Margot Lovinger – Kathy Nida

I went to the Houston IQF show mostly because I had two pieces in the SAQA People & Portraits exhibit, which is based on Martha Sielman’s book Art Quilt Portfolio: People & Portraits. We got official pictures of the exhibit, which travels next to the Texas Quilt Museum in La Grange, Texas, from January 9-March 30. Here was the entry to the exhibit at IQF.

Turning directly to the left, the first artist is Margot Lovinger, who works in layers of sheers and tulle. Maria Elkins is next, with her portraits combined with traditional quilt patterns. The cover shot from the book is in the exhibit, but her more recent piece, Surrender, has a heartbreaking story that goes with it here.

Next comes Margene Gloria May, whose portraits are made from a variety of different fabrics, including a wrinkled shirt and tie in the piece on the right.

Joan Sowada‘s work is next, with overlapping views of skateboarders and a closeup of a loving couple.

Lori Lupe Pelish‘s work has fascinated me for years, with the busy fabrics she uses to make up her portraits. There are two pieces here: the mother and child on the left, and then a quadtych (is that a word?) of 4 pieces. Her work requires closeup viewing and then a step away for the big picture.

Pat Kumicich‘s work is in your face. These aren’t pretty portraits…you need to take a closeup look.

Cheryl Dineen Ferrin does portraits of people she meets or knows, especially in motorcycle groups.

Pam RuBert‘s pieces always have some sense of humor or a pun that draws you in. Jenny Bowker‘s work has recently focused on people she met in a variety of countries, including Egypt.

Sherry Davis Kleinman uses a variety of pencils and paints to create her portraits on fabric.

Sonia Bardella uses paints and patterned fabric to make her portraits.

Lora Rocke uses thread painting to make her portraits, whereas Carol Goddu uses vintage and fancy fabrics to dress her dancers.

Bodil Gardner‘s quilts are always happy, and often use recycled fabrics. Ulva Ugerup‘s quilts are small, but have lots of impact and hand embroidery.

Yoshiko Kurihara’s quilts seem to be about parties, with all the characters very stylized and angular, yet also faceless.

Next to Kurihara were Mary Pal‘s cheesecloth portraits of the homeless.

Around the corner were Viola Burley Leak‘s graphic portraits.

I shared a corner with Leni Levinson Wiener‘s pieces.

Last of all, my two: Fully Medicated on the left and I Was Not Wearing a Life Jacket on the right.

What I loved about this exhibit (besides being in it) was the variety of work within the theme of people and portraits. There were many styles represented, but all the pieces were technically well done and each artist had a singular voice, which is apparent in the exhibit. We were allowed to choose the two pieces in the exhibit from those chosen for the book, although a few of the pieces in the show are not in the book, Elkin’s piece Surrender being one of those. Owning the book is one thing: seeing these pieces in person is an entirely different experience. If you missed IQF and can’t make it to La Grange, Texas, they will be in Birmingham, England in August 2014 and will be traveling after that. I’ll let you know future venues as they are added…definitely worth seeing.

I should add that all photos were taken by Gregory Case; the exhibition information can also be seen here on the SAQA website, this being a SAQA-sponsored exhibit.

I love that I get books to review…it’s even better when it’s a book I already own, so I can give away the extra. I got an artist copy of the Art Quilt Portfolio: People and Portraits, but I also received a review copy, so if you want it, just comment to that effect and I’ll draw names next Friday, April 5, and mail it out to you.

I did read this book cover to cover. It’s my favorite kind of book, full of a good variety of artists and pictures, with nice big pictures of the art, and insights into what the artists think about their work and their process. Yes, I am one of the featured artists, but if I didn’t like the book, I wouldn’t be giving a positive review.

Martha Sielman did a great job tailoring the questions to the specific work of the artists and providing us with some people we’ve all heard of and some who were merely blips on my radar (and even some I’d never heard of, which just means I’m not listening hard enough).

The profiled artists include Joan Sowada, Bodil Gardner, Maria Elkins, Colette Berends, Pat Kumicich, Sherry Davis Kleinman, Cheryl Dineen Ferrin, Yoshiko Kurihara, Lora Rocke, Margot Lovinger, Ulva Ugerup, Viola Burley Leak, Margene Gloria May, Lori Lupe Pelish, Sonia Bardella, Leni Wiener, Mary Pal, Jenny Bowker, myself, Pam RuBert, and Carol Goddu. Each featured artist had about 6 quilts pictured on 6 pages. I liked that each artist covered topics that were specific to their work and lives. In trying to answer interview questions in the past, I know that trying to answer wide-open and vague questions is difficult. Sielman definitely did her homework before sending out questions to the artists, and you can clearly hear the artist’s voice in each section.

There is a wide variety of work here, from the more realistic work done by Bardella, Elkins, and Rocke; to the more abstract pieces of Pelish, Burley Leak, and May; into the whimsical and expressive work of RuBert, Ugerup and Gardner; to Pal, Dineen Ferrin, and Bowker’s intriguing and revealing portraits of particular people. I was fascinated by Kurihara, Berends, and Goddu’s use of fabrics, although they don’t work in a similar fashion at all. I have been lucky to have been following the work of Lovinger for years, and Wiener’s blog is a great background to how she creates her work. Sowada and Davis Kleinman’s work have been on my radar for a good long time, and Kumicich is a recent find, as she is one of the artists in the I’m Not Crazy exhibit I curated.

I would suggest reading Elizabeth Barton’s review as well…she makes an interesting comparison between this volume and the Nature volume of Art Quilt Portfolio. She brings up a point that I also noticed, that there is no contact information in each artist’s section, and even the information at the back is fairly sparse. Although I know how to Google, it would be nice to have that information, even if half of it were out of date by publication…maybe that is why they leave it out.

I mentioned when I reviewed the Nature volume that I liked the galleries of other artists, but they seemed to make more sense in the Nature volume. There were logical topics. I suggested that for the People and Portraits, coming up with gallery titles that were relevant and yet were a means to gather work together would be difficult, and I was apparently right about that. I’m not sure I see the connections in some of the galleries…it might be OK to just not title them. I did enjoy the variety of other artists working with the figure, especially artists whose work I had not seen before. I think that is one of the great strengths of this type of book, in that it is not predictable, that the artists we might expect to see profiled here were not necessarily the artists chosen.

I’m looking forward to seeing what Sielman comes up with next. Again, if you want my copy, comment…