Sign of the week

Feeling disrespected

You know how sometimes you're nibbled to death by ducks?  That's how I have felt the last couple of days.  Please indulge me in a bit of a whine (then I promise I'll shut up).

I've been fortunate to have work on display in several venues this month, both in print and in person.  But my pleasure and pride were dulled a bit by a bunch of little glitches that I took as disrespect.

You have to know that I am a person with a name and a nickname.  My name is Kathleen; my nickname is Kathy.  Hardly anybody calls me Kathleen in person; I use Kathy on the phone, in emails, and to sign personal letters.  But I use Kathleen as a byline for published work, in information when I teach, and on signs and printed material when my work is shown in public.  Or at least that's what I want to use.

Picky, yes, but is that really so hard to understand?  Robert Rauschenberg was Bob to his friends but the Museum of Modern Art had no trouble putting Robert on the signs.  (Actually his name was Milton, but that's another story.)

From past experience I know that the issue of my name can be problematic.  That's why, when I turned in my work to one recent show, I wrote in large red letters on the paperwork, "Please use my name as Kathleen Loomis on the signs and programs."  Did it work?  Nope.  The signs and the program said Kathy.

When I turned in my work for another show, I sent along a bio and a list of the quilts provided, both using Kathleen.  I knew the gallery director had consulted my website, which uses Kathleen.  Did it work?  Nope.  The press release said Kathy, and I suspect the signs do too (I haven't been able to visit the show yet).

At one of the shows I had an even more discouraging nibble from the ducks.  A friend visited the venue as the show was being hung and sent me a nice email with a couple of photos.  He thought the show looked great.  But when I looked at the photos, all I could see were a bunch of ugly clip-like things on the top edge of every one of the quilts.  What????

As tactfully as I could, I emailed the gallery director and said I was confused by the clips and hoped they were something temporary during the installation process and "it certainly isn't the way I would like to see them displayed."

She replied "I am sorry that you do not like the clips.  I will re hang the work."  She said the hooks on her hanging system were too big to go through the eyehooks on my sticks.

Did I detect a certain coolness in that response?  Maybe I'm just being crabby.

Then the coup de grace -- in the mail arrived a copy of a quilting magazine that I don't normally see, but had printed a feature story on several quilts in the SAQA Seasonal Palette exhibit.  They did get my name right, but here's how they depicted my quilt:

Any one of these petty slights by itself might not have bothered me too much, but four in one week got kind of old.  Quack, quack.

Collaboration 2

Yesterday I showed you the unfinished artwork that I turned in for the collaboration project between older and younger artists.  Here's what happened to my piece after my collaborator, Kelly Rains, worked on it.

Gone were the knife, fork and spoon. Concentric circles in black, white and gray were put over the entire piece, either painted or with loosely attached paper, apparently cut from past art projects.

The character of the work had changed a lot, and my carefully executed collage had gotten a lot more slapdash.

I think the graphic quality of the concentric circles, especially the outer rings on top of the solid colors, is quite attractive and an improvement over the original open  areas.  And I like the cutout arcs, especially those taken from watercolor compositions and lettered on vellum.

But I wish I could have my knife, fork and spoon back.  They could be very happy in another piece of work.

Collaboration 1

Recently I participated in a collaborative project in which members of a group of mostly middle-aged and older artists were paired with members of a group of younger, hipper artists.  We were asked to make art on the theme of "cosmopolitan localism," which I thought was a bit obscure, but I decided that the most cosmopolitan aspect of our city is the immigrants from many different countries who have settled here in the last decades.

Since I don't draw and didn't want to use photography in this project, I decided to portray the immigrants by going to my favorite ethnic grocery store and buying a lot of food products from different countries.  Then I mounted them on a board in mandala fashion, leaving one quadrant empty for my collaborator to work with.

For the backgrounds, I used a map of the parts of town where most of our immigrants live, and some handmade paper that seemed kind of exotic in feeling.  I decorated the edges of the composition with a knife, fork and spoon that I had found on the street (the fork and the spoon had been run over and flattened) and a pair of chopsticks.

Here are some of the details.

One of the things I learned is that shiny plastic see-through packaging has no affinity for adhesives.  After trying two different kinds of glue I finally got it to stick with huge quantities of matte medium, but even so it didn't want to cooperate.  The paper and cardboard packages were much easier to deal with.

Tomorrow I'll show you what happened next.  Meanwhile, I'll tell you that the collaborative works are on display at the Patio Gallery at the Jewish Community Center in Louisville, through July 14.  If you're in the vicinity, drop by and see our stuff!

Photo suite 77 -- Paris from my hotel window

And yes, it's all from the same window!  Paris blocks often have huge interior courtyards with subsidiary buildings invisible from the street.  Our seventh-floor (sixth, in Europarlance) room had a great view of everything.

Art reader's digest

from an exhibit review in Embroidery magazine (published in the UK), September/October 2004, by Angela Hesketh:

"While some of the work in (the show) is irreverent, the search for 'content' often upstages the medium and some of the work could have been better executed.  When content is championed over the handling of the chosen medium, it raises a further debate -- that of the value and status of textiles as an art form."

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Do we agree?

Suppose the works had been paintings -- would the critic say that emphasis on content and possible poor execution call the value and status of painting as an art form into question?

Suppose the works had been paintings -- would a critic even bring up the issue of execution?

The whole thrust of contemporary art is to value content over technique -- does textile art deliberately want to distance itself from this historical development?