QUILTS - TODAY, ALWAYS

Artist: Rosie Lee Tompkins

 

Every few years, art critics, museum curators, designers and collectors “discover” quilts. It’s the damnedest thing! I’ve watched this EUREKA for most of my 70 plus years. 

But quilters never go away. They’re always around somewhere, hunched over quilt frames  with their neighbors (women usually) laughing about the latest antics of their kids, husbands and dogs. And methodically pushing with those thimbled fingers - down and back up - the needle holding cotton thread, making tiny stitches that weld together the textile layers that comprise a quilt. 

Community. Sorority. Creativity. The very purist example of socialism: “we’ll take turns….do your quilt…then Mary’s…then…You need a little more blue checkered gingham? Here…take some of mine.” Shared labor equally divided.

I know about quilters. My mom was one. Setting up a quilt frame was a Fall rite just as putting away the sundresses and dragging out the winter coats. I could quilt before I could read. And I knew the “rules.”

 

1. Make sure the fabric is clean first
2. Don’t mix fabrics..keep together by weight, weave, etc. 
3. Quilt stitches must be equal and in neat patterns, generally following the “maps” established by the piecing patterns
4. Piecing corners must meet exactly 

Very strict. Very European. Quilters were graded by how closely they followed the rules. Mom was an expert quilter. She would be flabbergasted by the quilts now hanging on museum walls made by descendants of slaves.

The Gee’s Bend quilt ladies  — and African American quilt making artists that followed — set the art world on its ear! Never mind perfecting precision corners, straight lines, and matching squares. Their quilts are voices of freedom made foldable.  

Rosie Lee Tompkins’ quilts incorporate cotton double knits, rayon, polyester, wool, cotton t-shirts, and silk neckties. And usually in one glorious soup of narration. The Gee’s Bend ladies combined old jean denim and corduroy. No perfect 90 degree corners. My mother and her quilting friends must be spinning in their graves to hear such trash.

But I am convinced that she would look at these objects and return to look again and again, and wonder about the freedom, the spontaneous choices. “Why didn’t we think…? Why didn’t we see…? Why were we so tightly controlled?” She and her friends would gasp at the beauty and fall in love with these quilts just as I have.

(There will always be a place in the quilt iconography for traditional quilt-making, just as there is room in art history for portraiture and landscapes. But the emphasis is different. One branch stresses the craft — the other, the art.) 

Last week, quilt artist and historian Carolyn Mazloomi (originally trained as an aerospace engineer, Dr. Mazloomi now lectures about quilt making art throughout the world) received $50,000 and was named a United States Artist Fellow. She donated the $50K to the Women of Color Quilters Network.  

The February, 2021, NY Times Style issue pictured this season’s high fashion wearable designs using traditional quilt patchwork. In another magazine reporting on style, a journalist wrote “while it may conjure up thoughts of the elderly, sewing scrap fabric together, this is not your grandmother’s quilt.” The writer needs some serious lessons in quilts. (Also an editor that points out agism and sexism when it shows up on the page!)

 And if fashion designers think they’ve hit on something new this year, they apparently never listened to Dolly Parton’s “Coat of Many Colors?” 

THE OWL

 An owl must live in the trees at the edge of our woods. I hear it who-ing every evening right before the channel 10 lady airs tomorrow’s weather forecast. She, (the news lady, not the owl), along with sharing her predictions for climate shifts, unknowingly announces our dinner. At my house, we are like Pavlov’s dogs, conditioned to respond to recurring signals: garbage truck = breakfast, noon whistle = lunch, weather lady = dinner.

 

Without those landmarks, would we starve? Surely not! We must retain some prehistoric mechanism, some native response to hunger, regardless of the time of day. But I am not so certain. 

The year of quarantine has deepened the ruts of living at our house. My routine varies so slightly that each day is an echo of the one before it and a prediction of the one to come. 

This is the worrisome part: I’m beginning to like that rut. It’s as comfortable as the thin tee-shirt that I sleep in. I know there are other nighties in the drawer but I reach for the same pale pink shirt with the long sleeves that need folding up twice to keep out of toothpaste, the one with a vest pocket that usually holds a slightly used tissue. The tissue invariably goes through the wash with the shirt and resurrects in shreds marking the entire laundry load and showering paper dander all over the black tile floor.

We humans are social animals; our survival depends on sharing, and I always believed myself to be a “people person.” Get me to a dinner party, a performance, an event. I can usually bluff my way through a crowd of strangers, sometimes convincing them and myself that it’s all good, that I find them intoxicatingly interesting, that we share fundamental facts upon which we can enjoy conversation and humor. 

But I wonder if these skills must be exercised, like our stomach muscles, doing social sit ups to keep the smile intact and the brain cogs whirring? If we see no one for weeks, months, years, do we become mute, indifferent to the quirks and tics of fellow travelers? 

Are we in danger of becoming social novices? A Covid casualty of a different kind?

I have a friend who keeps making new clothes for herself. She’s a fine knitter and seamstress and throughout the “Year of the Troubles,” she’s maintained her sanity by working at frenzy focus on this new wardrobe.  I smile at her obsession. Her life “pre-Covid” was one of modest social engagement. Judging by the trousseau she continues to construct, anyone might guess that she’s about to launch on a major travel season! 

Within the next several months, her life may resume something labeled “normal.” Likely, it will mean an occasional dinner out, a monthly evening with friends, a movie, a haircut appointment. What about all those new sweaters? the skirts of many colors? Even before their final pressing, are they destined for Goodwill? Second Hand Rose? There are worse ways to mark this year. 

As I sat at the table today, I caught sight of wide white wings sailing through the trees at the edge of the woods. I think it was the owl. I’ve never seen an owl in flight at my house. It was worth the wait. 

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The white lilies are from Trader Joe's...the best $9 I've spent in months!