I have not been dead, it just looks that way...

I am so embarrassed at how long it's been since I last posted.  June and July have been the busiest months in years and while I've kept up with the daily painting and the daily Instagram posts, I have sorely neglected my blog.  I guess that proves that, at least for me, making a commitment to daily art works much better than just trying to do something as frequently as possible.  I'll try to catch you up on what I missed telling you about at the time.

So the end of June was a marathon of getting a truckload of art ready to hang in my solo show at PYRO Gallery.  A bit more than half the pieces in the show were new work, made in the last two years.  The rest were older, but mostly never seen locally.  Among the very oldest was this quilt that appeared in the special "I Remember Mama" exhibit at the Houston Quilt Festival in 2003.

Household Textiles, 2003, details below

When I wrote an artist statement for the Houston show, it was pretty sweet -- kind of embarrassing to me as I read it again for the first time in almost 20 years.  I talked about women who "sit with our needles and contemplate our lives as we sew, finding joy, peace, and a brief respite from chores and chaos."

When I gave a couple of gallery talks during the run of my show, I found myself taking a different and darker tone.  I pointed out that household textiles come is two different varieties: as instruments of female drudgery, and sometimes as instruments of female creativity and pleasure.  I noted that the ladies on the quilt (three of them are actual people, including Viola, my mother; two are made-up names given to unidentified photos found in the family box) obviously spent a whole lot more time on drudgery than on creativity...

I was particularly happy that my sister was able to come for the opening of the show, and got to revisit her old wedding dress incorporated into the quilt. 

The marriage didn't last, but the dress sure did.  It was made of that luscious heavy, drapey polyester that was so popular in the early 70s and it will no doubt outlive every other piece of textile on the entire quilt, if not the entire world. You can see in the photo that I stuffed the long sleeve so it rises a good three inches off the surface of the quilt, and I was astounded to see that after 19 years on a shelf, the sleeve is still just as perky and wrinkle-free as it was when I folded up the quilt and stowed it away.   Go, polyester!   (Now, of course, people sneer at polyester, while loving microfiber, which of course is the same thing...) 

On another note of remembrance, I couldn't help but think, many times during the show, of my dear friend Marti Plager, who died a year ago.  She had always loved this quilt and on many occasions urged me to find a way to get it up in public again.  A few times I almost did, and Marti was disappointed when it never happened.

So it finally happened, and I hope Marti got to look down from heaven and see it displayed so nicely.

 

Sanford Biggers at the Speed, part 3

I've written about the Sanford Biggers show in two previous posts.  Time for a wrap-up.

The piece I liked best in the show was a Tumbling Blocks quilt, with a minimum of paint, overlaid with a dramatic horizontal flame of orange-and-black chevron print.  A little bit of black paint made a curvy outline over the old blocks, a sort of half-silhouette of a key shape.

Sanford Biggers, Quilt 17 ( Sugar, Pork, Bourbon) 

My second favorite was a collage of old quilts, plus a section of curvy stripes made from sequins on a black painted background.

Sanford Biggers, Transition

I liked these quilts because they thoughtfully used large patterned shapes to contrast with and complement the smaller patterns of the vintage pieced quilts.  In both cases there was artistry in the composition and care in the construction.

Sadly, I did not see those features in most of the quilts in the exhibit.  The artspeak at the entrance to the gallery tells us "the quilts signal their original creator's intent as well as the new layers of meaning given to them through Biggers's artistic intervention."  I searched in vain for the new layers of meaning in most of the pieces in the show.

As I mentioned in my first post about this show, I walked in the door as a Biggers skeptic, based on a bit of past knowledge of his work, but would have liked to like this show.  Instead I was surprised at the strength of visceral discomfort that hit me in only the first two rooms of the gallery; all those beautiful antique quilts deliberately messed up with paint and tar to no apparent purpose.  Perhaps it wasn't the defacing per se that bothered me -- I've been known to repurpose old quilt bits myself -- but the slapdash quality of the defacing.  

I went to the museum with two friends, one an artist, one not.  When we compared notes all three of us just wanted to get out of there fast.  I wasn't there long enough to discover exactly what made me so unhappy, and for that I apologize.  

The show will be up through June 26.  I'd love to hear what other people think of it, whether I'm alone in my unease.

Sanford Biggers at the Speed, part 2

More comments about the Sanford Biggers show.  Not everything in the show featured messy paint applications.  One of the quilts, stretched on a wood armature, had dramatic holes, bordered with black organza to give a striking shadow illusion.

