“The crucial point of context between a person and a work of art is intensely personal. People can be encouraged to know and believe this, and to trust their own reactions, their visceral responses. Certain kinds of art appeal to some people more than to others. This is fine and just as it should be. Looking at art is essentially a learning experience, but the content of that experience is an increase in the knowledge about one’s self in the last analysis.”

- Anne Truitt, in Always Reaching: The Selected Writings of Anne Truitt, edited by Alexandra Truitt. Yale University Press (New Haven and London, ©2023), p. 184.

“The prevailing understanding of needlework as feminine and something to be prohibited or repressed in relation to the masculine must be seen as nothing more than an extension of homophobic violence; and a real and present danger.” *

- Joseph McBrinn, in Queering the Subversive Stitch – Men and the Culture of Needlework

Sometime in the early 1980s I found myself in Chattanooga, Tennessee, my first time in that state. I’d been invited to participate in a small quilt conference organized by Bets Ramsey to coincide with an exhibition that she had curated, “Log Cabin & String Quilts,” at the Hunter Museum of American Art. Early in the course of the late 20th century quilt revival, museums noticed that quilts typically attracted large and atypical audiences. Quilts also served as a textural and visual contrast to the poured concrete hardness of the trending “Brutalist” architecture of the period, like the Hunter’s then relatively new 1975 addition.

And the answer was “yes.” By the time my second full academic year was winding down, I was beginning to get traction with each part of my responsibilities as a teaching faculty member and a studio maker. I’d learned a lot in a short time, and the beauty of it was – as I’d realize nearly two decades later – I’d keep learning until the day I’d pack it all up and take on the emeritus mantle. But I get ahead of myself...

Everything I’ve ever made came from impulses I harbored to try to figure out why I felt as I did about whatever – about myself, about my relationships, about the maddeningly diverse and divergent things I was interested in out there in the world. My mind always seemed to be tooling along in overdrive, so sometimes it was a challenge to rein in that cerebral busyness and sharpen or narrow my focus so that I could move more deeply into a subject, take more concentrated time with it in order to give it convincing visual form. When I look now at work completed over these last fifty years, I see in each piece my struggle to pull meaning from the act and art of living, to find order in the messiness of being. When I zero in more specifically on the work that I developed and executed in those first years in academia, I recognize in it my need both to feel grounded, and to take a fuller measure of where I’d come from.

I once thought that if a quilt weren’t made entirely by hand, involving no use of any sewing “machine” other than the maker’s proper two-fisted digits, it wasn’t a “real” quilt. That belief was short-lived. As soon as I got serious about making a living at making quilts, I understood that sewing machines had a more than rightful place in this particular craft tradition. Exigency disabused me of any Luddite tendencies I harbored.

That set the stage for my more ambitious embrace of technology in 1984, when I acquired my first Macintosh computer, the little “classic” desktop model that, by today’s standards, did relatively little but signified much. The day-to-day of managing a studio career and coordinating an international teaching schedule would be facilitated by the interface of a modem, a keyboard, and those previously mentioned digits. I was on my algorithmic way.

Whoever says “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach,” Has. No. Clue.

That brand of unserious thinking is part of our homegrown American anti-intellectualism, a deep-rooted and malign undercurrent that has pulsed along the darker fault lines of our culture and society since long before the birth of this nation. It’s part of what author Tom Nichols describes as “the death of expertise” in his book of that title. We profess to value education in our civic culture, but evidence cycles through regularly – as is happening at this present moment – that many of our citizens are fair weather friends of education. They don’t want to do the work. But I digress...

Art is about self-knowledge and exploration. It's about knowing what the limits are and about pushing beyond them. It's about maturity and honesty. It's about doubt and despair and working through them. It's about discovery and new directions and looking ahead - not sideways, or over one's shoulder, but ahead.*  - Michael James

You will find a type of building cladding called namako-kabe in parts of the Izu Peninsula southwest of Tokyo. Diagonally-arranged slate tiles are held in place by wide plaster casings that secure them against strong winds and rains coming in off the Pacific. I traveled there once in the mid-1990s, expressly to see them, and was more than fortunate to be able to spend a couple of nights at an onsen near Matsuzaki retrofitted from Samurai-era storehouses and sporting this exact exterior treatment.

“Growth does not have to be systematic. The way of the artist is a meandering path.”

