Found poetry 58

Good news on tour

Many times I've sent a quilt off for a show, knowing that it will be on tour for a while.  I tend to kind of forget about these travelers, having said good-bye without a firm idea of when they will come home.  At the moment I have two travelers, both in SAQA exhibitions that are getting wonderful exposure around the world.

Last week I got a message that Forced to Flee, the show about refugees that is now on display at Ruth Funk Center for Textile Arts in Melbourne FL, will be going to the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham UK in 2022.  Before then it will be at several museums in the US.

Tired and Poor

Then this morning there was another message, saying that Masterworks: Abstract & Geometric, which has been on the road since it debuted in Houston in 2017, will be going to Germany next year.  The show has already been in three venues in Japan, and will be going to China in September.  It just closed earlier this week after a two-month run in Memphis.

And here's a little bit of my quilt in the banner of the email, at the far right:

Crazed 16: Suburban Dream

I wasn't able to see the show in Memphis but Jackie Watkins sent me a picture of my quilt there.

I always think of that quilt as being pretty big (81 x 55") but it sure looked puny next to the huge piece next to it, whose maker I do not know.  (But they're in the same color scheme!)

SAQA's shows are the main reason that I belong to that organization.  I've lost count of how many times I've had work in their shows, and I am always pleased with the quality of every aspect of the operation.  Bill Reker does a great job of finding venues for the traveling shows and manages all the hassle of shipping.  Hats off to Bill and to SAQA for world-class show management.  Thank you!

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Update:  the huge quilt on the left wall is Letters from a Friend II, by Els van Baarle

Fiberart International 1 -- quilts

Last week I was in Pittsburgh for a family reunion and got to spend two delightful days at museums.  My first stops were the two venues of Fiberart International, the fine exhibition held every three years.  I've seen several past shows and was sometimes disappointed to find few pieces in the traditional quilt format, but this year had several.

Two of the best happened to be made by friends of mine, so I may be prejudiced, but I liked them!  Both were big, bright, intricately machine-pieced and quilted, beautifully composed, making strong statements.

Maria Shell, Mosh Pit @ the Goldern

Judy Kirpich, Anxiety No. 11

Gregory Climer, Men Kissing (detail below)

I liked the way this quilt combined the low-resolution pixelated photo with the hard edges of pieced prints.  I really liked the different grids, with piecing and quilting set at varying angles.

And finally, this calm and simple quilt that reminded me a bit of my own work, with very skinny pieced-in black lines and dense, shiny quilting in many different colors.

Carolina Oneto Tapia, Igualdad (detail below)

And here's one quilt that wanted in the worst way to make a big impact, and almost did, but not quite.

Luke Haynes, [Sewlebrity] Obama 

The gimmick here is the anamorphic projection, portraying a distorted image that reads right if you stand obliquely to the quilt.  But if you don't get it exactly right, it leaves the viewer frustrated.

When you look at the quilt straight on, the left shoulder is much fatter than it should be, but when you look at it from the side, the right shoulder is fatter than it should be.  I couldn't find a sweet spot in between (nor did I think it looked like Obama from any angle).

So much for the quilts -- I'll have a lot more pieces to show you in subsequent posts.


 

Last week on Art With a Needle

I bought a new computer and made an appointment with my geek to come on Tuesday to get it set up and transfer my life from the old computer to the new one.  He spent most of the afternoon here, but went home when thousands of emails started transferring and the computer estimated it would take "more than a day" to finish.  He came back Wednesday, spent most of the day, and went home to let the contents of my hard drive, including about 50,000 photos, transfer overnight.  He came back Thursday, spent a few hours, and went home thinking the job was done.

Ha ha.  I spent an hour on the phone with him on Friday clearing up some unresolved problems, plus discussing a problem that is going to require either him coming back to the house or me taking my old hard drive to  his shop.  Then Friday night I discovered that most of those thousands of emails, the ones that took all night to transfer, have disappeared from where they were on Thursday. 

I'm not worried that anything is going to be lost -- I have cloud backup of the entire computer as well as the old hard drive -- but I worry that it will take another week before everything gets in order.  If I'm lucky.  Those psychologists' lists of the ten most traumatic life events (death of spouse, loss of job, house burns down, diagnosed with deadly disease) really should also include getting a new computer.