Sanford Biggers, Ecclesiastes 1 (KJV)

A similar see-through illusion appeared in an assemblage of six framed quilt sections, with some two-layer areas where the semiopaque frosted plexiglass was cut away to reveal a quilt about a quarter-inch behind.  

Sanford Biggers, Nyabinghi, detail below

Two of the quilts, both Tumbling Blocks, were overlaid with sequins and lame, glittering under the gallery lights.  No paint drips on these, just fabric collage.  

Sanford Biggers, Ooo Oui, detail

Sanford Biggers, Ooo Oui

Several pieces were made by stretching quilt sections into wood-framed constructions.  The first one we saw as we came through the exhibit was intriguing, made in part from American flag-motif quilts. 

Sanford Biggers, Reconstruction, detail below

But the next four or five, the same concept with slightly different construction shapes, all kind of looked alike, and the fact that they were hung too high on the wall to see most of the surfaces made them easy to walk past without stopping to look. 

Maybe I would have liked them better if all the "construction" pieces had been hung together for comparison, but they weren't.

I'll give you the wrap-up report in my next post.  

Sanford Biggers at the Speed, part 1

The current blockbuster show at the Speed Museum is by Sanford Biggers, an African American artist whose shtick is to paint on top of antique quilts.  I have been somewhat familiar with his work for several years; in 2017 one of his quilts was in another show at the Speed, and I wrote about it in a blog post.  

I found some things to like in that piece, but I had two big reservations.  First, Biggers made a big deal out of the false story that quilts were used as secret signposts along the Underground Railroad.  Second, it hurt to see a beautiful antique quilt in fine condition used as a canvas.  Surely he could have found a beat-up quilt to paint on!

So I approached the new show with some preconceptions, but resolved to keep an open mind.  I lingered over the artist statement at the entrance to the exhibit, interested to note that he has backed off from his fake-history Underground Railroad statements.  In 2017 the wall tag read "Some quilts were used as signposts for safe houses..."  Five years later, we read "he was intrigued by the heavily debated narrative that quilts in some way doubled as signposts..."  That's progress, I guess, and maybe in five more years he will acknowledge that this narrative is not heavily debated at all, just carelessly repeated by ignorant people.  

But enough nitpicking, let's look at the quilts.  I didn't keep a tally, but it seemed that most of them were in pretty good condition and were simply painted upon and hung on the wall without additional support.  Some were in poor condition, and augmented by patching in pieces from other quilts, or collaging swatches of unquilted fabric, including several kimono pieces, on top. 

Sanford Biggers, Hat & Beard, details

Sanford Biggers, Hat & Beard

Most of the quilts followed the same recipe: start with a quilt or quilt collage, paint loosely over the top, let the paint (or sometimes, tar) drip and blob.  Some of them had intricate and meticulous stenciled designs, but almost always some area of deliberate mess.

Sanford Biggers, Quilt 30 (Nimbus), detail below

I can't describe the whole show in just one blog post, and probably not even in just two.  So stay tuned and I'll have more pictures and thoughts soon.

On the Road with Marti

One last post about my friend Marti Plager, who died last month.  She and I loved to take road trips together -- to Houston for the big quilt festival three or four times, to Quilt National four or five times, to Pittsburgh for Fiberart International, to Philadelphia for the international SAQA conference,  to Paducah several times for the quilt show, and to a whole lot of workshops, museums and galleries.  

Fifteen years ago I wanted for some reason to enter an art show at the Kerouac Center in Lowell MA.  The artwork was supposed to  have something to do with Jack Kerouac, and I really didn't know or care much about him, so I figured I needed a gimmick.

I did some research and found that when Kerouac sat down to write his famous "On the Road," he had a roll of newsprint wide enough to fit in his typewriter and very, very long.  He started writing at the top of the roll and just kept going.  So I thought I could come up with a roll of Kerouac-style writing too and get into the show. 

I called my piece "On the Road with Marti" and it is a lot of stream-of-consciousness-type reminiscence of some of the many road trips that we took together.  It's too bad the manuscript ends in 2006, because there were many, many more trips that didn't get documented.

I used a typewriter font, printed the manuscript onto rusted muslin, added cross-outs and edits by hand (as writers did in the olden days of typewriters) and quilted it into a scroll.  I don't know what Kerouac lubricated his road trips with, but Marti and I always used red wine, so there's a wine stain too.  And it got into the show.  