- Enrique Martinez Celaya, in ON ART AND MINDFULNESS *

After working hard to move my work away from the order enforced by grids, I was back to them wholeheartedly. Cross patterns, tiling patterns, checkerboards, chevrons, zigzags, weave patterns, herringbones, offsets, overlaps and shifts – as long as the visual rhythms were intrinsic to the patterns’ structures, insistent and specific, as long as my eye was forced to read and to follow, space after form and space into form, unit after unit, I was seduced. “It seems accurate to say that rhythm is the earliest and most inherent environmental fact of which we are aware,” writes the cultural anthropologist Ellen Dissanayake. “Existence equals pulsation.” **

These pulsing structures themselves would now be my subject, and whatever color occupied these figure-ground interplays would be equally of itself, naked and assertive.

Our insecurities can get the better of us. I’ve always thought my own too successful for their own good.

In the early 90s I stumbled over the question posed to me a few too many times, “Are you still making stripes?” the hard emphasis on that word “still.” I didn’t like its implication that I was repeating myself tiresomely, that I was finally trapped on a kind of treadmill where I was stuck cranking out the same thing, over and over. Truthfully, that’s what I’d started feeling. Is there anything else I can say with this, I was asking myself. Where else can this go? It seemed I already had self-defeating mind games on repeat and that still question added insult to injury.

Since undergraduate school I’ve had an allegiance to the so-called “dark-light principle of design” as Dorr Bothwell labeled it in the book she co-authored with Marlys Mayfield, NOTAN – The Dark-Light Principle of Design. That notion was foundational in my formal art education and still guides my mind and hand when I work out a surface today. I centered it as a pedagogical tool when teaching design workshops and, once in academia, when teaching foundation design and visual literacy. I may be criticized as retardataire for it, or my work dismissed by some because of it. I look around and what I see tells me that, for the most part, design, as subject, is not as current as message and signification. Imagery serves other purposes and other principles today, and that’s fine. The (art) world moves on. That said, another principle guides me: stick to your vision.

During the first year out of grad school I helped to support the young family that my wife Judy and our son Trevor and I were, working as a lunch cook in a children’s day care center. Sixty kids and twenty staff members five days a week, most of the meals pre-made via a food distributor and frozen, so...thaw, heat, serve, clean up. Not quite full-time employment, it was a “day job” that left me time to pursue this quilt passion that by then was well fired up.

After a year of that we’d relocate, I’d spend what seemed like a depressingly long summer working as a carpenter’s helper doing home renovations, and from that point would start to piece together enough quilt design teaching in adult continuing education programs to make enough, with Judy’s income, to cover our living costs. It was the 1970s. We budgeted and avoided extras. Nose to the grindstone, the essential modus operandi of the self-employed.

In the parking lot abutting the various venues where the August 1976 Finger Lakes Bicentennial Quilt Symposium was taking place, I chased down Jean Ray Laury, having met her for the first time just hours before. I think I’d sent her a fan letter or two by then, and Jean, unfailingly generous, had replied, beginning a correspondence that continued until her death in 2011. I told her I hoped soon to talk with her face-to-face, and Ithaca would be that opportunity.

I’d been teaching design and how-to classes at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, MA, for about a year, and one day the director came to me with a question. They’d been approached by the publisher Prentice-Hall that was planning a series of craft-focused guidebooks. The Prentice-Hall production team thought the DeCordova faculty might include potential authors. Would I be interested in writing a book about quilt making? Writing a book about anything was the furthest thing from my mind at that point, but I agreed to think about it.

In April 2011, I was contacted by the former Chairman of the corporation that had commissioned Metamorphosis, and his wife, both now retired and settled in the Southwest. They'd taken possession of the work after many years during which it circulated to various cineplex theaters that the company owned, after it was removed from the Norwalk, CT building for which it was created. It found its way to one theater in Durango, Colorado, hung in a concession area there, and it bore evidence of its proximity to popcorn-eating, soft-drink slurping movie-goers. Interested in selling it to a new owner, the couple were keen to know if the work could be cleaned or otherwise restored to something close to its original condition, ahead of it going onto the secondary market.

Sometime in the first part of 1983, to the best of my recollection, someone from TIME Magazine phoned, explaining that they had a feature article about studio craft in the works, and were in the process of getting photographs of some of the makers the article would consider. Would I be agreeable to their sending up from New York a photographer to shoot some images in my studio? Naturally, I was very agreeable.

