The quilt: Art you can feel
Finding the art that helps you to see and feel seen
Sometimes, when I’m looking at a work of art that I love, my chest opens and my pores get bigger. It’s not necessarily inspiration. It’s more an ache, or an opening. Everything feels more vivid; the world has a beating heart again.
What is that art for you? I’ve been wandering museums here in Des Moines and elsewhere during some short winter travels. And I’ve been thinking about what gets that name, art?
I’ve always wondered, but the question solidified around a particular form while I was working at a creative residency last summer. I stepped out onto the back porch of our house where a group of artists had gathered. Most of us had big projects during this precious time without jobs or food prep or other needs siphoning the hours. Breaks were brief and almost hysterical; we were hungry for talk and fellowship and something to imbibe before heading back into our made-up worlds.
It was a little chilly. I’d wrapped up in the quilt my sister-in-law and nieces made for me when I joined the family. The textile artists were all over it, checking out the color combinations, the stitching, how Sue and the girls had patterned the quilting. That quilt is a wonder—warm in winter, cool in summer, soft as fresh snow.
Someone asked if my area had a lot of crafting of this quality, and I said yes, I knew several quilters of varying levels of seriousness. Had in fact helmed the magazine housed next door to the most popular quilting publication in America (editor Linda Augsburg once reinforced the quilt’s edges for me). The conversation turned to that word, “crafts,” and why quilting wouldn’t just be called art. It requires training. It’s precise in its meaning. It’s all about color and composition and expertise. Like Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture, it contains the added dimension of usefulness.
But quilts are generally made by women, most often by rural women, and so their work gets the crafts designation. It’s considered less serious than the drawings and paintings and sculptures I’ve been seeing in city galleries during these winter weeks. But American quilting history is intentional and binding, especially in rural places like mine. It’s no surprise that when gay rights activist Cleve Jones envisioned a memorial to loved ones lost to AIDS that embodied memory and family, he chose a quilt.
I love what Mensie Lee Petaway says about the tradition handed down by her mother, rural southern quilter America Irby:
Ought not two quilts ever be the same. You might use exactly the same material, but you would do it different. A lot of people make quilts just for your bed, for to keep you warm. But a quilt is more. It represents safekeeping, it represents beauty, and you could say it represents family history.
Like the best quilts in my house, when I respond to art with that opening, I can return to the well again and again and find something new every time. I love Helen Frankenthaler’s colors for this reason:
I was so into the Alex Katz exhibition at the Guggenheim last year that I bought the book bag of Mr. and Mrs. R. Padgett, Mr. and Mrs. D. Gallup:
And when I saw The Reader by Emma Amos at Crystal Bridges among 20 acres of Ozark wilderness, I could’ve looked at it for days:
So it is with great quilts. The hand-sewn squares and endless recombination of color and pattern. I can study a different section every day and never stop finding something new. This fold. This stitch that seems intentionally uneven and human. How one pattern seems to lead directly to its neighbor. I’m a firm NO on polyester fill, cotton batting all the way, baby, but that’s my taste. It is art, though my sister-in-law would laugh to hear me say it.
My friend Bonnie Hartman has made some of the quilts in my house, too. Another Algona woman. We live in a hotbed for this art. Bonnie is the mom of one of my best college friends. Though we’ve scattered all over the world, Bonnie’s quilts have found each of us, one of the many things that still bind us together.
I am under one of Bonnie’s quilts now, as I write this. She gave it to me when my son left for college, a few months after my mom died. It’s the color of my home, my yard, the timber in Iowa. Murky river water and poison ivy in fall. Some of the patterns look like they came from other parts of the world, like most people here did. Some patterns look like marble to me, or concrete. It’s backed with soft black flannel that I rubbed between my hands when my dad also died, and when my daughter left for school, too. When I got a new job that I love. I wrapped my new puppy in this quilt.
I like to ask Bonnie, or Sue, or my Aunt Kathy, about how they make them. A few weeks ago, when I asked Bonnie, she began with the day she lost the love of her life. I grabbed the microphone so I could share the conversation with you, too. I used a hand-held on this one, recording on the fly. I’d love to hear if you think that changes the listening experience for you, or if you liked it just the same as when I’m in the womblike studio.
Anyway, Bonnie never charges for her quilts. She decides who gets each one as she makes it, and she’s never without a work in progress. She doesn’t care to call it art or craft or anything but quilting.
Press PLAY on this week’s Analog Mix Tape, featuring Bonnie!
Art. Certainly. Your descriptions of those quilts make me feel cozy just reading them. And I cherish the quilts one of my dear friends made for each of my children — such an amazing gift of love and time and personalized attention.
Even I learned a few things! Well done, Jen. Thank you for featuring my mom and recognizing that what she does is gallery worthy.