Adds Up, 77 x 54 inches, ©2005 Cynthia Corbin
The Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum in Golden, Colorado is dedicated to the preservation of the art and history or American quilt making. They maintain a permanent collection of quilts with historical significance and offer exhibitions and educational events in the support of their mission. The exhibitions include both historical as well as contemporary offerings. This past weekend, I had the pleasure of seeing the Speaking in Cloth: 6 Quilters, 6 Voices exhibition in person. I’ve had the book for awhile now, and I wrote about Jeannette DeNicolis Meyer’s work in a previous post. But it was a treat to see all the work in person, as photos usually don’t do justice to textile work, missing the nuances of texture and depth that are visible in the piece when you see it face-to-face.
Jeannette DeNicolis Meyer’s rich color and beautiful hand stitching create a lush environment of subtle light and shadow play on each rich surface. Ann Johnston uses her signature dye-painting techniques along with a diverse vocabulary of stitch patterns for her complex and dynamic compositions. Quinn Zander Corum includes beading and hand-stitching to invite the viewer to come in close for a better look. Her piece “The Back Forty,” consisting of 40 fully-developed small compositions, is a library of colors and techniques reminiscent of the traditional sampler quilt. Nancy Erickson invokes an ancient world where animals rule, realized with her personal iconography of cave paintings and her exhuberant brushwork. Trisha Hassler puts a unique spin on her mixed media work: she combines jagged, rusted steel with counterpoints of hand-dyed, quilted fabric pieces in a harmonious blending of hard and soft. Cynthia Corbin’s work is fascinating for its use of texture, both in the patterning of the fabrics as well as in the amazingly dense machine quilting which covers each piece. Her piece “Adds Up” is shown above, and here is a detail:
My only complaint about the show is that the exhibition space is unfortunately rather small, resulting in a very crowded show with pieces stacked one on top of the other. Some of the smaller works, which would have benefited from an eye-level viewing, were placed too high to see properly. But in any case, I highly recommend going to see this show. It’s up until January 31, 2009.
Also currently on view at the Museum is California Gold, an exhibit of quilts made in the 1870s and 1880s which include a warm yellow fabric of a color nicknamed “California Gold.” The exhibit honors the 150th anniversary of the Forty-Niners, pioneers who risked everything to travel west for the gold rush.
Turkey Tracks, 74 x 85 inches, c. 1885, collection of the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum
The signage for this piece reads “Woe betide the quiltmaker who decided to stitch this pattern for her son! Turkey Tracks, also known as ‘Wandering Foot,’ was thought to encourage people who slept under it to become endless wanderers … especially boys.”