Expressions in Equality Exhibit

So the Expressions in Equality exhibit opened Saturday night, and it has some amazing art in it…Hollis Chatelain’s Girls Are Strong being one of them…

Visions Art Museum does a nice job of allowing the artists to preview the show and take pictures, so here are Pam RuBert and Susan Shie’s pieces…

RuBert’s wonderfully colorful Green Lady Liberty, spaceships and all…

And Shie’s ER: Page of Potholders (Coins) in the Kitchen Tarot…

which I did not have the presence of mind to read, so I will have to go back (I don’t deal well with openings).

Compared to the last exhibit at VAM, this was much less abstract, although Freedom of Speech by Susan Wessels is an abstract piece I like, with Deborah Grayson’s Breaths to the right of it.

Pauline Karasch Salzman’s Lessons Learned is another one to come back and read, with Ife Felix’s Reverend Dr. King’s Dream Unrealized to the right.

Jerry Granata’s With Liberty and Justice for All definitely caught my eye…

And Shin-Hee Chin’s Equality: Expanding Circle of Liberty shows the continuing expansion of her techniques…

I wish I had gone back and taken more photos here…from left to right is Dawn Williams Boyd’s graphic Sisters in the Eyes of Men, Sandra Lauterbach’s Story of the Wall, Chin’s piece, Judy Zoelzer Levine’s Together on the Field of Play, Alice Beasley’s No Vote No Voice, and returning to Chatelaine’s piece.

In the back, they hung my Work in Progress with Randall Cook’s piece…

Here is Cook’s “Gay” Marriage…

Laura Gadson’s B-R-O-A-D-E-N-I-N-G Beautiful, an amazing piece made mostly of words and the eye staring back at you.

The curator, Sheila Frampton Cooper’s piece, Marie Magdelaine de la Saint Baume…

The quilting on that piece…I should have taken details!

Mary Pal’s The Other 1% hung next to Patricia Kennedy-Zafred’s Tagged, with actual tags hanging from it.

Blake Chamberlain’s Harriet Tubman was fascinating to look at up close…

And here’s me with my piece, finished! Hallelujah…

The back room has the amazing Margaret Fabrizio’s work…

Margaret is every bit as amazing and colorful as her work…

She traveled to India to learn how to make these. I love talking to her; she is interesting and funny and always has an opinion on the topic at hand. Plus she has great clothes.

I did not take photos of every quilt, unfortunately (distracted by people), but this is a strong show, well worth visiting for, although I would have liked shorter statements about each quilt hanging with them and in the gallery guide, which should be available this week. I missed Sherry Davis Kleinman and Marion Coleman’s pieces (there were always people standing in front of them). They did have us write longer statements for the docents; presumably if you were in the gallery, someone could produce a book of those for you to read. There is a hope that this show will travel, but perhaps you will have to travel to it…it’s at VAM through April 4.

The Place You Go…

I’m sitting here (Sunday night) waiting for the laundry to finish so I can put the girlchild’s soccer stuff in the dryer for tomorrow morning. I’m actually kind of wide awake…must have been that 26-minute nap I took this afternoon when I realized I couldn’t keep my eyes open. That’s the problem with hike days…they do kick my ass and I get very little else done, which is why I can’t do them every weekend. I can’t lose a day every weekend.

This is a 3-day weekend, though, so I still have tomorrow (Monday, yes I started this on Sunday night) to play catch up. I had a rough day yesterday. I actually cried on the hike…usually I don’t, but strangely, being in a group that large was isolating for someone like me. I’m not an extrovert at all. I need space, both mental and physical. I felt like some alien creature. It was so loud and raucous and overwhelming…I had to strike out on my own and physically super-challenge my body so my mind wouldn’t freak out. I have an event coming up with a lot more people than that…and I’m worried about my ability to deal. It’s strange…I spend all day with tons of people, but I don’t feel so out of place with my students…they are safe. I can handle interactions with them. Interactions with large groups of strangers? Fuck that. I’d rather stay home. I will be that crazy cat lady who never leaves the house if I’m not careful. The hike was redeemed slightly by the last 30 minutes spent talking to one other person. I can handle interactions like that, but you have to have something in common or at least something you can talk about.

