These fragile quilts by Black craftspeople need to be preserved — but the federal government has pulled the funds

Weekend Edition Sunday

The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive is about to launch an exhibition of historic quilts from a collection that's billed as "one of its kind". But it just lost $260k of federal funding -- the majority of which was earmarked to preserve the delicate artifacts some of which date back to the 1860s. The museum says if the money can't be recouped somehow, it will not be possible to look after the quilts past December.