Another Afghanistan quilt

I wrote earlier about a project that I'm working on now, a postage stamp quilt to mark the US military dead in Afghanistan.  But I am reminded of another quilt I made several years ago that is also about Afghanistan.

In 2015 I had the pleasure of attending and teaching at a big quilting show in Prague, along with my dear friend and art pal Uta Lenk.  Uta had arranged for the show to display a bunch of quilts by International Threads, a group of quilters from four different countries (US, UK, Germany and Israel).  After I said I would come to Prague, she promoted teaching gigs for each of us, which didn't make us rich but did pay for our hotel rooms and a bit of spending money.

Uta in the International Threads exhibit

In between teaching and hanging around our exhibit, we hit the vendors, and discovered a booth selling embroideries made by women in Afghanistan.  We were intrigued by the work, and when we found that many of the embroideries were made by the same woman, Nasrin, we decided to buy eight of them for the members of International Threads, which would be the theme for our next project.

I chose the embroidery with the most abstract and geometric design, and when I made my quilt, I echoed the gray-blue-turquoise-white palette, the bold zigzags and the half-square-triangle sawtooth edging, adding some yellow to pep up the composition.  I called the quilt "Nasrin's Magic Carpet."

With Afghanistan in the news again, I thought it would be a good time to pull out the quilt again and put it up in public.  It's hanging at PYRO Gallery right now, through the end of this month.  And of course I thought about Nasrin and her friends and family, wondering how they have survived through six more years of war and oppression.

After Uta and I bought the embroideries we sent them to our fellow members and I copied from the package the name of the nonprofit that distributed them: The Guldusi Project of Embroidery.  When I looked it up on the internet this week I learned that the organization was begun in 2002 by a German artist.  They have embroidery projects in several rural Afghan villages, and when I paged through the website I was excited to find exactly the kind of embroideries we had bought.

Uta's Nasrin square

You'll notice that the center portion of each square is a kind of mesh, the kind that's used to make the eye holes in a burka. The website confirmed that this type of stitching is called tsheshmakdusi (tsheshmak = eye, dusi = embroidery) and only a few women in a village in Laghman Province use this stitching in their work for sale.  This had to be the source of our Nasrin squares.

Red pin marks Laghman Province

And yes, when I looked through the thumbnails of work on this page of the website, I found one using the same palette, chevrons and sawtooth border, that was labeled "03Nasrin."  Unless there are many women with the same name doing very similar embroidery for the same nonprofit organization, this is indeed our artist.  At least, that's what I'm going to believe.

Uta has also been remembering her Nasrin quilt recently; check it out on her blog. 

   

Form, Not Function 6 -- not like the others

Sorry for the hiatus in blog posts -- I had a wonderful two-week visit from my sister, during which we saw friends, looked at art, ate in restaurants, bought art supplies and new furniture and tackled the huge job of reorganizing my studio.  No time for blogging with all that going on!

But she's home now, and I'm back to wind up my report on Form, Not Function, the juried quilt show at Carnegie Center for Art & History in New Albany IN.  The show has closed since my last post, but I have saved the fun stuff for last.  It seems that in every quilt show there's something completely different from the traditional quilt format.  Sometimes, like last year, it takes best in show; some years, like this time, the different one just sits there being delightfully different.

 

Elizabeth Morisette, Beak Mask

This weird contraption is made of zippers, opened to reveal the teeth, then coiled and stitched into a cone that morphs into a cylinder.  A clever riff on pandemic masks, with the patina of age and use on the old tapes.

But is it a quilt, you ask?  (Long-time readers know that I frequently ask this question when confronted with the different something at the quilt show.)  I say yes -- it has layers held together by stitching.    

I thought this one was witty and weighty at the same time.  Brava!

Form Not Function 1 -- the big winners

I missed the opening of Form, Not Function, the juried quilt show at the Carnegie Center in New Albany IN, but finally made it over to visit.  It's a striking show, nicely hung, with not a dud in the place.  Three of the four big winners were large abstract quilts, but in three quite different flavors of abstraction.

Best in Show: Karen Schulz, Objects in This Mirror 

Karen has been in the top tier of the art/quilt circuit for several years, winning best in show at Quilt National twice and jurying this year's QN.  Her spare and powerful composition uses a technique that always intrigues me, juxtaposing seemingly unrelated parts to make a surprisingly coherent whole.  Here her various techniques include piecing, couching and painting with both dye and acrylic.