I no longer recall what the prompt for that article might have been, though Paul Smith, then the director of the American Craft Museum on W. 53rd Street in Manhattan, and his curatorial staff were energetically promoting the diversity and inventiveness of craft practice across the US as well as internationally. Their efforts, including the many exhibitions they organized both at the museum and at touring venues, had a major impact on the growth of craft media at that moment. Many second-generation makers like myself, not long out of art school, benefited enormously by Paul Smith’s advocacy. Whether or not he’d put the idea before TIME, the magazine’s interest was exciting and potentially game-changing.

The photographer drove up to Massachusetts from Manhattan and spent a couple of hours in my studio. I remember the quiet young Asian man as being very professional yet matter-of-fact. (I lost his name decades ago, and regretfully can’t properly credit him here). We moved furniture around a bit, hung a couple of quilt options on what was serving as my working wall at the time, and foregrounded a work-in-progress, Metamorphosis. As he packed up his equipment after the shoot, he handed me two Polaroids he’d taken in setting up some of the shots.

...began as a commission for a new corporate headquarters building in Norwalk, Connecticut. The structure in question had a two-storey atrium area bookended by the firm’s main office and production areas. The interior designer responsible for outfitting those spaces had already purchased some of my work for a previous client, and was eager now to commission a site-specific piece. After preliminary correspondence and explanatory back-and-forths, I detailed a proposal that was ultimately accepted.

I’m calling the quilts in this blog entry the “offspring” of the diptych The Sixth Exercise that was the focus of the previous blog installment. By the time I made these my way of working was pretty well-established. I would typically try out numerous variations of particular stripe configurations and proportions, always by way of answering the question “What if I did this instead?” I liked tweaking an idea in different ways, carrying the basic premise along until I felt that I’d exhausted the possibilities worth pursuing.

I was reminded recently of a publishing/product development enterprise called “Creative Publications” that was doing interesting things aimed at the K-12 education market back in the 70s, 80s and 90s. (They appear to have been absorbed by McGraw-Hill, from what information I can find online.) Sometime in the early 80s they produced a set of small posters of my work. I think there may have been ten or a dozen different images, early works that included pieces like Necker’s Cube Quilt, Night Sky 2, Suntreader Monophony, and Moonshadow, among others. I was paid a small royalty from sales of the poster sets, in addition to receiving some dozens of the packaged sets free, that I either sold myself or gave away. They landed in many elementary and middle school classrooms across the country, and many former teachers over the years have told me that they hung them for their students’ edification, whether in homerooms or math classrooms or art studios. Nice.

While I’m no longer certain, I think that the Creative Publications poster set brought my work to the attention of a private school in Kansas City, The Barstow School, that landed me a commission to complete a pair of works for their library. The Sixth Exercise took up a substantial piece of my time and effort in 1982, though it was a productive year overall, one in which I completed nine pieces, the two panels for Barstow included. I can’t tell you what I was thinking that prompted the title The Sixth Exercise. Whatever the source was, it launched a series of pieces that would keep me preoccupied well into 1983.

When we say that people create something – a rumor, a myth, a conspiracy – out of whole cloth, we mean that they invented something out of thin air that has no basis in fact or reality. Essentially, we mean that they've lied, that they've sold us an untrue and/or unverifiable bill of goods. When we say that a quilt is made of whole cloth, we mean it very literally. It's a genre that goes back many centuries, a form that capitalizes on the low-sculpture or bas-relief effects that the quilted stitch can produce. In the quilt domain, it's as fundamental and honest, as truthful, as a quilt gets.

When I created the Suntreader series, I was drawn to the tondo form in part out of a desire to make something that wouldn't be mistaken for a bed covering. These were unmistakably objects for the wall. Their size and form bore no relationship to the bed, whose tyranny had kept quilts under its thumb ever since someone had decided they'd provide comfort and warmth and a good night's sleep.

When the first Quilt National exhibition was mounted at The Dairy Barn Southeastern Ohio Cultural Arts Center in Athens, Ohio in 1979, no one imagined that this biennial would become the institution that it is today in the world of so-called "art quilts." The brainchild of Nancy Crow, Françoise Barnes and Virginia Randles, all quilters residing at the time in Athens, the first iteration of this juried competition was modest by today's standards, but it immediately became a focal point for experimentation with the quilt as a tradition-bending form. The energy and interest that it generated right out of the gate has never waned in the forty-five years since.

