Color Improvisations now on display in Germany

My husband and I have just gotten home from almost a month in Germany. The motivation was a combination of nostalgia (we lived there for three years when we were first married, many decades ago), family heritage (I found the villages where three of my great- and great-great-grandparents were born) and art (we spent a week in Berlin in which we visited 10 museums and the opera, and Nürnberg was no slouch either in the museum department, not to mention its magnificent churches).

And, oh yes, the reason we planned the trip in the first place, to attend the grand opening of Color Improvisations, a show curated by Nancy Crow that was designed to showcase machine-piecing. I was fortunate to have two quilts in the show; there were 26 artists in all, from North America and Europe.  And I'm really happy that I can finally show you my quilts; we've been under embargo all along and at last we can share them with our friends instead of just mysteriously bitching about how hard they were to make.

Crazed 8: Incarceration -- 79 x 82 -- Kathleen Loomis

Crazed 8: Incarceration -- detail

Fault Lines 3 -- 75 x 78 -- Kathleen Loomis

Fault Lines 3 -- detail

Fault Lines 3 -- back view (detail)

The show has been a l-o-n-g time in preparation. We were invited to participate more than two years ago, and Nancy looked at our quilts twice – first as pieced tops, then after quilting – to accept or decline them. We shipped our work several months ago for photography and finally the show opened on July 11 in Stuttgart.

All the quilts are huge (minimum size was 72 inches square) and approximately square, and almost all were machine-quilted as well as machine-pieced. Nancy told us to make sure the backs were beautiful, so they could be hung with both sides visible, but for space reasons only five could actually be displayed that way. I was very proud that both of my quilts were given the two-sided treatment!

Nancy said in her remarks that she looks upon machine-piecing as an endangered art, and I agree. It’s so easy these days to fuse or raw-edge applique rather than piece, and so many quilt artists are using surface design techniques rather than piecing to create images. In my own small local support group, for instance, five of the six of us are using surface design as their main technique. Sometimes I feel like an outsider at the meetings because I’m buying commercial solids (not even dyeing my own fabric!!) and not even trying the wonderful painting, dyeing, discharging and screenprinting techniques that my friends are using to such beautiful ends.

But I feel almost an obligation to keep piecing, swimming upstream against the trends in the fiber art world. Kind of like the last ten speakers of some obscure tongue, who need to keep talking lest their language become extinct. Wouldn’t they feel guilty if they lay on the couch watching reality TV while their heritage disappeared?

So meeting my fellow artists at the show was a heartening experience, because we all know what it’s like to buck the trends and remain faithful to a waning craft. There was some surface design in evidence – in particular, Bonnie Bucknam and Terry Jarrard-Dimond use their own masterly hand-dyed fabrics, and Cathy Shanahan and Sylvia Sutherland are dye-painting their fabric. But everybody was piecing at some place along the way.

Check out a bunch of photos from the opening.