12 Voices An in-depth look at 12 artists

working in the quilt medium

Information for Educators

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Dear Educator,

The Dennos Museum Center is proud to present 12 Voices, an in-depth look at 12 artists

working in the quilt medium from Studio Arts Quilt Associates, Inc. Included in this

packet are: the juror’s statement, online resources, classroom extensions, and select

images for use in the classroom. A PDF version of this packet with color images can be

found online at www.dennosmuseum.org/education/schools/lessons/.

Dennos Museum Center K-12 educational programming aligns with Michigan Content

Standards for Arts Education and the National Standards for Arts Education. We

especially strive to provide experiences that will fit into a curriculum for the new

Michigan Merit Curriculum for the Visual Performing and Applied Arts. To this end,

experiences at the Dennos Museum Center highlight aspects of the creative process. In

order to make sure that your tour addresses what you are doing in the classroom, please

inform the docent (volunteer tour guide) when contacted of any special interests or needs.

For details on content standards addressed by educational programming, please go to

www.dennosmuseum.org/education/schools/resources/.

Please discuss your field trip goals with your docent prior to arriving at the museum. We

are exciting to work with you to create a successful and fun visit to the Dennos Museum

Center.

Thank you for visiting the Museum and we look forward to seeing you soon!

The Dennos Museum Center Educational Department

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JUROR’S STATEMENT

Studio Art Quilt Associates’ 12 Voices exhibition gives us a rare, in-depth look at twelve

of the finest quilt artists working today. Some are known worldwide. Others are fresh

faces displaying a strong and promising talent. Most live in the United States, but happily

SAQA’s global membership is reflected by the inclusion of two international artists.

Artist selection was done from 128 portfolios in July 2007. It was difficult to choose

roughly only 1 out of every 10 submissions. I was extremely impressed and intrigued by

the exceptional quality of the entries. I felt that each artist had a deep sense of her own

style, voice, and message, offering a strong and unified body of work. The final selection

of individual pieces was not made until February 2008, as I invited the twelve selected

artists to produce new work for consideration over the intervening seven months. As a

result, some pieces shown here have been created especially for this exhibition.

The vision for the show was to reveal more, by showing fewer — to give each artist

enough space and time to gather their best work and create new art which would speak

strongly to their subject. This show has been mounted almost 20 years after SAQA’s

founding and nearly 40 years after the studio art quilt movement began. I hope that the

beauty, excitement, and message of these art pieces will resonate in your memory long

after you have seen the show. It was a pleasure to see this all come together thanks to the

hard-working members of the SAQA exhibition committee. I hope it is as much a joy for

you to view this new exciting art as it was for me. My bigger hope is that we all can hear

what these amazing twelve voices have to say.

— Penny McMorris, Juror

ABOUT STUDIO ARTS QUILT ASSOCIATES

Studio Arts Quilt Associates, Inc. (SAQA, Inc.) is a non-profit organization whose mission is to

promote the art quilt through education, exhibitions, professional development, and

documentation. Developed in 1989 by Yvonne Porchella, SAQA’s vision was to: Promote art

quilts to major art publications, museums, and galleries, Educate the public about art quilts, Serve

as a forum for the professional development of quilt artists, and, Act as a resource for curators,

dealers, consultants, teachers, students, and collectors.

Today, with an ever-increasing membership, SAQA is gearing up to broaden the audience for art

quilts even further. And just as important, under the leadership of the current Executive Director,

Martha Sielman, SAQA seeks to become an even greater resource and advocate for all of the

SAQA membership.

SAQA defines an art quilt as a contemporary artwork exploring and expressing aesthetic concerns

common to the whole range of visual arts: painting, printmaking, photography, graphic design,

assemblage and sculpture, which retains, through materials or technique, a clear relationship to

the folk art quilt from which it descends.

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IMAGES & ARTISTS

Deidre Adams Composition VII

Deidre Adams is a painter, photographer, and mixed media fiber artist living in Littleton, Colorado. She

divides her time between her passion for making art and her career as a graphic designer. Deidre has been

making her mixed media fiber art for over ten years. Deidre incorporates dyeing, painting, photography,

stitching, and collage in her work, and she likes to experiment with new ways of combining process and

techniques, from the traditional to the avant-garde.