Some pictures live up to their proverbial one thousand word promise, others not so much. The photo of Jeffrey Gutcheon and me demonstrating our quilting styles and strategies may be one that meets the expectations of the adage. I'm not certain where it was taken, but I'm certain it was in 1976 or early 1977, as it shows my Necker’s Cube Quilt in the hoop and as yet unfinished. My database tells me that its “date completed” was 1977. Given the location of Necker’s Cube within that hoop, I'm estimating I hadn't yet completed much of the quilting, so this was likely 1976, probably at a quilt symposium.

I know that I first met the Gutcheons at the Finger Lakes Bicentennial Quilt Exhibit held in Ithaca, New York, in August 1976, though I don't believe this was taken there. More likely in Toronto, Canada, later that year. The other two of my quilts in the background appear to have been formally hung, and I don't think that was the case for my work at the Ithaca show, which I’d brought along with me. In any case, the approximate date for the photo is reliable.

By the time I met the Gutcheons we'd already corresponded once or twice, and I was eager to greet them in person. I'd accepted a ride to upstate New York from a quilt student from Rhode Island, Solveig Ronnqvist, with stars in my eyes. Not only were the Gutcheons on the program, but so was Jean Ray Laury. Their books had provided much inspiration in the previous two or three years, and the chance to get to know them better was irresistible. Those first in-person meetings developed into fast friendships and over the course of many years we'd spend quality time together at numerous conferences and symposia. The scene captured in that snapshot might have been staged in any one of several locations, at a moment when the quilt community was coalescing around large gatherings, regional and national “quilting bees” of a new sort, for the last part of the 20th century.

The early "sky" quilts, Aurora in particular, helped my career to get traction. They resonated in people's imaginations, both inside the "quilt world" and beyond it. I completed Aurora in time to include it in the portfolio of slide images I submitted to the National Endowment for the Arts, in my first application for a Craftsman's Fellowship. As I recall, one could submit a limited group of images – the number 10 sticks in my memory – and that early in my practice I didn't have a lot to choose from. I included both full views and some details of the five or six works I felt were up to the challenge, to make up the requisite number, and sent my package off to Washington, DC. Some months later, I had their notification that I was one of the fellowship recipients for 1978. This felt huge to me at the time, and I was excited to share the news.

I no longer remember whether the title Aurora came first, or whether its definition, "...an atmospheric effect in which light is fractured into bands of color" was the spur, but in the making of this quilt I found my groove unequivocally. Everything fell into place – color, composition, materials and techniques – to produce a work whose visual and structural integrity was exactly what I sought.

Early on I saw no disconnect between the functions a quilt could serve as a bedcover and as a work of art. In fact, I saw all quilts as art and still do – and I’ll qualify that a little by adding, there’s good art, and there’s bad art, regardless the medium. The designs communicate graphically whether laying flat over a bed or hanging against a wall. In the latter regard, they could occupy substantial surface area, sometimes as much as nine or ten feet in width or length, they could attract the eye from a far distance, yet they could be folded into a small bundle that fit comfortably under the arm or in a shopping bag. Not so easy to do that if your fabric substrate is eight feet square and stretched over a wooden support.

I no longer remember where I first saw images of Seminole / Miccosukee Indian patchwork, but by the mid-70s I was appropriating their design strategy in pillows, shirts, neckties and related applications,. Learning these systems of machine construction paved the way for all the work in strip-piecing that I'd launch into over the course of the 80s and 90s. This kind of appropriation by a non-Native maker is now widely (and rightly) frowned on, but we weren't so enlightened 50 years back.

The very first Quilt Engagement Calendar, published by E. P. Duttton & Co., Inc. in 1974 for  the 1975 year, was of all of them, the most revelatory (at least for me). It included images of some very singular and original quilts from the 19th and 20th centuries, many at the time in the hands of some top-flight Manhattan antiques galleries and collectors. I pored over those images admiringly, sometimes longingly, as so many of them spoke to me, for their colors or for the maverick qualities their designs projected. One of these was this wonderful "Houses and Barns" quilt, ca. 1910, from Massachusetts. It was linked in the credit to Phyllis Haders, who would not long after publish her first book about Amish quilts, Sunshine and Shadow: The Amish and Their Quilts.

