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.

When I made the work that would commemorate that visit and embody my deep admiration of not only Japanese vernacular architecture but Japanese artistic sensibility broadly, I decided to include a direct visual quotation from the catalogue of Edo period painted screens. I borrowed a cluster of crows from a screen that I'd actually first seen at the Seattle Art Museum, in whose collection it's held. Birds and other animals have long featured in certain types of quilts and this was a way to incidentally acknowledge that tradition too. Fabrics that I'd painted and that I'd purchased from Skydyes would furnish the textural nuances, and quilting would delineate additional patterning, some of it drawn from Japanese textile design and some from the Zen garden practice of careful gravel raking. 

The resulting piece was a paean to Japan, a statement of both admiration and appreciation for the generous welcome and hospitality I'd been accorded each time I traveled and taught there, and for the many and diverse inspirations the country had offered. 

Teaching and lecturing in a country with whose language I had only the most rudimentary and minimal familiarity required patience all around, and my Japanese students were especially patient. Even after studying the language for two years with a native speaker, I had virtually no functional capacity to communicate verbally beyond a handful of standard day-to-day expressions. I’ll be forever grateful for and to the concerned and supportive translators who mitigated those communication challenges (chief among them Mariko Akizuki, a wonderful person in addition to being an outstanding translator!) They taught me a lot about Japanese mores, culture, and the social dimensions of the business environment there. Most importantly at the time, they were my guides to negotiating the peculiarities of the Japanese version of the quilt world, especially the high regard and loyalty accorded to quilt sensei by their students.

In Matsuzaki, 1998, 51” h x 88.5” w  private collection

Speaking of teaching...by the mid-90s I’d been teaching design and color workshops to students in the quilt domain almost exclusively, throughout the US and Canada, throughout Europe, and in Japan, for nearly two decades. I always appreciated those students’ enthusiasm and their willingness to work intensively and, sometimes, to follow me on out-of-the-box (at least I thought so) explorations posed to them as visual challenges. Individual and group hosts were unfailingly generous and regularly overextended themselves to assure my comfort and that of the workshop participants. It was a fascinating way to see the world and earn a living, and some deep and lasting friendships grew from those experiences.

As I changed my ways of working in the studio and my thinking about the work I was making, I was also wrapping my head around a different fact of my life, that part in which I performed as itinerant teacher. It was always the same. I had a small repertoire of workshop topics and related visual exercises, and a set of procedures for leading folks through three, four or five days of design and color thinking. While the locales might be far afield and very different, I knew what to expect from workshop gig to workshop gig. Though I worked to introduce new material and to keep things lively and interesting for both the students and myself, I was growing increasingly frustrated. Unable to see workshop participants grow and develop their skills and the products of their imaginations over time, I was inevitably, each new iteration of a workshop, back to square one: a new venue, new faces, new experiences for them, same old same old for me. I wanted something different in my teaching as much as I’d wanted something different in my studio work.

Around that time, faculty at my undergraduate alma mater, the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, near New Bedford (my hometown), reached out. Their Program in Artistry, and specifically their textile design program, invited me to speak about my work to students and to participate in occasional group critiques. The faculty members’ reputations were stellar, their undergraduate and graduate students were serious and committed, and I was honored. This association eventually led to my being invited to serve as a visiting lecturer in textile design at UMass/Dartmouth for a semester, and to advise a small cohort of graduate students as a sabbatical replacement for one of their textile faculty, the late Barbara Goldberg. By then I’d resolved the question of where I could take my teaching or rather, where it could take me. 

Double Crossed, 1998, 45” h x 63” w; private collection

There was one more important aspect of this impulse I was feeling toward yet another paradigm shift. I'd been self-employed at that point for over twenty years, and though we'd managed to achieve a reasonably satisfying standard of living, with the costs of health care and a long list of additional living expenses, and seeing our son successfully through to his undergraduate degree, we'd never earned enough to squirrel away anything that would resemble a workable retirement fund. Par for the course then, and now still, for lives lived in the world of the freelance arts. As I approached my fiftieth birthday, that deficiency began to take on more urgency. The notion of having a "day job" with the benefits that might come with it; the prospect of being able to reduce the often exhausting and far-flung travels that punctuated every month and year; and the new intellectual challenges that a position in academia would offer - each of these attractions, and others, influenced the midlife conversations I was having with myself as the end of the century loomed.

I made a decision. If higher ed would make a place for me, I would make a place for it.