Russell Chatham - Dennos Museum Center

12 Voices
An in-depth look at 12 artists
working in the quilt medium
Information for Educators
Dear Educator,
The Dennos Museum Center is proud to present 12 Voices, an in-depth look at 12 artists
working in the quilt medium from Studio Arts Quilt Associates, Inc. Included in this
packet are: the juror’s statement, online resources, classroom extensions, and select
images for use in the classroom. A PDF version of this packet with color images can be
found online at www.dennosmuseum.org/education/schools/lessons/.
Dennos Museum Center K-12 educational programming aligns with Michigan Content
Standards for Arts Education and the National Standards for Arts Education. We
especially strive to provide experiences that will fit into a curriculum for the new
Michigan Merit Curriculum for the Visual Performing and Applied Arts. To this end,
experiences at the Dennos Museum Center highlight aspects of the creative process. In
order to make sure that your tour addresses what you are doing in the classroom, please
inform the docent (volunteer tour guide) when contacted of any special interests or needs.
For details on content standards addressed by educational programming, please go to
www.dennosmuseum.org/education/schools/resources/.
Please discuss your field trip goals with your docent prior to arriving at the museum. We
are exciting to work with you to create a successful and fun visit to the Dennos Museum
Center.
Thank you for visiting the Museum and we look forward to seeing you soon!
The Dennos Museum Center Educational Department
2
JUROR’S STATEMENT
Studio Art Quilt Associates’ 12 Voices exhibition gives us a rare, in-depth look at twelve
of the finest quilt artists working today. Some are known worldwide. Others are fresh
faces displaying a strong and promising talent. Most live in the United States, but happily
SAQA’s global membership is reflected by the inclusion of two international artists.
Artist selection was done from 128 portfolios in July 2007. It was difficult to choose
roughly only 1 out of every 10 submissions. I was extremely impressed and intrigued by
the exceptional quality of the entries. I felt that each artist had a deep sense of her own
style, voice, and message, offering a strong and unified body of work. The final selection
of individual pieces was not made until February 2008, as I invited the twelve selected
artists to produce new work for consideration over the intervening seven months. As a
result, some pieces shown here have been created especially for this exhibition.
The vision for the show was to reveal more, by showing fewer — to give each artist
enough space and time to gather their best work and create new art which would speak
strongly to their subject. This show has been mounted almost 20 years after SAQA’s
founding and nearly 40 years after the studio art quilt movement began. I hope that the
beauty, excitement, and message of these art pieces will resonate in your memory long
after you have seen the show. It was a pleasure to see this all come together thanks to the
hard-working members of the SAQA exhibition committee. I hope it is as much a joy for
you to view this new exciting art as it was for me. My bigger hope is that we all can hear
what these amazing twelve voices have to say.
— Penny McMorris, Juror
ABOUT STUDIO ARTS QUILT ASSOCIATES
Studio Arts Quilt Associates, Inc. (SAQA, Inc.) is a non-profit organization whose mission is to
promote the art quilt through education, exhibitions, professional development, and
documentation. Developed in 1989 by Yvonne Porchella, SAQA’s vision was to: Promote art
quilts to major art publications, museums, and galleries, Educate the public about art quilts, Serve
as a forum for the professional development of quilt artists, and, Act as a resource for curators,
dealers, consultants, teachers, students, and collectors.
Today, with an ever-increasing membership, SAQA is gearing up to broaden the audience for art
quilts even further. And just as important, under the leadership of the current Executive Director,
Martha Sielman, SAQA seeks to become an even greater resource and advocate for all of the
SAQA membership.
SAQA defines an art quilt as a contemporary artwork exploring and expressing aesthetic concerns
common to the whole range of visual arts: painting, printmaking, photography, graphic design,
assemblage and sculpture, which retains, through materials or technique, a clear relationship to
the folk art quilt from which it descends.
3
IMAGES & ARTISTS
Deidre Adams
Composition VII
Deidre Adams is a painter, photographer, and mixed media fiber artist living in Littleton, Colorado. She
divides her time between her passion for making art and her career as a graphic designer. Deidre has been
making her mixed media fiber art for over ten years. Deidre incorporates dyeing, painting, photography,
stitching, and collage in her work, and she likes to experiment with new ways of combining process and
techniques, from the traditional to the avant-garde.
