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?”