is a cutesy, traditional pattern whose namesake sports a poke bonnet and a triangle dress with little feet sticking out.

The satirists show her in one panel hooded like a Heaven's Gate suicide cultist. In others, she is stung by killer bees and carjacked. Elsewhere, Sue dies a quilter's death, done in by rotary cutter and a quilting machine.

``It was a tongue-in-cheek bit of humor, and we thought it representative of a particular period of time and a particular group of quilters - younger quilters,'' said Hunt. Complaints about the violence came mostly from traditionalists, he said.

``There's not been but a handful of people, overall, complain,'' he said. And most of the complainers didn't see the quilts themselves, he said, but read about them on the Internet.

``We don't want anyone to think that we are in any way glorifying violence,'' Hunt said.

The Spirit of St. Louis quilt, named for the first plane to carry a lone aviator across the Atlantic, was stitched in the 1930s when tributes to Charles Lindbergh were in vogue.

The quilter intended it as a graduation present for her son, but she was dismayed at the finished product because the propeller came out looking like a swastika, said Hunt.

``When that was pointed out to the artist, she stored the quilt in a cedar chest,'' he said.

``We had enough negative response to it that we decided to pull it from the show, not because we thought it inappropriate to show historically, but because there's no reason for controversy to cloud the show,'' Hunt said.

``America Remembers: Quilting the 20th Century,'' opened in April and will run through Oct. 4 at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley.

The exhibition is intended to show how women this century began to use quilting for personal, political and artistic expression. It includes a 21-foot-by-10-foot memorial quilt to victims of the Oklahoma City bombing.

About 400 people a day have been attending, Hunt said.

``We're responding to a minority of people because primarily we don't want to offend anyone,'' he said.