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| Maybe the Word Bird knows. I copied a magnified bird (chickadee?) then added detail using words I heard around me |
"No," I said, 'not exactly."
She doesn't speak my language. I'm beginning to realize hardly anyone does. When a professional artist doesn't have an inkling of what an art quilt is, it's time to pay attention.
"Be sure to come to the opening of the next show at Grassroots," I told her. "I'll show you." (I hope to have a piece accepted in the next Thomasville show ... but if I don't, I'll take some art quilts and show her anyhow.)
Some artists call it "the Q-word." Quilt. They prefer to describe their work as fabric collage, or mixed media. Indeed, that's what quilting is. But I had stubbornly convinced myself to continue saying I make art quilts; thanks to my new artist friend, I see that most people wonder what an art quilt could possibly be. And I'm afraid they will turn away before I have a chance to explain.
Susan Shie of Wooster, Ohio, calls her quilts "soft art." She emphasizes she's artist first, quilter second. Yet she, and many others, proudly sew their art.
I'm a language person. I pride myself on clarity. Yet I have been insisting on using a confusing term -- not making any sense in the important issue of self-definition. How could I be so slow? And what am I, Word Bird?
2 comments:
Hi Kathleen. I called my work "Soft paintings" when I was in college and grad school. We didn't have the term "art quilt" then. But in my second year of college, when I was 28, Miriam Schapiro came to my college and turned my thinking upside down, and I came through that really wanting to merge my artmakking with my "women's work," which I'd done tons of at home, never thinking of it as art. I became a pretty raging Women's Art feminist.
Then, as a professional artist, many others and I called our work art quilts, but eventually got the drift that the REAL art world thought we were a joke. Without thinking of remembering our original radical impulse to make this hybrid art, as women, now we wanted to be seen as painters again. Let us in!!!!
I am 64 now, soon to be 65. I'm pretty sure my work will never reach the level of success I'd hoped for. But I'm also sure that I want to go back and take back my rejection of quilting. It IS a good thing, a very radical and exciting thing, to make women's art.
Read Radka Donnell's book Quilts as Women's Art: a Quilt Poetics. It's probably out of print. And Radka died a couple of years ago, and the book is hard to read. She gave me a copy of it in the early 1990s, and it came out in 1990. This book is where it's at. It's like reading existentialists though. You read a tad, and then you think about that and try to absorb it. Radka was really cool though and is worth the hard read!
I would have died and gone to heaven to read Radka's book when I was becoming a wild woman artist rebel in the late 1970s!
Enjoy! Viva la revolucion! Let's fire it up again!
Take it easy, but take it seriously. And thanks for being in my current online drawing class! Lucky
OK. I'll definitely read Quilts as Women's Art by Radka Donnell. And I wish youever more brilliant success. If we keep sparkling, the fireworks will light the sky! Thanks for your energy!!
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