For her art quilts, Deidre chooses fabrics with interesting textures and movement. She then pieces them,
and uses quilting to create more texture and movement. After the piece is quilted, Deidre paints the work.
She says of this step: ―At all times, I’m conscious of the stitching lines and texture, and I apply paint in
such a way as to enhance the surface.‖
4
Teresa Barkley
Shakespeare Stamps
Teresa Barkley is constantly on the lookout for interesting fabric; "interesting" defined as fabric with
imagery or writing printed on them, such as printed feed sacks, linen children's books, old lace, canvas
moneybags, and commemorative handkerchiefs. She finds these in antique stores, flea markets and
Manhattan's fabric district. She sorts and stores the fabrics — some of which she's had for 25 years — by
theme.
Barkley's techniques include hand-appliqué, quilting, heat-transferring (images), and hand-painting
(stenciled letters). She incorporates "found object" materials, making her quilts a sort of fiber collage.
5
Elizabeth Busch
Yellow
From Busch’s artist statement:
As an artist, I draw, paint, sew, sculpt space. My environment in Maine is extremely
important to me and influences my work. I work in two mediums: Kinetic Sculpture and
Art Quilts. In each, the process is key. Layering, spacial illusion, landscape and
autobiography are the subject. Working in twenty foot spans and stitches to the inch, the
play of great scale and intimacy piques my interest.
My quilts are sewn paintings, acrylic on canvas, that are then hand quilted. This part of
the process allows me to become physically reacquainted with a piece created at arm's
length on the wall, and to add another visual dimension to it. I believe that the work
communicates with many, because color and mark making are a universal language.
6
Linda Colsh
Scent Astray
Colsh begins with a plain white or black cloth and transforms it with a series of surface design
processes, including dying with thickened dyes, resist banding, discharge dying, monoprinting,
screenprinting, and acrylic paint.
From Colsh’s artists statement:
I distill images into symbols, packing as much meaning and narrative as I can into a
concise icon…I like images that are both literal and symbolic, and words and titles that
have multiple meanings.
Each of the five art quilts in 12 Voices is a narrative about a person – a real person –
whom I saw and photographed because she caught my interest. Knowing nothing about
the person, I think about her, sometimes drawing or writing about her in my notebooks. I
develop her character and embroider her imaginary life with events and traits and
background that I find in my own imaginings. On the computer and then in my surface
design and sewing studios, I revise and alter the original photos with other imagery to
tell her story and embellish it with my personal editorial commentary on the big issues
that I think about and that concern me as I move thought my own world.
7
Judith Content
North Light
Judith Content is a fiber artist in Palo Alto, California, who utilizes a contemporary interpretation of the
Japanese dye technique, shibori. Her hand-dyed, quilted, and pieced silk wall pieces often depict elaborate
landscapes that are inspired by the mystery and majesty of the Pacific coastline.
Judith is inspired by nature and by Japanese haiku. Many haiku inspired her work in the 12 Voices exhibit.
Judith on her dying process:
As I prepare my palette of silks, I don’t take notes or record the results – but allow each
dye session to enlighten the next. A collection of diverse silks are strewn on the studio
floor, torn up, arranged and rearranged until they resonate. The composition of
fragments is meticulously secured to the design wall, studied, refined and finally sewn
together. Quilting defines portions of the design, and appliqué is often used to accentuate
depth or movement in the piece.
8
Angela Moll
Secret Diary 3
Angela Moll's artwork ranges from wearable art to quilts, all using her screen printed and painted fabric as
a point of departure. A native of Spain, she is primarily a self-taught artist. Her background includes studies
on western 20th century painting, Chinese calligraphic brushwork, as well as medieval book arts and family
sewing traditions.
In her Secret Diary series, Moll incorporates journal entries that are screenprinted on fabric. The inclusion
of this text creates a unique and unified composition.
From Moll’s artist statement:
I use the collaged and stitched diary fragments to speak about intimacy and
communication as well as privacy and communication.
Each quilt is an open notebook, the oversized text extending an invitation to read. Yet the
stitched diaries prove to be unreadable, revealing just the outline of a life story: rhythm
and pattern, lines and layers. The pressure, intensity, and speed of the handwritten line
imply the texture of emotions. It is an open book but a Secret Diary.
