THE (barn) QUILT TRAIL

Donna Sue Groves wanted to surprise and honor her mother, Maxine. Maxine was an avid and somewhat well-known quilter so Donna Sue decided to paint a large quilt square on wood and install it on the family barn.  The family barn - and family - resided in Adams County, Ohio, and this was 2001. It was also the beginning of a “Quilt Trail” with tributaries now in 43 United States and 2 Canadian Provinces.

Decorating barns is not new. Barns mostly were unpainted until the mid-1800’s. By 1850, paint was affordable and easy to come by and Pa. Dutch had a heritage of painting on just about everything! It didn’t take a huge leap from painting red barns to jazzing them up with a big ol’ garnishes that came to be called “hex signs.” 

Hex signs were generally stars, triangles and flowers inside circles and there’s a bunch of theory as to their meanings, most commonly something about superstition, but those theories are all merely guesswork.  

Two important things happened to set them in front of the american folk art eye: Pennsylvania Dutch farms were/are among the tidiest communities in our Country . They are simply beautiful and happened to be set among the rolling hills of Pennsylvania, itself a lovely part of our nation. These communities were stamped with every attribute we associate with agricultural/societal perfection and populated by equally perfect people: clean, self-reliant, creative, nurturing, and successful but humble. The combination made this a microcosm so foreign to the rest of us (Disneyland hadn’t been invented yet) that it became a tourist destination and wham-o!, (2) an enterprising speculator started selling hex signs as souvenirs.

I first came across Quilt Trails in North Carolina and jumped to the obvious (and wrong!) conclusion that North Carolinians were especially clever when it comes to crafts and how to market them. We began seeing squares on barns when we visited Penland. N.C. still holds a special place in my estimation; you can actually pick up tourist maps at any N.C. visitor center to follow barn trails. Digging a little further, I came across a web site for Ontario, Canada, where they hold workshops where you can design and paint your own squares and spares for people who agree to install but don’t want the dirty work.

Here’s a map of New York with counties that have quilt trails.  Just like us Yankees, however, nobody seems to know how to put it all together in a tourist package deal. Here’s another site that describes the mechanics of the whole enterprise.  

Or you can join me some summer day when I plan to paint my own barn quilt square.

   

MEMORIES OF WILLIAM CHRISTENBERRY

I walked into a large chalky white room with high ceilings, bare floors. The room itself seemed oddly vacant but for a smattering of little buildings about the sizes of most doll houses - maybe slightly smaller scale. The models sat on tables and pedestals only slightly higher than my waist. As expected in any museum, these objects were perfectly spotlighted from overhead; after all, this was the Museum of Modern Art. 

These obsessively detailed pieces of architecture were miniaturized churches, gas stations, general stores and fruit stands. They embodied life in the American south - or perhaps any part of America’s poor backroads communities where stores sold Nehi Grape soda and signs outside churches announced “Special prayer meeting tonite for Sister Grace.” 

Roofs more often than not were pieced together rusted sheet metal; most buildings were one room and a porch. Who knows when they were built? Or if they were built on purpose? More likely, they grew along the dirt road as naturally as milkweed.  

And after half a century or more, the buildings were abandoned, the road itself little more than tracks through the dirt. Customers gone to Walmart. All that remains are the ghosts.

I fell in love with William Christenberry that day nearly forty years ago.

Christenberry grew up in the deep south and says “I find beauty in things that are old and changing, wearing away.” He has spent his adult life documenting this now-obsolete way of life.  The models he builds are only part of the diary. Christenberry was one of the first artist to use color photography as an art form, pointing his Kodak brownie to these same objects and compiling the photographs into art collections. He’s collected metal signs along the way that now fill his 20 foot studio wall from floor to ceiling. I’m saving my money to someday buy a copy of his book “Working from Memory.”

Christenberry is 78 years old. Four years ago he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. He’s at the tipping point with more bad days than good now and has just opened his very last exhibition at the Hemphill Fine Art Gallery  Logan Circle, Washington, D.C. The 26 works will be on view until August 1.  His love of the rural south and his exquisite eye will be missed.