 

Kerri Green, Graded Discourse

This cheerful quilt features bright solid colors, overlapping shapes and elegantly pieced curves in a Venn diagram sort of composition.  An arc of black and white gives a punch of pizzazz in the corner.

Sue Cortese, Kumo II -- Relationship  

The pale starburst in the top left quadrant of the quilt is shibori dyed; the striped arms of the larger, darker star are partly dyed and partly pieced.  The white background has subtle touches of pale blue and the occasional dark quilting thread.  It's dramatic but calm , enlivened by complex quilting lines that change direction as they encounter invisible tentacles radiating out from the center.

I liked all three of these a lot.  A whole lot!  I'll tell you about some of the other quilts in the show in later posts.  The show continues at the Carnegie through July 17, and as the old Michelin guides used to say, it's not only "worth a detour" but "worth a trip."

A present arrives

I received a wonderful present today from Paula Kovarik, a great quilter whose work I admired even before we got to meet and become friends,  It's a small quilt, densely stitched, of course, since that's her modus operandi, but a bit different from her signature quilting in that it has no funny creatures, just straight lines.  In fact, the quilt is called "Sightlines," which I'll explain in a minute. 

I couldn't wait till I find a place to hang it, so Ken obligingly modeled the quilt right out of the box.

This quilt is special not just because I get to have another Kovarik original in my collection -- which is special enough right there -- but for how it came to be mine.  Paula has written a book about her quilting process, and I had the privilege of editing and proofreading it for her.  "Sightlines" is my pay for the job.  

Having read every word of this book four or five times, I am uniquely qualified to tell you that it's a fine piece of work.  It has several kinds of text: detailed stories about how she came to make some quilts, tutorials and exercises on how to emulate her style of drawing-through-stitch, thoughts on her creative process and why she works in this medium.  It will even tell you how to (gasp!) cut up and reconfigure quilts that you're bored or dissatisfied with.  (Paula even did this with a Quilt National piece after it came home from touring.)

The book is called "At Play in the Garden of Stitch: thoughts that come while eyeing the needle" and it should be ready to purchase very soon.  (One advantage of self-publishing, which I shared with Paula while she was still in the planning stages of this book, is that you don't have to wait for months and months for a publisher to slot you into a huge schedule.)   I'll let you know when that happens.

But back to my new quilt.  Paula pieced the quilt from her scrap bag, and when it came time to quilt it, decided to not just stitch on all the pieced lines, but to extend those lines all the way to the edges of the quilt.  That led to a very dense network of lines, which made a web of interesting shapes, especially in the large black and white areas of the quilt.  Wherever she saw a triangle, she filled it in with dense stitching in gold.  

The gold areas jitter, giving excitement to the plain white foreground and making the black "sky" alive with sparks or fireworks or maybe auroras.  I can't wait to get this quilt into a permanent place so I can see it every day. 

A message from Alison 2

I wrote earlier this week about exchanging messages with Alison Schwabe, a longtime internal pal who lives in Uruguay and commented about my Memorial Day quilt that consists of 4000+ tiny American flags.

And once she got on the subject of flags, Alison wrote some other things worth sharing.

"Lately with all the USA election commentary on our cable channels here, CNN and BBCWorld, the stars and stripes of your flag have been the core of all the graphics, obviously, and I'm no stranger to US elections coverage, but this season it's been striking to me that any combination, any arrangement, of star+stripe+red+blue+white is a visual shorthand for a statement of your country.  I don't mean depictions of the flag itself, everyone has things from tea towels to clothing patches, coffee mugs etc etc with our national flag on.  I mean the elements which combine to make up the flag design.  You see it in fabrics and clothing, sunglasses, household objects, all kinds of things in addition to the bunting and stuff that's rolled out for electioneering events at all levels.  Even the round carpet in wherever it was Biden was speaking from last Wednesday night was red and blue with central white star!  I'm not aware that any other country's national flag has spread out so much from its actual flag format."

I am a flag junkie and have used flags a lot in my art, as well as taking photos of them any time I can.  So Alison's comments made me think about the ubiquity of the flag's elements.  Even the nicknames of our flag -- The Stars and Stripes, The Red, White and Blue -- demonstrate by metonymy and synecdoche how the elements instantly conjure not only the whole flag but the nation itself, a linguistic shorthand as well as a visual one.

I've begun a series of quilts called "Stars and Stripes" in which I'm exploring how you can use those two shapes and how much you have to change them around before it no longer reads as a flag.