9
Clare Plug
Viewpoint
From Plug’s artist statement:
My artwork, particularly those pieces from the last 6-8 years, can almost be thought of as
my personal meditations on a provincial life in Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand. More
specifically they reflect my continuing interest in this coastal landscape, macro/micro
views of natural objects, and the very limited color palette I enjoy working with.
In creating my artwork, I am also drawing from the long established design traditions
and conventions of quilt making: processes of abstraction, graphic effects, creation of
optical illusions, compositional devices used in the organizing of design elements, an
emphasis on real and visual texture, and the use of repetition to generate rhythms.
10
Joan Schulze
End Times
From Schulze’s artist statement:
The urban experience colors the way I look at the world. My choices in creating a piece
usually come from my travels and can be read as pages in a journal. I am enamored with
surfaces and how they disintegrate over time. I layer and scratch away to reveal what is
beneath the surface, much like the effect one sees on old frescoes, illuminated
manuscripts, and urban walls. These erasures and fragments are combined, manipulated,
and rearranged as I work.
I love the idea of a quilt. The layering, the fact that it can be reversible, that you can plug
into this great and varied history of bed coverings and with a little push you can enter a
new world of walls, ceilings, or installations. It is the best of all worlds for me. Quilting
now functions as drawing with echoes of the tradition.
11
Merle Axelrad Serlin
Coast
Merle Axelrad Serlin is an artist and architect living in Sacramento, California who has been working with
fabric since 1991. Her fabric collage technique takes something traditionally relegated to craft status
(fabric) and transforms it into a serious art form. Serlin often starts with a photograph, and working to
create a composite image.
Serlin on her process:
My collages are made of thousands of tiny fabric pieces, sometimes no larger than a
quarter-inch across. These fragments of woven color and texture are carefully arranged,
layered, pinned, and sewed together. My work has often been described as ―painting with
fabric,‖ but it also has dimension, like a sculpture.
I select fabrics I think I’ll want to use in the collage and arrange them on cardboard
sheets, creating palettes of similar colors, values, and textures. I usually use the rougher
fabrics for areas where I want a lot of texture – dry grasses, rocks, bark – saving the silk
gauzes and soft cottons for smoother subjects like water and sky. Value is something I
pay special attention to. Perhaps the key element of my work is depth, and I achieve this
largely through value. When I’m working on a collage, I work one area at a time,
completing that area before I go on to the next. So I need to know in advance exactly
where my darkest and lightest areas will be. That is what makes a clear drawing or photo
so critical for planning the overall collage.
12
Susan Shie
The Silverware Drawer
Susan Shie is a legally blind artist from Wooster, Ohio. Shie paints, airbrushes, and writes with fabric
markers for surface decoration. Like Angela Moll, Shie includes journaling in her work, writing whatever
comes to mind as she works, and doesn’t work from a draft.
From Shie’s artist statement:
My work is personal diary work with themes focusing around the kitchen and family, St.
Quilta the Comforter (my made up character, based on my mother), astrology, tarot,
peace, and the environment, with a whole lot of emphasis on peace and compassioncentered politics.
13
Ginny Smith
Maybe the Test of Migration
Ginny Smith is an artist in Arlington, Virginia with a restless need to create.
From Smith’s artist statement:
I love zoos and circuses, museums and city streets, stories, fables, myths and symbols. I
react to the world by creating my own characters, who act where I cannot, and fight back
when I am fearful. They even die and come back to life.
For example, my quilt Maybe the Test of Migration came from musings of the
disappearance of crows from our neighborhood. Maybe they had just moved on and
hadn’t died from the West Nile Virus.
14
Kathy Weaver
Cyborg Female 1: Complacent Nature
From Weaver’s artist statement:
My work addresses aspects of the intersection between technology and art. By using the
labor-intensive quilt medium, nostalgic materials, and the robot persona, the pieces have
layers of meaning about time, personal and political conflict and memory. The robot
represents scientific and technological improvement resulting in change to the status quo.
The robot’s setting is that of a tilted stage or shadow box and in this environment the
robot is a translator of events, an alter ego, a doppelganger. The robot can be an
observer, a soothsayer, a malcontent or a destructor. The viewer is invited into the
picture plane to see the modality of the robot’s disposition as it reflects human nature.
