I’m woefully behind in posting this news, but better late than never, right? This wonderful new book by Spike Gillespie profiles 20 art quilters, detailing their stories and working methods, with beautiful photography and layout. I’m honored to have been chosen to be a part of it. It was also really cool to find out that 2 of my pieces were featured on the cover, along with work by Lisa Call and Margot Lovinger.

Spike traveled around the country to meet the artists in person, and she came to Denver, along with photographer Ori Sofer, to interview me and Lisa for our respective articles. They were lots of fun, with interesting personal stories of their own. Ori took a lot of great pictures of me and my studio, and generously gave me copies of them. The photo I’m using on my About page and for my Facebook profile is one that he took. I like it because it pretty much looks like me but still looks decent, if you know what I mean!

The best part of this book is that it’s not just pages of the artists’ work, but also includes photos from their studios and little blurbs of advice from each one. I had to squirm a little when I saw mine in print, because Spike didn’t clean up my somewhat uncivilized language, but quoted me verbatim. Ahem!

But I couldn’t be more thrilled about being in this book. Here are a couple of spreads from my section:

Quilting Art is available through Amazon or directly through the publisher, Voyageur Press.

This is a photo of my grandfather. It came from an old square-format negative that was hanging around at my parents’ house for years, stuck in an envelope full of other such miscellaneous pieces of film that had long ago lost association with any known prints. My mother had always wanted to “do something with them someday.” At some point I acquired the ability to have negatives scanned, so she gave over the responsibility for this envelope to me. Some time later I did scan a lot of them, but a concrete idea of what to do with them never materialized. They were all taken long before I was born, and so I don’t know all of the people in them, but I do recognize my grandparents in some.

I always have a hard time figuring out what to do for my father on Father’s Day, partly because he lives in a different state and partly because, well, let’s just say we haven’t had the most traditional of father-daughter relationships. After my mother died a few years ago, we started talking on a somewhat more regular basis than at any prior time in my life. A couple of weeks ago, when I got an e-mail from iprintfromhome with an offer for a free 11 x 14 print, I got the idea that he might appreciate seeing this photo in print again. I needed to make the square into a rectangle, so I cropped the original and added some cloudy background stuff to impart a little drama and mystery. In the end, I liked my letter-size test print that I had made myself on my Epson R1800 better than the large one, so I put it into an 8×10 window mat to fit the 11 x 14 frame I had bought for it. Then I packed up the whole thing into a double box with lots of bubble wrap and sent it off, crossing my fingers that the glass doesn’t get broken in shipment. Hope he likes it!

Kerr Grabowski, May 2009. Photo by Deidre Adams.

Today’s SDA conference agenda included a variety of lectures and demos related to textile arts. The most inspiring for me today was a demo by Kerr Grabowski, in which she shared her techniques for working with things normally associated with art on paper — like charcoal, graphite, pastels, and water-soluble media — and making them permanent on fabric. Kerr is known for her beautiful garments and her innovative explorations in screenprinting techniques.

Samples Kerr made using her new process:

I had taken Kerr’s workshop on deconstructed screen printing years ago, and I remember how much fun it was and what great marks could be made on fabric using this process. I still have some really beautiful fabrics that I made in that workshop. Kerr is a generous, sharing person (she even provides a video of the DSP process right on her home page), and her enthusiasm for the process is infectious. She started her demo by saying that she wished her audience to try some of these processes and to let her know what we discover; she wants to start a dialog of artists working together. I left the demo wishing I could go home right then and start playing with some of these techniques.

Later I attended a lecture by Dr. Maria Elena Buszek titled “Minding the Margins: Craft, Criticism and Contemporary Art.” It had to do with the divide between craft and art, but I have to be honest — she talked so fast and furiously I couldn’t keep up with her and I’m not sure even now what her point was, except maybe that so-called “craft” artists should try harder to place themselves in the wider art milieu and expose ourselves to criticism in that realm. She has a Ph.D. in art history, so her view must necessarily be somewhat academic. As textile artists, we can all decide for ourselves whether any of this matters to our pursuit of happiness or fame and fortune or whatever it is we seek in the long run. Evidently she is ruffling some feathers, but I confess to not knowing a lot about this topic. She did give several references for reading which I have put on my to-do list.

The day was capped off by “Textile Fusion: An Interactive Fashion Performance.”

The logistics of the thing weren’t well planned, and nobody seemed to know where they should stand or where the action was going to be headed. It was all very conceptual, with live music that at first seemed pleasantly appropriate but which soon turned relentless and repetitive. Plus, the whole fashion thing in general is very much beyond me, and wearable art is no exception. However, the planners had the good sense to hold the show in the Bloch Building at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art. This was my second visit to the museum, and as I had not had time to get to this part of it earlier, I found a ready opportunity to escape this scene and immerse myself in the quiet solitude of cavernous halls full of good old-fashioned modern art for a refreshing change of pace.

The collection holds a good variety of Abstract Expressionists:

Jackson Pollock (left) and Willem DeKooning (right)

They also have a wide variety of all your modern, postmodern, minimalist, and pop favorites, including Rothko, Kline, Diebenkorn, Warhol, Oldenburg, Rauschenberg, Rosenquist, Judd, LeWitt, Martin, Murry, Riley, and several Thiebauds. One of the more interesting is a huge painting by Kerry James Marshall done on banner canvas, called Memento #5, celebrating the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.

One of the most interesting exhibits in the museum is an exhibition of photographs by Homer Page, a mostly unknkown photographer who created this body of work in 1949-50 in fulfillment of a Guggenheim fellowship. They are street scenes of New York City, often including images of advertisements in ironic juxtaposition with ordinary people. According to the museum’s promo page, this work “represents a ‘missing link’ between the warm, humanistic, and socially motivated documentary photographs of the 1930s and early 1940s in the works of Dorothea Lange, and the tougher, grittier and more existential work of the later 1950s as seen in the images of Robert Frank.” I would love to have more time to go back and look at these again. May just have to order the book instead.