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'd started corresponding with Romanian-born Radka Donnell in 1975 when I first became aware of her work. By the time I'd sent her that particular letter we'd met up once or twice in person though our exchanges were primarily in writing. At the time Radka lived alternately in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Zurich, Switzerland, and split each year more or less evenly between the two. Over the course of our three-decade-plus friendship, she pursued her original and barrier-defying quilt practice on the floors and walls of home-based studios in the Boston area and in Europe. Radka was ambitious, determined and fearless, and through her life as a maker she would champion the quilt form broadly, her own work specifically, and all of the women who made quilts. She was a tireless proponent for the quilt's rightful place in the art world. Her commitment to "quilts as women's art" (the phrase that would eventually become the title of her 1990 book) was unwavering, yet I always felt supported by her despite being a man in what was then perceived as the province of women. We were very similarly oriented toward quilts, recognized that affinity, and would build parallel careers with mutual admiration and reciprocal advocacy.

“The Garden of Love” (above), a 1974 work by Radka Donnell, shown as it hung in the DeCordova Museum’s 1975 exhibition BED & BOARD. The quilt measured 104” X 85”. This scan of a 35 mm slide is primitive by today’s standards, but it’s the only image I have of this particular piece of Radka’s, one that remains one of my favorites. She was doing very original work at that point in the quilt revival that accompanied the US Bicentennial commemorations, and that originality continues to distinguish her work today, fifty years later, and nine years now since her death.

I did add the NEA fellowship award to the financial resources we'd been setting aside with the goal to build a house with a studio space in Somerset Village, where we'd settled in 1974. After five years in an apartment that we'd quickly outgrown, the stars and our savings aligned, and we were able to realize our dream of home ownership. The studio would become the locus of much of our creative life over the next twenty years. The view below shows the house still under construction, autumn 1979. We moved in before Thanksgiving. The stairway on the right side led to the studio door. I remain grateful to this day, that the National Endowment for the Arts award helped to make that studio possible.

Once a work is created and the last stitch is sewn, it gets its own life. That life is as unique and unpredictable as any offspring's life. Most of what I think of as the "sky quilts," including Aurora, fared well as far as I know – well, perhaps not Night Sky 2, which, when I last saw it, was facing material challenges. Aurora landed in a fair number of exhibitions over the course of the decade that followed its completion. Significantly, it was included in the large survey show of studio craft, "Art for Use," organized by what was then the American Craft Museum in New York City (now the Museum of Arts and Design), for the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, NY. By that time the museum's director, the late Paul J. Smith, had taken notice of my work and over the years would prove to be a generous and valuable supporter. While I didn't manage to get up to Lake Placid to see that initial installation of the show, I did see it installed in the museum's New York building when they mounted the show post-Olympics. Moments like that were immensely gratifying.

While Aurora was still a work-in-progress, I entered into an agreement with two designer friends, Dawn and Stan Stopka, to trade it with them for a sofa/settee that they would make for us. Dawn is a talented weaver who had a long career in the home furnishings industry, and Stan was then a woodworker who'd studied under Tage Frid, one of the biggest influences on the studio furniture movement, at Rhode Island School of Design. Stan would go on to a successful career first in crafting racing vessels, then in home construction (and, incidentally, would build the large studio addition I'd add to our home in the early 1990s). We'd intended to furnish our home, when we could manage it, with the output of makers that we knew or whose work we admired, and this "commission" would set that plan in motion. I had an ulterior motive, too. In trading Aurora for the settee, I had the Stopka's pledge to loan it occasionally, when worthy exhibition opportunities developed. From the start, they were unfailingly generous in that regard.

So Aurora was often on the road through the 1980s, and otherwise was kept carefully rolled up at the Stopkas’.When they eventually finished designing and building their own light-filled home in southeastern Massachusetts, it became clear to all of us that lacking a wall large enough and light-shy enough to display the quilt properly, it was time for Aurora to be "re-homed." I would help them find a buyer and once a sale was completed, they would commission a smaller work with a portion of the proceeds. That's exactly how it played out.

The buyers were Ardis and Robert James (no relation) who, some years later, would give a large collection of quilts to the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. Aurora would ultimately become part of this museum's holdings. Below it's shown in a 2022 exhibition of works from the Ardis and Robert James Collection at the International Quilt Museum, An Evolving Vision: From the Studio. The exhibition marked the 25th anniversary of the founding of the International Quilt Study Center at the university.

In the Fall of 1999, Aurora was included in "The 20th Century's 100 Best American Quilts," an exhibition that was mounted at the international Quilt Festival in Houston, TX, sponsored by the IQF and Quilter's Newsletter Magazine.

There's a coda to this account of Aurora's genesis, development and its mature life. In 2022, following on a series of major life re-alignments that included a partially successful "downsizing" endeavor, I gave the "trade" settee back to the Stopkas. A piece like that, entirely hand-made, has to be appreciated for its material uniqueness and for the creative energy that it embodies. I wanted it to be back with their family, knowing that their daughters, both also educated at RISD, would protect and appreciate it into the future. When the Stopkas drove it from my Nebraska home headed back to New England, I was relieved that their beautiful settee was moving on into a new phase of its own life. That they were able to see Aurora once again, at the quilt museum here during the James collection exhibition that was up that summer, frosted the cake.