Masters: Art Quilts Vol. 2

I tried to wait before buying the second volume of Masters: Art Quilts, but when I was sitting the SAQA booth at IQF, it was right in front of me, mocking me. I didn’t open it at first, remembering how many days I spent reading (READING?) the first volume, knowing I was supposed to be working the table. That worked for a while; the table was busy, lots of people.

Then they were all gone. And the book was right in front of me. I grabbed it, opened it, saw the first quilt, and had to put it back when someone came up to the table. I did that about 5 times and finally gave up and decided to buy the damn thing.

Here’s the plus to buying it through SAQA…Lark Books is donating the full purchase price of the book ($24.95, worth every penny) to SAQA if you buy through us. Yes. I know Amazon is cheaper, but it doesn’t benefit an art quilting organization that happens to pay for a lot of the shows and publications my work gets into, so I chose to get it through them. It’s in the book sale section under retrospectives.

So back to the book. It’s a hefty beast, at 400+ pages. It focuses on 40 contemporary art quilters, with a few paragraphs on their technique, inspiration, and style by Martha Sielman, SAQA’s current Executive Director and a curator in her own right. I was impressed that I didn’t know all the artists’ names; I love to learn about new artists, and these books are wonderful for that. There are also about 5-10 pages of quilt pictures for each artist, interspersed with quotes from the artists themselves about their process or inspiration. The pictures make the book. They are as large as they can be on the page and in beautiful full color. Lark does a great job with publishing the Masters series.

Some of the artists you may have heard of include Jan Myers-Newbury, Emily Richardson, Chunghie Lee (who juried the Creative Force show that is traveling right now), Genevieve Attinger (in Creative Force), Paula Nadelstern, Rosalie Dace, Leslie Gabrielse, Nelda Warkentin, Dianne Firth, Alice Beasley, Mirjam Pet-Jacobs (in Sightlines), Jane Dunnewold, Laura Wasilowski, Eleanor McCain (juror for Quilt National 2011), Elizabeth Busch, and Dorothy Caldwell. I had seen a few of the quilts in the book, although mostly online. It’s wonderful to have them all in one place…the old Masters volume sits by my bed for pre-sleep perusal. This one can too.

I was impressed by Sielman’s inclusion of more male quilting artists. We know they’re out there, but often don’t hear from or about them, so it was a nice addition. Leslie Gabrielse’s work is very stylized, like art of the 1920s, but includes these surprises of plaid fabric in a woman’s leg that work to make the figure without overly distracting the eye. Arturo Alonzo Sandoval uses unique materials to make his art quilts, including velcro, metal, film, acetate sheets…you know, all the stuff we have around the house but haven’t made art out of yet (there’s still time, and now you have a role model). Jim Smoote was a real surprise to me; I had never heard of him (doesn’t mean much…I’m not the one who knows everything), but his portraits of African-American women are stunning portraits, skillfully placed in a modern setting. Someone please persuade him to get a website! Tim Harding was another new artist to me…I should clarify…I had seen one of his swimmer quilts before, but didn’t realize at the time that it was his work. His use of silks and folding the fabrics artfully treats the subject of water and swimmers…his vision is intriguing.

It’s hard to choose who else to focus on in this review…I really do feel that if you are working in or interested in art quilts in any way that you should own both these volumes. This book has a range of styles from figurative, through abstract, modern, and expressive. There are quilts reminiscent of landscapes, there are those that hint at our traditional background, there are portraits…which reminds me, I had not seen work by Carolyn Crump, and her use of color against the black outlines that looks so much like block printing is beautiful, but when she adds the stitching, the pieces sing. Her portraits are expressive and full of movement.

Bente Vold Klausen was another new artist to me. Her work seems to grow from some sense of violence upon her or others, with abstract figures created from newspaper articles wearing targets and surrounded by darkness. I had recently seen a reference to Izabella Baykova, another international artist whose work intrigues me. She uses sheer fabrics in her work; her figurative stories are wonderfully graphic, like a graphic novel, but so soft like Russia in winter. Her ability to manipulate her materials makes the silks and rayons glow.

The rest of the artists fill out an incredibly strong view of a piece of the current art quilting world. The book is inspiration for those of us working in and collecting quilt art; it contains solid examples of real ART in the fiber world, for those who don’t know what that is. I recommend this series and hope Lark continues to use Sielman’s curatorial skills in the future. For those looking for a voice, for their style, this book will help you to see what that looks like. For those who have a voice, this is pure inspiration and enjoyment.