Six Continents of Quilts: The Museum of Arts & Design Collection Fifty Art Quilts from Around the Globe Organized by the Museum of Arts & Design
Opens July 3 at UBS PaineWebber Lobby Gallery
NEW YORK - Beginning July 3, the Museum of Arts & Design will present Six Continents of Quilts: The Museum of Arts & Design Collection, a major exhibition of quilts by artists from the United States, Europe, Asia, Africa, South America and Australia. Featured will be more than 50 art quilts - most of them recent acquisitions - from the Museum's permanent collection. The exhibition will be mounted in the Lobby Gallery of the UBS PaineWebber Building, 1285 Avenue of the Americas (at 51st Street), in Manhattan. Gallery hours: weekdays, 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. The exhibition runs through September 13.
"We celebrate this presentation of a remarkable assembly of quilts from many parts of the world as a symbol of the unifying spirit that artists bring to enrich our world," says Holly Hotchner, Director of the Museum of Arts & Design. "We greatly appreciate the opportunity to work with our colleagues at PaineWebber to present these noteworthy works to the public in New York and at other venues. We also take great satisfaction in knowing that the recent acquisition of so many fine works will make our collection one of the most important and far-reaching in the country."
Curator Ursula Ilse-Neuman of the Museum of Arts & Design, who organized the exhibition, says, "Quilts combine the tactility of sculpture, the expressive range of the painter's palette, and the communicative power of photography. These artists share the ability to draw on their personal visions to express ideas that touch everyone."
Quilts have been the pre-eminent form of artistic expression for American women for over 200 years, and represent one of the most important repositories of classic American design. Today, the strength, expressive potential and range of the quilt have attracted men and women from many countries. Using new techniques and materials, they have transformed the quilt into a fresh and vital medium that has become known as the "art quilt." In the past 30 years, art quilting in the United States has become one of the most exciting and innovative of the textile arts.
The artists represented in Six Continents of Quilts bring a wide range of inventiveness and vitality to the quilt form, revealing both the diversity and the "common threads" that unite peoples across geographic boundaries. The exhibition has been organized into broad thematic sections that range from the abstract to the narrative and from the symbolic to the political: Color, Light and Form, Tradition and Innovation, Storytelling and Fairytales, Conscience and Outcry, and Landscape and Cityscape.
This subjective organizational scheme enables the viewer to experience the variety of styles and treatments in art quilts today, while recognizing universal artistic concerns.
Many of the artists in the section Color, Light and Form have chosen quilting because new materials and techniques offer a wide range of expressive potential to reflect their vision. Michael James (New York) creates intricate rhythmic dances of colorful shapes that are meticulously worked out with impeccable craftsmanship. James, who is widely credited with helping to make the quilt an art form, takes a painterly approach by using a palette of more than 100 shades to create the subtle shadings and interplays that are integral to his Waves II: Storm Surge (1988).
Traditions and Innovations explores the ways in which traditional quilt techniques and imagery have been continued and adapted in various cultures. Munni Srivastava extended her childhood love for the rich textiles of her native India when she pursued textile studies in Germany and Britain. Winter Days (2000), one of a series illustrating the seasons, is an excellent example of Srivastava's unique combination of Indian embroidery with Western patchwork patterns.
Storytelling and Fairytales features quilters whose work focuses on people and their stories. Michael Cumming's I'll Fly Away (1991), for example, portrays an enslaved African American woman as a symbol of power.
Quilts have often voiced Conscience and Outcry against social injustice. Wendy Huhn uses image transfer and surface design to tell her stories. Her colorful quilts balance a whimsical, tongue-in-cheek style with serious statements about important social issues, notably feminism. In Home on the Range (1994), a Renaissance nude sits atop an early model stove that was originally marketed to laud the benefits of domesticity.
The quilters included in Landscape and Cityscape are inspired by imagery from their natural or urban surroundings. The Gift of Tongues (1991) is the second in a series of explorations of the theme of the Tower of Babel by Robin Schwalb (New York). The cityscape she depicts symbolizes the melding of languages and cultures from which the city reinvigorates itself through what Schwalb calls "a message of tolerance, human endurance, and delight in diversity."
History of the Quilt
Many countries have centuries-old quilting traditions, such as the Trapunto style from sixteenth-century Italy and the ancient Sashiko sewing tradition in Japan. In America, the earliest quilts were Native American chintz quilts, frequently made from cloth cut into large pieces and appliquéd into designs including coverlets and bed hangings.
The art quilt developed out of a renewed interest in quilting after World War II. The 1960s climate of political and social rebellion against the status quo led artists to question boundaries and to expand possibilities for defining art.
In 1976, the Museum of Contemporary Crafts (now the Museum of Arts & Design) mounted The New American Quilt, an exhibition that highlighted the work of contemporary quilt artists for the first time. By the 1980s, artists such as Nancy Crow, Michael James and Faith Ringgold, all of whom are represented in Six Continents of Quilts, had dedicated themselves to using, teaching and expanding the range of the non-traditional quilt, establishing it as a contemporary art form.
Not since the 19th century has so much creative energy been applied to quiltmaking. The breadth of new ideas and techniques from outside the quilt tradition has reinvigorated a wonderfully rich traditional form. Art quilts are being created in all parts of the globe as artists draw on the power and expressive potential of the medium.
Related Program:
Saturday, June 1, from 1:00 to 2:30 p.m.
Offered in conjunction with SOFA NY, the International Exposition of Sculpture Objects and Functional Art, at the Seventh Regiment Armory, Park Avenue and 67th Street, New York City.
Rebels with a Cause: Contemporary Arts Quilters in America and Abroad
Since the early 1970s, the evolution of the art quilt has progressed rapidly, driven by a few trend-setting museum exhibitions that took quilts out of their traditional, utilitarian context. A panel of experts will discuss the state of the art quilt in the United States and its growing importance in Europe, Asia, Australia and South Africa. Key issues include the influence of national characteristics, gender and ethnicity; the quilt as a site for social statements or spiritual (self-) discovery; and the use of novel techniques and materials that may have their roots in other art forms.
The panel includes Janet Koplos, senior editor of Art in America; quilt historian Jacqueline Atkins; Canadian quilter Dorothy Caldwell and Michael Lewis, a teacher, lecturer, writer and quilter. Moderators: Museum of Arts & Design Curator Ursula Ilse-Neuman, and Curatorial Assistant Jennifer Scanlan. Free with daily SOFA admission ($16).
Support for this exhibition is provided by UBS PaineWebber.