Red Thread Studio

All Together Now

As much as I love textiles, I equally love well-crafted language, and the art of beautiful, truthful writing and oratory. So part of what makes this inauguration/celebration highly emotional and deeply moving for me is the joy of a return to great speeches, the inclusion of poetry, the amazing power of the right words at the right time, delivered with passion and conviction. On CNN, they've just replayed Martin Luther King's speech - the one that's come to be known as I Have A Dream, though that was not its original title. And I'm happily anticipating both Obama's speech and Michelle's clothes tomorrow, for both of their smiles as they arrive at the end of the beginning, and mostly for the audacity of hope for America, yes indeed, unlike anything I've experienced in my lifetime.

The Washington Post has an essay linking Obama's style of orating with King's and other black preachers. The Root has a Q&A with Elizabeth Alexander, the inaugural poet, who sounds like a delightful woman who is equal parts down-to-earth and lofty. You can read some of her published poems on her lovely Web site. 

Poetry is best read aloud; people often feel intimidated by poems, unsure if they're up to the task of appreciating them, but that's because we're woefully underexposed to poetry. Here is Alexander's Ars Poetica #100:

Ars Poetica #100: I Believe

Poetry, I tell my students,
is idiosyncratic. Poetry

is where we are ourselves,
(though Sterling Brown said

“Every ‘I’ is a dramatic ‘I’”)
digging in the clam flats

for the shell that snaps,
emptying the proverbial pocketbook.

Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,

overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way

to get from here to there.
Poetry (and now my voice is rising)

is not all love, love, love,
and I’m sorry the dog died.

Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)
is the human voice,

and are we not of interest to each other?

Whether we find it in poems, speeches, essays, music, stitching, dance, travel, or some other path that gives us both expression and contemplation, we're all searching for rhythm, melody, cadence, pattern, and beauty -- our collective heartbeat and our collective soul. 

Edited to add: If your idea of poetry is food, food, food, you might love the Obama Foodorama blog. 

Now, I'll feel off-topically guilty if I don't include something more specific about art and textiles. Jennifer Falck Linssen is an artist who uses Japanese katagami and katazome stencils to make inventive, graceful sculptures. As it turns out, she lives not far from me, and has a show opening at a local museum that I hope to see. And I've just discovered Laura Tyler, another locally-based artist who works with encaustic techniques. Laura has an excellent art blog. 

I've started another piece with shisha mirrors, beads and stitching; it has a long way to go, but here is the base.  

And one more link: I've been reading Eric Weiner's The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World. If you've had it with all the preachy "happiness science," this book is your antidote. Though I'm finding it to bog down a little at the end, it's very funny, and very sweet. I was that possibly-insane-looking person laughing out loud on the airplane last week while reading it. 

Be About Beauty

This rich, stunning work, titled Be About Beauty,  is by nationally known fiber artist Adriene Cruz. She kindly gave me permission to reproduce it here; visit her Web site to see more of her work. The poem is by Kalamu Ya Salaam, founder of NOMMO Literary Society, a New Orleans-based creative writing workshop. The copyright date of the textile work is 2001.

I discovered Adriene Cruz through Rayela's Fiber Focus, a wonderful blog by Rachel Biel Taibi -- Rachel lives in Paducah, Kentucky, but is a sister global textile explorer. She's especially interested, as I am, in the cultural context of textiles, and she also writes about aspects of sustainability; she has an interesting post on fair trade, a concept that a lot of people relate to in terms of coffee and chocolate, but it also has great relevance in crafts and textile production.

Back to Adriene Cruz: her work is about spirit, meditation, power, beauty and heritage. Enjoy it, and let whatever you do be about beauty today.

Quilts of Soul, Strength and Scarcity

I saw the exhibition Gee's Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt at the Denver Art Museum yesterday. This is not the same exhibition of quilts that appeared in 2003 at the Whitney Museum, inspiring critic Michael Kimmelman in the New York Times to call them "some of the most miraculous works of modern art that America has produced." Those quilts have since appeared on postage stamps, among other things, and made the Gee's Bend quilting style famous. But the quilters, the spirit and the story are the same.

It's the story that makes these works astounding. From an artistic viewpoint, they are all visually arresting; some are more successful than others. A few quilts are incredibly dynamic, with colors and shapes making an inventive, harmonious whole enhanced by the raw stitching, exposed knots and uneven binding that reveal the maker's hand. Some are more jarring. Most quilt artists today would probably attempt to develop more refined techniques, unless they were self-consciously trying to imitate this style.

But these women, until recently, were not aiming to be quilt artists, selling in galleries and exhibiting in museums, and could hardly imagine that possibility. They were trying to inject some creative salvation into the task of keeping their families warm in lives of the most abject poverty in this great but sometimes unjust country.

The town of Gee's Bend is isolated on three sides by the Alabama River, with limited access on the fourth side. Its residents are African-American, descended from slaves, and historically subjected to every injustice thereof --  a ferry service was shut down in 1962 to prevent the townspeople from registering to vote, not resuming until two years ago, and education and opportunity was minimal at best. In Wilcox County today, almost half of children under 18 live below the poverty line.

