Romare Beardon at the Mint/Kathryn Clark Quilts

We visited the Mint Museum (downtown Charlotte) last Saturday. It was the last weekend to view the Romare Bearden retrospective and the joint was hopping! Kids, families, live jazz music – there was nothing HUSH about the place. Those of us who came to see the artwork were civility itself in spite of elbows gently prying bodies out of the way for better viewing.

Bearden was a native of Charlotte – an African American artist (1911-1988) – who migrated to Harlem and spent his life illustrating the sights, colors, and spirit of the black experience. And this was a BIG SHOW. Nearly 100 collages, paintings and works on paper were assembled from collections across the country and sprawled throughout the entire 4^th floor of the museum.

I love collage – I love quilts and mixed up materials - marriages of glass, metal, wood and the exuberance of pattern and texture. I’m also a sucker for pictorial narrative. Bearden was a master of all that so it came as an emotional stomach punch to see these works in person. They simply took my breath away and I stood in front of the collage on loan from Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Museum and wiped away tears.

Imagine! It was free – but priceless.

(The show will travel nationally. Don't miss it!)

Few of us live in an information free environment and if you do, you are not reading this blog. For the rest of us, the news is bad and for some of us (me, for instance) who follow real estate, it’s just crazy-bad! More than one theoretical pundit states that unless the foreclosure mess is cleared up, our country will continue to struggle against the quicksand of this horrible economy and if you think you are immune, think again! That rock under which you crawl is not saving you; every one of us is being touched by this depressing historical time.

Kathryn Clark is an urban designer/architect turned fiber artist who lives and works in San Francisco. I found photographs of her quilt series- “Foreclosures” - on a design web site that I follow. Her work is artistically beautiful – a wonderful balance of color, shape and texture – imaginatively clever and thematically relevant.

Not bad for a “mere quilt maker,” eh?

(Please find her at http://kathrynclark.blogspot.com/ You’ll be glad you made the effort.)