I'm planning to make six quilts in the series.  Here's number one, obviously a flag:

Number two, a little less flag-like, but still pretty obvious:

I think this next one is going to be number four, and if you don't see it hanging from a flagpole, you probably wouldn't read this as a flag, thanks to unflaglike grays:

Alison mentions the use of flag elements in household stuff.  She's right -- add the colors to some sort of star and stripe, and you're totally "patriotic," as witness this stuff I found in a Walmart some years ago near Fourth of July, never mind that it was all made in China. 

Yo-yo dress update

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the best in show winner at Form, Not Function: Quilt Art at the Carnegie.  It was a dress made of yo-yos, whose train merged into a rectangular yo-yo quilt, made by Marty Ornish.



I wondered in my blog post whether the yo-yos were recycled from old quilts or newly made from old fabrics or what.  This morning I was happy to find that Marty left a comment on my post that explains all.  She writes:

"These two circa WW2 quilts were made by three women.  The youngest, Joan Crone, is now 86, and she sewed these yo-yos 'to help pass the time during the war' and created the quilt with her mother and grandmother.  Her own grandchildren didn't want these quilts, and after she saw my other work at my solo show at Visions's Art Museum, she gifted the yo-yo quilts to me with the explicit wish that I would incorporate them into my art, and she is thrilled with the response.

"Many of the yo-yos had to be repaired, and I deconstructed one of the quilts to create the dress.

"Regarding the issue you raised as to whether or not the yo-yo quilt meets the strict definition of a 'quilt,' while, as you know, a traditional quilt has three layers stitched together, with the advent of art quilts many textile museums now accept two layers of a textile held together by stitching as qualifying as a quilt."

What a good story, especially the part about how the grandchildren didn't want the quilts (boo, hiss) but they were recycled into a lovely art installation.  Marty does this all the time, and is happy to receive donations of unwanted textiles to use in art.  Those of you whose children or grandchildren are as unappreciative as Mrs. Crone's might want to make note of Marty's address [ marty.ornish@gmail.com ] so your beloved stuff could also find a new home with someone who will treat it very well.

Here's an excellent interview in a San Diego paper in which Marty tells how she got into wearables and other fiber art. 

Regarding Marty's comment about the definition of a quilt, she's right that the art quilt world has generally discarded the requirement of three layers.  As one of the founders of the FNF exhibit, I was proudly responsible for writing its definition -- "layers held together by stitching" -- and participated in several discussions, both as juror and as installer, about whether a given entry met the test.

Once we received a quilt that had been accepted, but when we unwrapped it the lack of any stitching-through-layers was obvious.  We loved the piece and tried and tried to find a single stitch anywhere that went through.  Fortunately the artist had sent in her entry well before the deadline, and we decided to send it back to her and ask her to put in at least two or three stitches that would be clearly visible.  She did, without noticeably changing anything about the piece, and the quilt went on the wall and looked great in the show.

We accepted more than one entry over the year from a well-known fiber artist who did intricate hand-stitching.  It was obvious that the stitches went through multiple layers, because we could see that the back and front were different fabrics and the stitches went all the way through, so it clearly met the FNF definition -- even though the artist's website made a point of saying that she does NOT consider her work to be quilts.

I still think yo-yos are pushing the definition, because the stitching mainly goes between one yo-yo and another rather than holding the two layers of the yo-yo together, but faced with a beautiful piece like Marty's dress, you look for a reason to define it in rather than a reason to define it out.

More on Vickie's quilts

Last week I wrote about Vickie Wheatley, whose quilts are on display at PYRO Gallery in Louisville  through March 21, and promised to show you some of the interesting ways she finished and mounted her small pieces. 

She made a lot of little four-block quilts with leftovers from her much larger "Anxieties" series, finishing to about 12 inches square.  Some she finished with dense black zigzag stitching, then mounted on a black canvas, with maybe a quarter-inch of canvas showing around the edge.  If the light isn't exactly right, you can barely tell where the quilt stops and the canvas starts.

Some she faced, then mounted on a pale wood panel.

Here she zigzagged the edges with a variegated thread, which gave the effect of a striped binding.  Again, mounted on a pale wood panel.

Vickie also made a bunch of quilts with a wonky circle design, like these:

Rather than quilting the leftover circle blocks, she used them as the base for intricate hand-stitching.  Some were mounted in fabric-backed frames with raw edges. 

Others had black binding, again in frames.

If you can't find a piece that fits your particular decorating vibe, you aren't really trying!