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.

Above, in itinerant teacher and lecturer mode, answering questions about actual works after slide talks in 1978 (left, Bridgetown, Nova Scotia) and 1987 (right, Fall River, MA).

Over time, with the publication of the handbooks and exposure of my work through exhibitions and periodicals, that teaching expanded and in the course of a twenty-five year period took me to venues far and wide, my student base becoming fully national and international. The studio work itself attracted collectors and some commissions, and by the 1980s, between the income generated by the sale of that work and my vagabond teaching and lecturing, and Judy’s own work in the home sewing arena, we were usually making enough. Sometimes it was “just” enough, but enough.

Leitmotif, 1987 ; overall measurement 42.5”h x 67.5” w. This three-part piece was sold by The Hand & the Spirit Gallery in Scottsdale, Arizona sometime in the late 1980s. Whereabouts unknown.

There was a third leg in the income picture, and that was competitive grant support. There were a healthy number of opportunities at the time, both at the state and federal levels, and in both regards I was fortunate. The Massachusetts state Council on the Arts (MCA), the Boston Artists’ Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) each rewarded multiple applications that I submitted in those decades. That grant revenue, all of it “no strings attached,” helped me enormously in positioning myself as an arts professional, and especially in contributing to the construction of both of my Somerset, MA studios. Those awards enhanced credibility as well, an important added value, if one for which there isn’t an easy monetary conversion. Ultimately, it all factored into being able to live a decent life in the arts, to being able to make a reality of the dreams embodied in those undergraduate and graduate fine arts degrees I’d worked hard for, completely uncertain at the time how to put them to work and where they might lead.

Air Structure 2, completed in 1984, shown in the 1988 exhibition “Today’s Artisan: The Art of Craft” at the Newport (RI) Art Museum. The quilt was subsequently sold to a major broadcasting corporation based in Philadelphia, and was destroyed in a high-rise fire there in 1991.

In 1988, ten years after receiving an initial NEA visual artist’s fellowship, I was awarded a second. In both instances, those awards came when I needed them most, when each could be applied to the construction of much needed studio space. The 1988 award came with an additional opportunity, a USA-France Exchange Fellowship. In collaboration with the La Napoule Arts Foundation, a private US-based artist residency organization, the NEA would underwrite the cost of a three-month residency at the Château de La Napoule in the south of France. Because of conflicting commitments, I wasn’t able to schedule the residency until 1990. Fortunately, the NEA and the Foundation were accommodating.

In September 1990 I joined a group of ten American and six European artists representing a wide range of media and practices, for a three-month midlife idyll at the Château de La Napoule, at the edge of the Mediterranean, in a complex of stone buildings parts of which dated to Medieval times. The intensity of the experience was akin to going back to graduate school, but at a point in life when I had the degree of maturity to really appreciate and maximize it.

Transparent Shadowbox, 1988, 56” h x 56”w.  Although the linear grid structure wasn’t articulated in the quilt’s surface by this point in my work’s development, the overall image was nonetheless scaffolded by an underlying grid to which (allowing for variances in the actual construction of the fabric top) the design conformed. I found this restrictive and began to search for a way to abandon the grid armature. At right above, that grid base is shown. In this particular quilt, the grid defined 4.5” units. These paired images represent the fundamental problem I posed to myself when I went into the residency: how can you escape the tyranny of the grid?

I'd been working intensively with the strip-piecing process for over ten years at that point and wanted to take it to another level. The fact that my surfaces remained grid-based frustrated me. That traditional crutch was overly familiar, and although the linear grid was no longer apparent in the quilts' surfaces, it scaffolded them. I reasoned that I'd be able to achieve a greater sense of movement, a more free-form energy, if I could figure out how to get past the grid.

With that in mind, I decided to work on paper while at the residency. I brought with me a minimal stash of supplies, some tube paints and drawing materials, various papers and sketchbooks. Other artists at the château soon directed me to art supply shops in nearby Cannes and in Nice, and there I made the acquaintance of the venerable Sennelier label. I purchased their largest, thickest oil sticks in quantity and launched into a curiously meandering, free-form and intuitive search for some kind of visual realignment that might eventually translate to my textile priorities.

Above, three oil pastel drawings completed during the second month of the three-month La Napoule Art Foundation residency. Below, a drawing in progress in the La Napoule studio, with oil pastel sticks alongside.

The physical environment and the remove that the residency offered from the comfort zone of my home studio, the social and intellectual stimulation that came with such an assembly of artists from very different milieux and with very different focuses, and the grant of time to play and experiment added up to what was and remains a pivotal career experience. To the NEA and the taxpayers that made it possible, and to the La Napoule Art Foundation, I'm forever grateful.

At work in the La Napoule studio, September 1990.

When I completed the three small drawings reproduced above, I sensed for the first time a pathway to achieving the more fluid and kinetic posture that I was after in my textile work. Within a couple of years I would free the quilts from what I’d come to think of as the “tyranny of the grid.” Once that challenge was resolved, I’d realize I’d taken stripes and strip piecing as far as I could or wanted to take them, and I’d shift gears once more.

Lush Life, 1992  73”h x 73”w.  Private collection. Both Lush Life and Rehoboth Meander (below) and related works made following the residency sprouted from drawings made during that three-month “sabbatical.”

Rehoboth Meander, 1993 53”h x 52.5” w. Collection, The Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC. Shown at right at the Renwick Gallery, 2012.

I committed all of the grant funding from the National Endowment for the Arts to the costs of building the two studios I worked in between 1979 and 2000. The first, at left, was functional but small and low-ceilinged. The studio I moved into in 1992, at right, was a high-ceilinged addition to our home, with north-facing clerestory windows and a large working wall. Lush Life is shown in progress on that wall.

Government support for the arts, at least in the US, is always contested and controversial. By the time that I landed at La Napoule, the NEA was under fire in the wake of controversies surrounding a number of artists, Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano perhaps most notoriously. At that moment the recently ended Cold War morphed into a "culture war,” as Marjorie Garber describes in her 2007 study Patronizing Arts (Garber, p. 76). One outcome would be Congress's 1995 termination of grant funding to individual artists after multiple unsuccessful attempts to do so over a nearly thirty-year period (Garber, p. 77). I was fortunate to have received individual artist funding when I did, and in hindsight, doubly fortunate I was working on the "open" side of that relatively brief window.

Above, the artists and La Napoule Art Foundation staff members who comprised the Fall 1990 residency. The group included writers, sculptors, photographers, painters, a dancer and two quilt artists, myself and the late Faith Ringgold (in red head wrap at center). 

In 2011 I met the actor Jane Alexander at a friend's induction as the new President of a small private university here in Nebraska. She was there as the event's keynote speaker, and afterward I introduced myself and explained my history with the NEA. Alexander was serving as the NEA's chairperson in 1995 when the late Senator Jesse Helms (R-North Carolina) led the successful assault on individual artist funding. I explained how important NEA support had been to my career. She'd long since returned to her acting career, but was cordial and gracious, hearing me out as I thanked the NEA through her. Belatedly, but no less sincerely.

One early morning a week or so before the La Napoule Art Foundation residency came to an end, I was up and out early enough to get this photo as the sunrise touched the château's stone faces. The golden glow captures precisely how I feel to this day about that productive interlude and the community of artists and makers whose energy, creativity and camaraderie were shared so generously. Some of us have stayed in contact these last thirty-plus years, following one another's careers, sometimes getting together when travels made that possible. Apart from the work itself, nurturing and being a part of communities of like practice are among the most satisfying enhancements to a life in the arts.