15
QUILTING TERMS
Appliqué - The sewing technique for attaching pieces (appliqués) of fabric onto a background
fabric. Appliqués may be stitched to the background by hand using a blind stitch or by machine
using a satin stitch or a blind hemstitch.
Backing – The fabric that makes the back side of the quilt
Basting - The sewing technique for joining by hand layers of fabric or the layers of a quilt with
large stitches. The stitching is temporary and is removed after permanent stitching.
Batting - The layers or sheets of filler placed between two pieces of fabric to form a quilt. Its
thickness varies, and it provides warmth.
Binding - The straight-grain or bias strips of fabric which is often folded double and covers the
raw edges and batting of a quilt.
Embroidery - Embroidery is the art or handicraft of decorating fabric or other materials with
designs stitched in strands of thread or yarn using a needle. Embroidery may also use other
materials such as metal strips, pearls, beads, quills, and sequins.
Fusible Web - A material that has been treated with an adhesive that fuses fabric pieces together
when pressed with a warm iron.
Quilt Sandwich - A quilt sandwich is made when a quilter puts their quilt top, backing, and
batting together. The quilter then quilts the pieces together to stabilize the work
Quilt Top – the decorative side of a quilt that usually consists of several pieces of fabric sewn
together to create an appealing design
Quilting - The small, running stitches made through the layers of a quilt -- top, batting and
backing -- to form decorative patterns on the surface of the quilt and to hold the layers together.
Quilting can either be done by hand or with a sewing machine.
Shibori - Shibori is a Japanese term for several methods of dyeing cloth with a pattern by
binding, stitching, folding, twisting, or compressing it. Some of these methods are known in the
West as tie-dye. Western civilization does not have an exact word equivalent that encompasses all
the techniques of shibori. Tie-dye simply covers binding methods of dyeing, known as bound
resist.
16
ONLINE RESOURCES
Studio Arts Quilt Associates: http://www.saqa.com/
12 Voices Artists
o Deidre Adams http://deidreadams.com/
o Teresa Barkley: https://www.artfulhome.com/artist/368.html
o Elizabeth Busch: http://www.elizabethbusch.com/index.htm
o Linda Colsh: http://www.quiltart.org.uk/lindacolsh.html
o Judith Content:
http://www.craftinamerica.org/artists_fiber/story_233.php?PHPSESSID=f
72f5b628c95cf6cf5d7df385a515c7b
o Angela Moll: http://www.angelamoll.com/
o Clare Plug: http://www.quiltgallery.co.nz/artists/artistworks.php?id=9/
o Joan Schulze: http://www.fiberscene.com/artists/j_schulze.html
o Merle Axelrad Serlin: http://www.axelradart.com/
o Susan Shie: http://www.turtlemoon.com/
o Ginny Smith: http://www.ginnysmithart.com/
o Kathy Weaver: http://www.kweaverarts.com/
PBS’s Art of Quilting: http://www.pbs.org/americaquilts/aoq/index.html
Great Lakes Quilting Center at Michigan State University Museum:
http://www.museum.msu.edu/glqc/
Art Quilt Reviews: http://artquiltreviews.wordpress.com/
17
LESSON PLANS & CLASSROOM EXTENSIONS
Webquest: Landscapes
An online lesson plan is available on our website at
www.dennosmuseum.org/education/schools/lessons/webquest_chatham.html. This lesson
aims to build critical thinking and observation skills while using internet resources in a
meaningful way and aids students in understanding the elements of art and recognizing
the use of them in everyday design.
Classroom Extensions:
Language Arts
Have students write narratives and illustrate them by creating quilt designs
Have students write narratives based on traditional quilt designs
Visual Arts
Create color studies by cutting and pasting fabric to board. Ironing the fabric to
fusible web before cutting will prevent fraying.
Mathematics
Have students design a quilt square using geometry.
Have students analyze the geometry of traditional quilt square designs:
o What angles and shapes are used?
o What is the surface area of each fabric?
o How much of each fabric is needed when you include a quarter inch seam
allowance?
History
Have students work in committees to choose a cause and create a quilt for the
cause or to raise awareness about an important issue.
o Examples of Cause-quilts:
 NAMES AIDS Memorial Quilt
 Iraq Memorial Quilt
 Quilts for a Cause (Breast Cancer)
18