For her art quilts, Deidre chooses fabrics with interesting textures and movement. She then pieces them,

and uses quilting to create more texture and movement. After the piece is quilted, Deidre paints the work.

She says of this step: ―At all times, I’m conscious of the stitching lines and texture, and I apply paint in

such a way as to enhance the surface.‖

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Teresa Barkley

Shakespeare Stamps

Teresa Barkley is constantly on the lookout for interesting fabric; "interesting" defined as fabric with

imagery or writing printed on them, such as printed feed sacks, linen children's books, old lace, canvas

moneybags, and commemorative handkerchiefs. She finds these in antique stores, flea markets and

Manhattan's fabric district. She sorts and stores the fabrics — some of which she's had for 25 years — by

theme.

Barkley's techniques include hand-appliqué, quilting, heat-transferring (images), and hand-painting

(stenciled letters). She incorporates "found object" materials, making her quilts a sort of fiber collage.

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Elizabeth Busch

Yellow From Busch’s artist statement:

As an artist, I draw, paint, sew, sculpt space. My environment in Maine is extremely

important to me and influences my work. I work in two mediums: Kinetic Sculpture and

Art Quilts. In each, the process is key. Layering, spacial illusion, landscape and

autobiography are the subject. Working in twenty foot spans and stitches to the inch, the

play of great scale and intimacy piques my interest.

My quilts are sewn paintings, acrylic on canvas, that are then hand quilted. This part of

the process allows me to become physically reacquainted with a piece created at arm's

length on the wall, and to add another visual dimension to it. I believe that the work

communicates with many, because color and mark making are a universal language.

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Linda Colsh Scent Astray

Colsh begins with a plain white or black cloth and transforms it with a series of surface design

processes, including dying with thickened dyes, resist banding, discharge dying, monoprinting,

screenprinting, and acrylic paint.

From Colsh’s artists statement:

I distill images into symbols, packing as much meaning and narrative as I can into a

concise icon…I like images that are both literal and symbolic, and words and titles that

have multiple meanings.

Each of the five art quilts in 12 Voices is a narrative about a person – a real person –

whom I saw and photographed because she caught my interest. Knowing nothing about

the person, I think about her, sometimes drawing or writing about her in my notebooks. I

develop her character and embroider her imaginary life with events and traits and

background that I find in my own imaginings. On the computer and then in my surface

design and sewing studios, I revise and alter the original photos with other imagery to

tell her story and embellish it with my personal editorial commentary on the big issues

that I think about and that concern me as I move thought my own world.

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Judith Content

North Light

Judith Content is a fiber artist in Palo Alto, California, who utilizes a contemporary interpretation of the

Japanese dye technique, shibori. Her hand-dyed, quilted, and pieced silk wall pieces often depict elaborate

landscapes that are inspired by the mystery and majesty of the Pacific coastline.

Judith is inspired by nature and by Japanese haiku. Many haiku inspired her work in the 12 Voices exhibit.

Judith on her dying process:

As I prepare my palette of silks, I don’t take notes or record the results – but allow each

dye session to enlighten the next. A collection of diverse silks are strewn on the studio

floor, torn up, arranged and rearranged until they resonate. The composition of

fragments is meticulously secured to the design wall, studied, refined and finally sewn

together. Quilting defines portions of the design, and appliqué is often used to accentuate

depth or movement in the piece.

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Angela Moll

Secret Diary 3

Angela Moll's artwork ranges from wearable art to quilts, all using her screen printed and painted fabric as

a point of departure. A native of Spain, she is primarily a self-taught artist. Her background includes studies

on western 20th century painting, Chinese calligraphic brushwork, as well as medieval book arts and family

sewing traditions.

In her Secret Diary series, Moll incorporates journal entries that are screenprinted on fabric. The inclusion

of this text creates a unique and unified composition.

From Moll’s artist statement:

I use the collaged and stitched diary fragments to speak about intimacy and

communication as well as privacy and communication.

Each quilt is an open notebook, the oversized text extending an invitation to read. Yet the

stitched diaries prove to be unreadable, revealing just the outline of a life story: rhythm

and pattern, lines and layers. The pressure, intensity, and speed of the handwritten line

imply the texture of emotions. It is an open book but a Secret Diary.