My first forays into teaching quilt-related subject matter came in the second half of the 1974 – 1975 school year, coincident to my being enlisted to teach high school art classes in my New Bedford, MA parochial alma mater, replacing my own high school art teacher who’d taken sick earlier that year. I quickly realized that being a high school art teacher wasn’t for me. I had entirely the wrong temperament for it and have ever since admired those who make it their comfort zone. More power to them.

A local community college’s Women’s Center advertised for “crafts” teachers, I saw the notice in my local paper, applied, was hired and assigned a small room with a large folding table, ten chairs, and their blessing. Close to fifty people, all women, showed up for the first announced session. None of them seemed dismayed that the instructor was a man. I was in business. That 1975 group became five different class groups, and for the next five years I invested a lot of time and energy in courses like this, at locations as spread out as the Boston Center for Adult Education, the DeCordova Museum School in Lincoln, MA, the University of Rhode Island Extension Division, and many more. Putting upwards of 25,000 miles a year on our car was soon par for the course.

I give those many workshops students – in the thousands across the decades since – a lot of credit not least for their unfailing enthusiasm in the face of my sometimes out-of-the-box design and color challenges. Many became friends that I remain in touch with to this day. As I developed classes and “designed” specific types of workshops, there was a lot of experimenting, and they were always game. In many instances I was barely one step ahead of them, learning techniques on the fly just days, sometimes hours, before I’d demonstrate my “competency,” such as it was. Most of it was new to us at the time, everyone was engaged and excited, and from it a real community grew and over the decades since, has prospered mightily. If you’re reading this and you were ever in one of those classes or workshops, thank you, thank you.

In a previous post I mentioned Ruby Short McKim and her book "One Hundred and One Patchwork Patterns." I was intrigued when I first meandered through the book and noticed the patterns she developed from floral inspiration, her "Poppy" design among them.  I liked that a stylized geometry could effectively represent natural forms more typically rendered in fabric using appliqué or embroidery techniques, and sometimes both.

The Canadian Haida carver Robert Davidson is quoted as saying "The only way tradition can be carried on is to keep inventing new things." That statement, one that seemed very obvious to me when I first came across it while I was still an undergraduate, became a kind of mantra that helped me to gird against a bit of resistance that I felt as I made my first steps into the quilt world. I'd famously (or infamously) called on quilt makers to set aside the familiar and timeworn patterns that formed the catalogue of possibilities for what we called "quilts," in a letter to the editor of a quilt magazine of the time, Quilters Newsletter, published out of Colorado by Leman Publications. Its editor, Bonnie Leman, offered my thoughts to her readership. While they garnered some "yeas," the "nays" far outnumbered them and provoked a sometimes heated debate in print that continued through several editions. A tempest in a teacup, you are probably thinking, though at the time it perhaps unnecessarily branded me as hostile to the quilter's enterprise, a male intruder intent, as one writer put it, on "...tearing down everything he considers old or old-fashioned."

Now that I am myself indisputably old (though, I hope, not old-fashioned), I can see that my naïveté at the time deceived me into thinking that of course, everyone would agree with me that it was time for a visual revolution. Time to discard the tried-and-true and venture into unfamiliar territory. Over time, the quilt world would assimilate some of the perspectives and strategies of the young upstarts (I certainly wasn't alone!) and what would be called "the art quilt movement" would eventually solidify and find widespread acceptance. The back-and-forth between the conventions of the tradition and the progressiveness of the new wave would continue–they continue still–though today the field has settled into a kind of quiet détente. It is, though, a very conservative milieu, regardless which side of the fence you're on. It's no accident that artists who've appropriated the quilt and set it to different conceptual and expressive purposes – I have in mind people like Tracy Emin, Lucas Samaras, Faith Ringgold, Sanford Biggers, and Bisa Butler – have steered very clear of the "quilt world."  Context is key.

In the winter of 1973, my final semester of graduate school, I attended a lecture by Jonathan Holstein and Gail van der Hoff at the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester. By then they were quite well known for the Whitney Museum exhibition they curated in 1971, Abstract Design in American Quilts. On the stage with them were several lofty stacks of folded quilts, among these a number of striking Amish quilts. This was my first exposure to this particular genre, and I was dazzled. These Josef Albers-like constructions of solid color fields of wool challis challenged and widened my novice's idea of what traditional quilts looked like. Within a few years, several publications appeared documenting the Amish's singular approach to quilt surface design, among them Phyllis Haders' Sunshine and Shadow: The Amish and Their Quilts. I've been inspired by the Amish sensibility about color ever since.