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

Roman, 1998, 41” h x 59.5” w, private collection

When I expressed that thought in my keynote address Getting Our Bearings – Quilt Art at Century’s End on May 1, 1992, at the annual American Quilters Society exposition in Paducah, KY, I was launching into the midlife crisis (or something resembling that) that I’ve spoken about in the previous few blog posts. My first wife and I were empty nesters – our son was finishing his second year of university a long day’s drive away, would successfully complete his undergraduate studies in 1994 and, despite the typical fits and starts and diversions and detours, would never return home to live. We were taking stock, thinking about how we wanted to construct our next life chapter.

The quilt world reaction to that May 1992 talk was mixed. It certainly prompted discussion, and a lengthy rebuttal** by folklorist Lorre Weidlich, PhD, in the pages of a now defunct newsletter, The Quilt Journal, that in turn generated a fair amount of opinion, both in print and otherwise. In hindsight, Dr. Weidlich’s critique was a generous and serious response and analysis that over time helped me to modify and expand my own thinking – thinking that, admittedly, was worked through largely in the solitary cocoon of my studio and in the bubble of the quilt world itself. I learned a lot in that moment, not least that a straight, cisgender, white male had better take particular care to examine his biases and presumptions when expounding on any aspect of historically female traditions and practices. To me today, my 1992 talk looks like a lot of mansplaining (a term that didn’t exist at the time). Mea culpa.

Orange/Blue, 1997, 39” h x 62.5” w. Collection, Museum of Nebraska Art

It was ambivalence that caused me to open that can of worms and to launch that debate. Ambivalence also pushed inquiry, and led me (alongside other forces and stresses) to a renewed pursuit of understanding – self understanding, not least – through which I encountered and absorbed the wisdom of writers including Suzi Gablik (Conversations Before the End of Time, The Reenchantment of Art, Has Modernism Failed?), Ellen Dissanayake (What Is Art

For?, Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes from and Why, Art and Intimacy), Peter Dormer (The Art of the Maker, The Culture of Craft), Lewis Hyde (The Gift), and others. I also read a number of essayists, diarists and memoirists, among them artists and writers including Anne Truitt, May Sarton, Doris Grumbach, Ned Rorem, Pascal de Duve, Derek Jarman, and Donald Hall. Their self-examinations guided my own.

Autumnal, 1999, 41” x 41.5”, private collection

When I came up for air, I concluded that to find the kind of discourses I wanted to be involved with, and to challenge myself in the context of the studio and the work I was doing there, I’d have to look beyond the niche world I worked in. I was building friendships and working relationships with academics in southeastern New England and farther afield, people like painter and one-time quilt maker David Hornung, woodworker Rosanne Somerson, jeweler Klaus Bürgel (all at that time at Rhode Island School of Design), and textile artists Marjorie Puryear and Barbara Goldberg in the Program in Artisanry at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, among others. These associations helped to give me the confidence to think that I might make a go of it in an art school or university environment. I began sending around resumes.

Two views of a two-person exhibition titled “Recent Work,” with jeweler Klaus Bürgel, at the Wheeler Gallery in Providence, RI, April 1996. Bürgel ingeniously solved the problem of the macro/micro dimensional differences in our work by creating recessed pedestals that simultaneously isolated and spotlighted his work. 

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s I maintained a correspondence with a former workshop student and collector of my work, Ardis James. I shared a family name with her and her husband Robert, but to my knowledge as of this writing, we weren’t even distantly related. Related by a deep interest in quilts, yes, but not otherwise. I knew by the mid-1990s that, with posterity in mind, she and Robert were seeking to find a future home for their large and varied collection of quilts, some 950 or so objects, housed at that point in a bespoke storage studio in their Chappaqua, NY home. Ardis kept me periodically apprised of the progress of their efforts and interactions with various institutions and organizations. When, in 1997, I was invited to join the advisory board of the newly created International Quilt Study Center, I learned that they’d found that permanent home at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, in their home state.

That association would alter the course of my life and my work, essentially turning it inside out.

Inside Out, 1999, 42.5” h x 78.75” w, private collection

* Michael James, Getting Our Bearings – Quilt Art at Century’s End. American Quilter, Fall 1992, Volume 8 Number 3, p. 54.

** Lorre Weidlich, PhD, Quilts and Art: Value Systems in Conflict, The Quilt Journal, Volume 4 Number 1, 1995, p. 9ff.