It was a relief to come home after the hike and space out for hours, grade some papers, hang with my kids, cut out some Wonder Under. I appreciate the physical exertion and being out in nature, but hanging out in groups isn’t making me happy. Then again, nothing much is making me happy.

So in the middle of this post, the rant came through and became its own post, and then I went to the gym to try to leave some of my irritation and anger there instead of carrying it around. I’m debating calling the doctor (hemorrhage!), I need to find eye doctor paperwork for the kids, I haven’t prepped for tomorrow, I need to go to school to check for lab supplies, but I can’t get out of my driveway, because they are in fact digging holes in my front yard so my toilets might work properly someday. I’m wondering if I will ever stop grinding my teeth, if my eyelid will ever stop twitching, if I will ever sleep properly again.

The part I was having issues with was people making assumptions about other people based on how they behave or look or are labeled. I’m constantly amazed by how different people are than what they project…my leach-field guy looks like a redneck, talks like a redneck, and then starts talking to me about the Lord of the Rings trilogy and how many times he’s read it and whether Smaug is the coolest dragon around or what. The guy is 64 and you’d never think to look at him that he could have slogged through that series (god knows I haven’t been able to after multiple tries). You cannot make assumptions about people. You have to talk to them and listen to them and turn on the part of your brain that pays attention to someone besides your arrogant self, and only then can you make any decisions about people, and you still have to leave open the possibility that you are completely wrong. Maybe I know that from teaching middle school for so many years. Maybe I’m just that kind of tolerant person. I don’t know. I just know that it’s not OK to hurt other people. And sometimes people think your emotions are hurting them, but it is really their response to your emotions that’s the issue. I had the girlchild full on screaming at me this morning and I realized that she was having the same issue…her emotional reaction to what I had said was hers and hers alone. I was not the cause of the screaming. She was. Granted she’s a teenager and doesn’t modulate her responses well…she’s not Asperger’s, but teens often have this idea that they are the only people on the planet (shocking!) and it can manifest in similar ways. “My way is the only way.” Boychild and I often have discussions about her inability to realize there are other people in the world who might not have the same priorities as she does. In this case, I let her stomp off and slam a door, and then she came back and it was eventually all OK. I wonder what it will be like when they are both gone and I no longer have to tiptoe around those kinds of emotional outbursts. I wonder if her roommates will survive! I wonder if having the girlchild as his sister has helped the boychild navigate emotions any better…god knows they are full on in his face on a regular basis. His sister screams. His mom cries.

Wondering about my own sanity. Wondering after reading someone else’s blog if there is actually always a way out of depression, or if it just becomes something you live with for the rest of your life. After this weekend, I don’t see a way out, I don’t see a light at the end of the tunnel, I don’t feel like it will ever change. It does not help that my hormones are going ballistic. I could really live without that additional mess in my head…hence the thought to call the doctor…more because of the physical symptoms than the mental…the physical symptoms set off all the alarms on the stupid online symptom checkers. But I already know what they will say, what they will want to do. They’ll use the words ‘abnormal’ and ‘dysfunctional’…ironic because those can apply to my physical symptoms and my mental symptoms. OK, not fully dysfunctional, because I do manage to function fairly normally…I’m just patently aware of how nonfunctional my functioning is.

Anyway. I find the solution to all this angst, short-term as it might be, is that silly thing called art. My brain wandered about a bit, trying to figure out what it felt like doing, until that urge to draw came a banging at the brain door…so I pulled this one out from before, in December sometime (was it really that long ago?)…

I had copied it and taped it to another page, so I found that and started drawing downwards…

Shades of the Celebrating Silver quilt…I still need to put yet another page on the bottom…

because she needs more room. She wants the rest of her body. She told me. She demanded it. I listened. And I need to figure out what else is happening here…maybe more of those crazy birds. Who knows. Draw, Kathy. It gives you some peace. Draw the assholes out. Draw the arrogant jerks out. Draw the emotional reactions and put them on paper. Make someone see what’s in your head. Make someone feel what’s in your head. Make.

