Early Studio Quilts

   I encountered the art quilt form in the 1970's before the term "art quilt" had been coined. Wenda von Weise, a pioneer in photo transfer techniques on cloth, lived and exhibited her stitched paintings in the small town I grew up in east of Cleveland, Ohio. She was removing classic, heavy, canvas from the stretcher bar and collaging photographic images of family and Midwestern farmland on newly-liberated, tactile, surfaces. Her layered canvas and a brilliant use of machine-stitched line pushed her paintings into the realm of hybrid; a new form of painting/wall quilt.

  In 1976, I left home to study art at the College of Wooster in central Ohio with an American craft revival in full swing. The traditional quilt form was being transformed by a small group of  artists, like von Weise in Cleveland and Nancy Crow in Athens, Ohio. Penny McMorris, in Bowling Green, Ohio was organizing quilt exhibits, appearing on TV, and writing about the new quilt movement. At Wooster, art historian and faculty member Thalia Gouma Peterson included images of quilts in her Contemporary Art  and Feminist Art lectures. She organized a curriculum around visiting Feminist artists. Many of whom worked with fiber and textile forms, like Miriam Shapiro and Jody Pinto.

  During those formative student years I was introduced to the work of Eva Hesse and Louise Nevelson. Following their lead,  I experimented with a wide range of materials like found wood and metal, latex rubber, fiberglass, plastic, muslin, plaster, hay, and twine. I apprenticed in NYC with one of the founding mothers of the Feminist Art Movement, Mary Beth Edelson. There I witnessed an urban community of women artists involved in the revival of handwork and the domestic textile arts.

   I graduated in 1980, set up my first studio, Fabric Constructions, in Toledo, Ohio and began my 30 year involvement with the art quilt and all things fiber. 

BIG X: I am ©1990 48"x82"

La Vie Dansante ©1989 64"x81"

Untitled I ©1988 72"x80"