Since the early days of the Republic, the American spirit has served as a powerful tonic for the age-old craft of quilting. Here more than anywhere else in the world, quilting has flourished, inspired by homespun innovation. Today that innovation is propelling quilt making into new territory.
Contemporary quiltmakers are transforming the craft. Their works are as far removed from what came out of the old-fashioned quilting bee as the microwave oven is from the wood-burning stove.
”The contemporary quilt has a whole new esthetic to it,” says Paul Smith, director emeritus of the American Craft Museum in New York. ”In the last 10 to 15 years, there has been a lot of experimentation with the quilt format. Quilters have broken with traditional geometric patterns and materials and have expanded the vocabulary of the traditional quilt.”
No longer interested in creating decorative covers for the bed, contemporary quiltmakers are piecing and stitching fabric into visually exciting works intended to be hung on walls, like paintings. No longer bound by the patterns of traditional quilts, they are creating abstract and allegorical patterns of their own. And no longer tied to the tradition of hand stitching, they are using the sewing machine for part-and sometimes all-of the work.
Some contemporary quilts look as hard-edged and jarring as Op Art. Others have the playfulness of Pop Art. The subject matter is as varied as current events, folklore, color experiments and personal statements about war and peace.
According to crafts experts, in the last year there has been a substantial increase in the collecting of quilts for homes and offices. Modern quilts are being bought by a wide variety of people, from serious art collectors to people who have never bought art before. In the process, prices have reached levels that quilters say they could not have imagined a short time ago.
”Prices have jumped quite a bit in the last year,” says Penny McMorris, an art historian in Bowling Green, Ohio, who is an authority on quilts. ”Two or three years ago you could get a nice contemporary quilt for $2,500. Now that quilt is more likely to be about $7,000. Some are reaching $15,000.”
ART STUDENTS GROWN UP
The driving force behind contemporary quilts is a cadre of quilters who were art students in the 1970s, when all handicrafts began to enjoy renewed popularity. They are working across the country, in big cities as well as rural hamlets. Among the best-known quilters are Nancy Crow of Baltimore, Ohio; Michael James of Somerset Village, Mass.; Yvonne Porcella of Modesto, Calif.; Pamela Studstill of Pipe Creek, Tex.; Faith Ringgold of New York City; and Terrie Hancock Mangat of Cincinnati.
”Many contemporary quilters taught themselves to quilt,” McMorris says. ”They began experimenting and adapting new patterns in old ways. Now we are seeing the results of their work.”
These quilters consider themselves artists, and they refer to their works as ”art quilts”; their label has been adopted by collectors and crafts authorities.
”An art quilt is a one-of-a-kind original expression, part of a body of work produced by a serious studio artist,” says James, 38, who has been quilting full time since 1976.
James, whose strongly colored linear designs are reminiscent of Frank Stella paintings, has a graduate degree in painting from the Rochester Institute of Technology. ”I didn`t have any conscious desire to be a quiltmaker,” he says. ”I just got attracted to quilts, and one day tried putting some fabrics together.”
He describes his quilts as ”explorations of color and the interaction of color with linear design.” He says he was drawn to quilting ”because of the fabric: I relate better to the material than to paint.”
Other prominent quilters also talk about the appeal of working with fabric. ”I love the touch, smell, feel of the fabric,” says Crow, 43, who works in a 100-year-old barn on her farm in Ohio. ”It is very comforting to have fabric near you and to touch it.”
STRONG GRAPHIC EFFECTS
Crow, who has a master`s degree in ceramics from Ohio State University, began experimenting with quilting-”playing around with fabric”-in the late 1970s. Her quilts have bold, abstract geometric designs. Known as a colorist, she says she likes ”strong graphic effects, strong contrasts between light and dark.”
Porcella, 51, was an operating room nurse and a designer of wearable art before teaching herself to quilt in 1980. Her recent works have been pictorial statements about experiences in her life. Earlier works were abstract images inspired by combinations of color.
Porcella says she was drawn to quilting because of ”the tremendous power of graphic arts in quilts” and because she feels ”a personal sense of attachment to fabric.”
Contemporary quilts are as diverse in materials and techniques as they are in subject matter. Fabrics range from cottons and silks to plastic and polyester. Quilters often employ a variety of techniques used by contemporary artists, including airbrushing, silk screening and photography.
”The contemporary quilt has produced an esthetic peculiar to the period we live in,” says Robert Bishop, director of the Museum of American Folk Art in Manhattan, adding that the sewing machine is part of that esthetic. ”Today so many quilts are made by machine,” he says. ”Many are quite beautiful and should not be faulted.”
According to McMorris, who has written books on quilting, contemporary quilts are beginning to turn up in art galleries, not just crafts galleries. In New York the Bernice Steinbaum Gallery in SoHo is showing quilts by Faith Ringgold, and an exhibition of quilts by Jane Kaufman opened earlier this month. There have also been recent exhibitions of quilts in galleries in Cincinnati and Chicago.
Until recently, McMorris says, quilting was not taken as seriously as other crafts because it was branded as women`s work: ”Quilts have always been the low man on the crafts totem pole, a craft done by little old ladies. It seemed unimportant, even among the other fiber arts.”
AVID COLLECTORS
Among collectors, Robert and Ardis James, who live in Westchester County in New York, have what experts agree is the largest collection of contemporary quilts. The Jameses, avid collectors of both antique and contemporary quilts, have six quilts by Michael James in their collection, as well as works by Pamela Studstill and Terrie Hancock Mangat.
Mangat`s quilt ”Memory Jars,” a tableau of three large jars studded with childhood mementos-plastic charms, metal pins, buttons, a rosary, miniature toys-is mounted above the fireplace in the living room.
”We only buy what we like, and we buy quilts by people who are going to be around,” says Ardis James, who is building a private quilt gallery onto her house for the nearly 270 quilts she has acquired with her husband since they began collecting in 1981.
”We also look for nice quilting-good work in the old-fashioned sense,”
says Robert James, a financier.
Quilt collectors say that even though their purchases are increasing in value, they do not buy them for investment. ”If they didn`t appreciate, we would love them anyway,” Ardis James says. ”My husband says this is more fun than the stock market. And he said that before Oct. 19.” –