I made it to my quilt guild tonight, for the first time in 12 months, I think. Mary Pal was speaking and she and I had seen each other Saturday night at the Coast to Coast opening. I think we might be sisters from another mother…we are in the same shows, feeling some of the same artistic angst. I hope for her sake that she is not feeling the rest of my angst. It was nice to hear her talk, to feel her deep hug again, to feel a connection to a fellow artist who plumbs the depths of her artistic self to make work in the middle of the night, by the skin of her teeth, in the early morning light. To feel a connection that deep to someone you barely know…simply because of the place you go when you work.

Art can be amazing that way.

People and Portraits Exhibit

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.

Art Quilt Portfolio: People and Portraits, Review and Giveaway

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…

I’m Not Crazy at PIQF

Last weekend, I boarded a plane Friday night with my flu virus and some cold meds and kleenex and sore-throat lozenges, and I made my way northward to Santa Clara, California, where the Pacific International Quilt Festival was taking place. I had never been to one of the Mancuso shows before, but knew it had a mix of art and traditional quilts, much like IQF, but with more emphasis on the traditional.

I went to see my curated exhibit I’m Not Crazy, which opened back in August, but only travels to California once in the year. I was looking forward to seeing the pieces in person, since pictures don’t do fiber art justice, most of the time.

My camera card ate my photos (it may spit them out again…it has done that before), so Tanya Brown was nice enough to take some for me the next day…Here are the three sections of drape that we had for this show.

The first section with what I call The Face Wall, staring out at those who walk by…

And its facing wall…

Below, Sylvia M. Weir’s Insane Asylum and Karen S. Musgrave’s Glimpses of the Dark Angel.

The coloring on each of these two pieces is beautiful in real life.

Below, Mary B. Pal’s Stogie, Lois A. Sprague’s Moody Blues, and Kathleen McCabe’s What Next?

I love the range of expressions in those three pieces.

Below, Carol Howard Donati’s In My Head and Cynthia St. Charles’ All Alone and Blue.

Both pieces have hints of traditional piecing and patterning, but the details of quilting and pattern move beyond the traditional.

Below, a general view of the second section…

And the other wall of that section…

Below, Gerrie Congdon’s Alternate Universe and Salli McQuaid’s Bipolar 1: Loco.

They echo the movement in each other. Salli is our catalog designer and we are very appreciative of all her hard work on the project.

Below, Susan Lenz’s Held Together by a Thread, Judith A. Roderick’s Red Ravens, and Harue Konishi’s SYO#42.

Below, Nancy L. Bardach’s Running Through and Connie Rohman’s Woven (for Jack).

These two quilts seem to speak to each other. I hope we get a gallery exhibit for these at some point, so they can have more space around them, but they did play well together despite the limited space.

Below is one side of the third section…

And the other side…

Below, Jane B. Broaddus‘ Another Panic Attack and Lea McComas’ Recovery.

Both of these had lots of surface design and embellishment that worked well with their chosen images.

Below, Melinda Bula’s Good and Plenty and Karol Kusmaul’s Whee at the ALF.

This picture shows more of the texture that was visible on these two quilts than the pictures I had for their entries…so it was nice to see that in real life.

Below, Elizabeth Michellod-Dutheil’s Mal Etre and Judy Kirpich’s Circles No. 5.

The circles seem to lead the eye from the left piece to the right. It’s always interesting to see it hung in real life, instead of just laid out on paper. It was harder to visualize the works together in the space than I thought it would be…I would think it would be easier if I had them in the space and could choose the hanging order. That said, it is a beautiful show, thanks to all the hard work of the artists and Sue Reno’s decisions on which pieces to include. I’m looking forward to seeing the catalog, which is in process. I’ll announce its availability when I know it’s coming out. I appreciate SAQA for giving me the opportunity through the curator-in-training program to put this exhibit together; Kathleen McCabe, Martha Sielman, Eileen Doughty, Lisa Ellis, and Bill Reker for their help within SAQA with the process, the website, the shipping, and the entry program; Mary Claire Moyer and the Mancuso Brothers for helping SAQA and me, and giving us the exhibition space; and Sue Reno and the artists for working with me to create a great exhibit. The feedback we’ve gotten has been positive, which is a plus.

The show continues through May, following the Mancuso shows in Florida, Virginia, New Jersey, and Colorado, having opened in New Hampshire and already traveled to Pennsylvania and now California. Hopefully we can add some venues to the end of that, because I think the show deserves a gallery space somewhere.