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Clare Plug

Viewpoint

From Plug’s artist statement:

My artwork, particularly those pieces from the last 6-8 years, can almost be thought of as

my personal meditations on a provincial life in Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand. More

specifically they reflect my continuing interest in this coastal landscape, macro/micro

views of natural objects, and the very limited color palette I enjoy working with.

In creating my artwork, I am also drawing from the long established design traditions

and conventions of quilt making: processes of abstraction, graphic effects, creation of

optical illusions, compositional devices used in the organizing of design elements, an

emphasis on real and visual texture, and the use of repetition to generate rhythms.

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Joan Schulze

End Times

From Schulze’s artist statement:

The urban experience colors the way I look at the world. My choices in creating a piece

usually come from my travels and can be read as pages in a journal. I am enamored with

surfaces and how they disintegrate over time. I layer and scratch away to reveal what is

beneath the surface, much like the effect one sees on old frescoes, illuminated

manuscripts, and urban walls. These erasures and fragments are combined, manipulated,

and rearranged as I work.

I love the idea of a quilt. The layering, the fact that it can be reversible, that you can plug

into this great and varied history of bed coverings and with a little push you can enter a

new world of walls, ceilings, or installations. It is the best of all worlds for me. Quilting

now functions as drawing with echoes of the tradition.

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Merle Axelrad Serlin

Coast

Merle Axelrad Serlin is an artist and architect living in Sacramento, California who has been working with

fabric since 1991. Her fabric collage technique takes something traditionally relegated to craft status

(fabric) and transforms it into a serious art form. Serlin often starts with a photograph, and working to

create a composite image.

Serlin on her process:

My collages are made of thousands of tiny fabric pieces, sometimes no larger than a

quarter-inch across. These fragments of woven color and texture are carefully arranged,

layered, pinned, and sewed together. My work has often been described as ―painting with

fabric,‖ but it also has dimension, like a sculpture.

I select fabrics I think I’ll want to use in the collage and arrange them on cardboard

sheets, creating palettes of similar colors, values, and textures. I usually use the rougher

fabrics for areas where I want a lot of texture – dry grasses, rocks, bark – saving the silk

gauzes and soft cottons for smoother subjects like water and sky. Value is something I

pay special attention to. Perhaps the key element of my work is depth, and I achieve this

largely through value. When I’m working on a collage, I work one area at a time,

completing that area before I go on to the next. So I need to know in advance exactly

where my darkest and lightest areas will be. That is what makes a clear drawing or photo

so critical for planning the overall collage.

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Susan Shie

The Silverware Drawer

Susan Shie is a legally blind artist from Wooster, Ohio. Shie paints, airbrushes, and writes with fabric

markers for surface decoration. Like Angela Moll, Shie includes journaling in her work, writing whatever

comes to mind as she works, and doesn’t work from a draft.

From Shie’s artist statement:

My work is personal diary work with themes focusing around the kitchen and family, St.

Quilta the Comforter (my made up character, based on my mother), astrology, tarot,

peace, and the environment, with a whole lot of emphasis on peace and compassion-

centered politics.

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Ginny Smith

Maybe the Test of Migration

Ginny Smith is an artist in Arlington, Virginia with a restless need to create.

From Smith’s artist statement:

I love zoos and circuses, museums and city streets, stories, fables, myths and symbols. I

react to the world by creating my own characters, who act where I cannot, and fight back

when I am fearful. They even die and come back to life.

For example, my quilt Maybe the Test of Migration came from musings of the

disappearance of crows from our neighborhood. Maybe they had just moved on and

hadn’t died from the West Nile Virus.

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Kathy Weaver

Cyborg Female 1: Complacent Nature From Weaver’s artist statement:

My work addresses aspects of the intersection between technology and art. By using the

labor-intensive quilt medium, nostalgic materials, and the robot persona, the pieces have

layers of meaning about time, personal and political conflict and memory. The robot

represents scientific and technological improvement resulting in change to the status quo.

The robot’s setting is that of a tilted stage or shadow box and in this environment the

robot is a translator of events, an alter ego, a doppelganger. The robot can be an

observer, a soothsayer, a malcontent or a destructor. The viewer is invited into the

picture plane to see the modality of the robot’s disposition as it reflects human nature.

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QUILTING TERMS

Appliqué - The sewing technique for attaching pieces (appliqués) of fabric onto a background

fabric. Appliqués may be stitched to the background by hand using a blind stitch or by machine

using a satin stitch or a blind hemstitch.

Backing – The fabric that makes the back side of the quilt

Basting - The sewing technique for joining by hand layers of fabric or the layers of a quilt with

large stitches. The stitching is temporary and is removed after permanent stitching.

Batting - The layers or sheets of filler placed between two pieces of fabric to form a quilt. Its

thickness varies, and it provides warmth.

Binding - The straight-grain or bias strips of fabric which is often folded double and covers the

raw edges and batting of a quilt.

Embroidery - Embroidery is the art or handicraft of decorating fabric or other materials with

designs stitched in strands of thread or yarn using a needle. Embroidery may also use other

materials such as metal strips, pearls, beads, quills, and sequins.

Fusible Web - A material that has been treated with an adhesive that fuses fabric pieces together

when pressed with a warm iron.

Quilt Sandwich - A quilt sandwich is made when a quilter puts their quilt top, backing, and

batting together. The quilter then quilts the pieces together to stabilize the work

Quilt Top – the decorative side of a quilt that usually consists of several pieces of fabric sewn

together to create an appealing design

Quilting - The small, running stitches made through the layers of a quilt -- top, batting and

backing -- to form decorative patterns on the surface of the quilt and to hold the layers together.

Quilting can either be done by hand or with a sewing machine.

Shibori - Shibori is a Japanese term for several methods of dyeing cloth with a pattern by

binding, stitching, folding, twisting, or compressing it. Some of these methods are known in the

West as tie-dye. Western civilization does not have an exact word equivalent that encompasses all

the techniques of shibori. Tie-dye simply covers binding methods of dyeing, known as bound

resist.

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ONLINE RESOURCES

Studio Arts Quilt Associates: http://www.saqa.com/

12 Voices Artists

o Deidre Adams http://deidreadams.com/

o Teresa Barkley: https://www.artfulhome.com/artist/368.html

o Elizabeth Busch: http://www.elizabethbusch.com/index.htm

o Linda Colsh: http://www.quiltart.org.uk/lindacolsh.html

o Judith Content:

http://www.craftinamerica.org/artists_fiber/story_233.php?PHPSESSID=f

72f5b628c95cf6cf5d7df385a515c7b

o Angela Moll: http://www.angelamoll.com/

o Clare Plug: http://www.quiltgallery.co.nz/artists/artistworks.php?id=9/

o Joan Schulze: http://www.fiberscene.com/artists/j_schulze.html

o Merle Axelrad Serlin: http://www.axelradart.com/

o Susan Shie: http://www.turtlemoon.com/

o Ginny Smith: http://www.ginnysmithart.com/

o Kathy Weaver: http://www.kweaverarts.com/

PBS’s Art of Quilting: http://www.pbs.org/americaquilts/aoq/index.html

Great Lakes Quilting Center at Michigan State University Museum:

http://www.museum.msu.edu/glqc/

Art Quilt Reviews: http://artquiltreviews.wordpress.com/

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LESSON PLANS & CLASSROOM EXTENSIONS

Webquest: Landscapes

An online lesson plan is available on our website at

www.dennosmuseum.org/education/schools/lessons/webquest_chatham.html. This lesson

aims to build critical thinking and observation skills while using internet resources in a

meaningful way and aids students in understanding the elements of art and recognizing

the use of them in everyday design.

Classroom Extensions:

Language Arts

Have students write narratives and illustrate them by creating quilt designs

Have students write narratives based on traditional quilt designs

Visual Arts

Create color studies by cutting and pasting fabric to board. Ironing the fabric to

fusible web before cutting will prevent fraying.

Mathematics

Have students design a quilt square using geometry.

Have students analyze the geometry of traditional quilt square designs:

o What angles and shapes are used?

o What is the surface area of each fabric?

o How much of each fabric is needed when you include a quarter inch seam

allowance?

History

Have students work in committees to choose a cause and create a quilt for the

cause or to raise awareness about an important issue.

o Examples of Cause-quilts:

NAMES AIDS Memorial Quilt

Iraq Memorial Quilt

Quilts for a Cause (Breast Cancer)