The characteristic Gee's Bend quilting style emerged and evolved in this insulated community, passed down through the generations. The quilts are made from used clothes and fabrics, many using a simple Housetop or partial Log Cabin block, others with a more random structure. Fabric pieces tend to be large, or as large as repurposed used clothing (or corduroy scraps from Sears, Roebuck & Co.) would allow, and few of the quilts are squared off; some have binding on one or two sides only; the quilting stitches follow crooked, curved or bending lines and the stitches are big by quilting standards. They were made quickly to be used quickly, for warmth in unheated rooms. Yet the women took the time and had the spirit and imagination to make creative choices, often dramatic and unexpected and playful.

To see these quilts on the walls of an elegant museum gave me some cognitive dissonance, because they reverberate with this story of scarcity few of us could overcome, and strength that most of us would be hard-pressed to find; it's in every stitch. This story is in many patchwork quilts, but it is especially poignant here. It's also a story of joy and creativity and the deep relations that have held this community together.

Today, thankfully, many of the Gee's Bend quilters have benefited from the popularity of the quilts, though there have been some lawsuits regarding payments, intellectual property rights and licensing agreements. I was moved by the story of one woman who stopped quilting for 20 years because of illness and depression, overcome by a life harder than I can imagine. When the Gee's Bend quilts were "discovered" and began to sell and return some benefits to the women, her despondency also began to life, and she was able to stitch again.

A book on display at the exhibition said that she had prayed all her life that her last years would be her best years. She felt that her prayers had been answered.

Betsy Ross Would Be Proud

I've been supporting John Edwards in the primaries, but that doesn't keep me from feeling the thrill of possibility with Barack Obama, or the immense satisfaction of seeing a strong, smart woman as a serious presidential candidate. I'm a fan of Bill Richardson too -- I hope he ends up with a meaningful position in a Democratic administration next year.

I'd been wondering if any of the candidates had a connection to textiles or craft when I visited Kyra's Black Threads blog -- she has a link to Fiber Artists for Obama. And we know that John Edwards's father worked in a textile mill, and he talks eloquently about the demise of domestic textile production. Any other connections to textile art or garments? I don't think we'll see Hillary admitting to any needle arts -- too loaded for her -- but maybe if they win, Bill as First Mate  will continue to expand the White House collection of American crafts that Hillary began in 1993.

Or maybe he'll pick up the knitting or quilting needle himself -- it'd be good for his heart and keep him out of trouble, right? How about it, Bill? Take up the Slow Cloth cause and promote and protect the work of fiber artists around the globe and sustainability in textiles. Call me if you need some help.

Or maybe Obama will win and really bring attention to the contribution of African-American artists to our culture. In textiles, there's the Gee's Bend quilters, and much more. Faith Ringgold is one of our elder godmothers of contemporary quilting, and her work is spectactular, political and inspiring. I am also a huge fan of multimedia artist Betye Saar.

I had the pleasure of meeting Betye Saar once, when I worked at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and she and her daughter Alison Saar had a joint exhibition. In the main gallery Julian Schnabel had an exhibition that was suffocating in its own art-world egotism and posturing. The Saars had a much smaller gallery and an absolute jewel of a show that quietly played second fiddle to Mr. Schnabel. But their authenticity, integrity and spirit was so immense that for me it far overshadowed the big whoop in the main gallery. The Saars gave me an unforgettable lesson about the meaning of making art versus "success" in the art world, and also about using culture and gender references in art in an effective and unapologetic way.

I thought one of my recent magazines also had reviews of African-American textile arts books, but my highly refined controlled-chaos organizational system is failing me. I'll find it. Meanwhile, the magazine stack is getting bigger. My new issues of Selvedge (No. 21, The Responsibility Issue) and Surface Design (Winter 2008, Structured Surfaces) came yesterday -- both breathtaking. I think Selvedge integrates its graphic design and its content better than anybody to produce a truly extraordinary, appetizing, collectable journal. And it totally, totally makes me want to move to England for a year or two to immerse myself in the textile world there.  

Surface Design editor Patricia Malarcher has tremendous authority and impeccable, sophisticated taste and intelligence, as well as being an artist herself, and her voice and sensibilities make this magazine extremely valuable too. In this new issue, my first stop will be the article on artist Yvonne Morton, who is inspired by textile arts of the Congo -- this is truly a Slow Cloth artist all the way.

Over on Beading at the Beach, BeadBabe49 questions meditation and stitching, and whether other artists talk about it and recognize it. I thought of her when I read Patricia Malarcher's editorial in Surface Design. She quotes Lenore Tawney: "I'm not just patiently doing it. It's done with devotion." Patricia goes on to say:

The sense of devotion embedded in structure is a subliminal text that is frequently visible in artworks of fibrous materials. The incremental repetitive gestures that accumulate into woven, knotted, looped, wrapped, or pieced-together surfaces leave evidence of quiet, and quieting, time dedicated to making.

Through that sense of quiet and meditative process, we can emerge and give our work a strong and passionate voice.