Miraculously, I have spent a few hours in the studio in between geekwatching, and may even be ready to start quilting on my latest top next week.

Here's my favorite miniature of the week, the idea shamelessly stolen from Sandy Snowden, except that she's stitching 24,000 beads into these wavy tentacles in a year-long project, while I only did about 60.

Art reader's digest

From How to Disappear, by Akiko Busch:

"Soetsu Yanagi was a Japanese potter who advocated for anonymity in folk art. In his 1972 book, The Unknown Craftsman, he includes the absence of the artist's signature in his list of what confers beauty on an object.  Along with use, the imprint of the human hand, simplicity, low cost, and regional tradition, the anonymity that comes in deflecting attention from maker to user is part of what infuses physical artifacts with value and meaning.  Certainly those criteria apply to all those handcrafted household artifacts made of wood, clay, textiles, metal; all those utilitarian plates and spoons; all those touchstones of domestic life, tables, chairs, knives, tools, hinges, and quilts, all shaped, carved, molded, and sewn at a time when such things are largely forgotten, but this archive of objects carries its own collective effervescence over the centuries.  In an odd way, it might even be the very absence of the signature that confirms the humanity of the work."

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Thought-provoking, but I'm not sure I agree.

Perhaps it's true that functional objects are more about the user than the maker, but over the centuries the master makers have always commanded more value than the anonymous journeyman.  Think silver made by Paul Revere, fabrics by Jack Lenor Larsen.

I am one of many quilt lovers who are sorry that so many of the old quilts lack a signature.  When the owners of these quilts bring them in for appraisal or display, the ones with ID seem to be more prized; how many family quilts are tagged with a precious slip of paper, perhaps safety-pinned to the binding, noting that great-grandma started this quilt in 1917 and Aunt Minnie finished it in 1940.  Many of my own family "heirlooms" were lovingly wrapped and labeled by my mother.

I'll happily use an anonymous doily in my fabric collage, but I'd never cut into one made by my grandmother.  At some point I'll have to add a second label to this roll, explaining that it was my mother who wrote "my mother."  And just to make things clear, I'll add her name -- Ida Wilhelmina Fahselt Burtzlaff.  Because I think it's good to know who made something special.

What do you think?

Last week on Art With a Needle

After I said that I thought one of my "crossroads" tops wasn't good enough and needed to be fixed, Shannon left a comment: "I wonder if you would be willing to share some of your critical thought processes or just general thoughts about what makes something good or not.  I struggle with this pretty often with my pieces.  Sometimes it's very clear that something isn't good, but when it's not so obvious I have a harder time.  I also really struggle with differentiation between pieces that are "good" and pieces that I just like.  I would love to hear your thoughts on this!"

Shannon, thanks for asking -- this question is one of the all-time big ones for artists, right up there with "what is art?"  Every artist, in every discipline, struggles with this every time a new piece is made.  So developing your critical eye is just as important a skill for an artist as actually learning to make things.

Sometimes you can learn and practice this skill by joining a critique group, or taking an art class where critique is part of the routine.  Sometimes you can learn a lot by reading comments from critics or teachers, or from books.  I have been a regular reader of the magazine Art in America for many years, as well as the art section of the New York Times.  I particularly enjoy the show reviews where at least one piece is pictured, along with the critic's comments.

Unfortunately, there is little published critique in the fiber art world, since Fiberarts magazine folded several years ago.  So you may get more out of discussions of paintings, sculptures, mixed media or installations.  The elements of "good art" apply across all mediums, so if you learn to detect good or bad composition or color use in a painting you can also detect it in a quilt. 

Here's the quilt I showed last week and said I needed to go back and improve it:

When I get to it, I plan to make at least one or two posts that describe my thought process, and how I go about making the fix.  Maybe thinking along with me will give you more insight into how I approach the problem of self-evaluation.  It won't be next week or the week after, because I need to let this stew a bit before I have at it.  But it will happen, I promise.

Here's my favorite miniature of the week: