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...

Spiritus Mundi, 2000, 61.5” h x 55.5” w; hand-painted and hand-dyed cottons; machine-pieced & -appliquéd, hand-embroidered, machine-quilted. This was the last piece that I completed in my Somerset, MA studio before departing for a new life in Nebraska. True to my expressionist tendencies, it captured my optimism, ambition, and willingness to embrace risk and change at that moment when I chose to walk away from life as I’d known it, to what would prove to be a challenging but deeply stimulating unknown.

In hindsight, it was probably a plus for me that I didn’t fully understand what I was getting myself into when I contracted to join the faculty at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln in 2000, twenty-six years into my improbable quilt career.

Having been invited in 1997 to join the advisory board of its newly formed International Quilt Study Center, I had become somewhat familiar with its campus location and with some of the faculty in its parent department, then called "Textiles, Clothing and Design." I’d taught a handful of days-long or week-long workshops as summer program offerings, with both credit-seeking and non-credit students. I’d familiarized myself with the department’s various disciplinary area curricula, I’d discussed the responsibilities I’d be expected to assume, the course load I’d be required to carry, and had acquired a general sense of what it would mean to be a member of its faculty.

I really had no clue, and learned fairly quickly that I’d underestimated both the demands of the position and my ability to tread water. After all, I’d left academia more than twenty-five years earlier, MFA in hand, and never looked back until very near the end of the century, when I began to grow an association with my undergraduate university [discussed previously in the blog post of Sunday, 15 September]. I intentionally set myself on a new path, but for a couple of years that path would be fraught with anxiety and a shaky self-confidence.

In fact, there were moments in that first “full-time day job” year when I found myself knee-capped – exhausted and in tears, grounded in a fetal position on the floor of a new home in a new city and state, asking myself “what have you done?” It didn’t occur to me that some of my first-year undergraduate students might themselves be lamenting their decision to pursue design studies in the framework of an intensive, full-year program called “Visual Literacy” that I’d been assigned to teach along with an interdisciplinary faculty team. Even if it had, I couldn’t have let on to them that my learning curve was as steep as, or steeper than, theirs.

Top, University of Nebraska–Lincoln undergraduates at work in a Visual Literacy section circa 2002 (photo by Greg Nathan for University Communications). Immediately above, assignment responses by students in one of my “Color” sections (projects shown clockwise from top left by Kim Snyder, Austin Martin, unidentified, and Michelle Cotton.) Below, Visual Literacy color section students at work on a project I assigned wherein they were required to familiarize themselves with a local small business and design a visual branding scheme for it, represented here in a shopping bag prototype (students l. to r.: Ryan Smith, unidentified student, and Catherine Meier; prototype at right by Ryan Smith.

Thanks to a strong, loving and mutually supportive spousal relationship, and to generous assistance from the institution itself and guidance and encouragement from academic leaders and staff throughout the organization, and from faculty colleagues, I slowly figured it out. Bouts of imposter syndrome became less frequent, small accomplishments multiplied, student success scaffolded my self-confidence, and slowly I settled into the complex and interwoven systems that drive all university communities. For the next twenty years I would balance the demands of academia and the demands of the creative impulses that formed the core of who I was as a maker. Those two dimensions of my everyday reality fed one another, and in time I’d come to understand how a quarter century as an independent self-starter, a studio maker, had more than prepared me for fifty- and sixty-hour work weeks on a Research-1 university campus.

In its 2003 iteration, a one-semester graduate level course that I developed and delivered as Design Perspectives and Issues culminated in an exhibition titled “Material Response.” MFA and MA students chose "inspiration" works from the collection of the International Quilt Study Center (two views in its original storeroom, above, ca. 2003, showing at left a Pennsylvania Amish Center Diamond quilt attributed to Sarah Smoker, made ca. 1925; and at right, IQSC volunteers unpacking quilts for seminar students to examine). After researching the quilts, each student created an original work that embodied a synthesis of their individual studio practices and the quilts they’d chosen to engage with. Essentially, the assignment was a version of a traditional “call-and-response” interaction.

Below, installation views showing graduate student Jennifer Ghormley’s response to Faith Ringgold’s The Women: Mask Face Quilt #1 (1986); and students Joshua Luther and Pamela Tye Horne’s responses to two quilts from the IQSC collection, an Ohio Tumbling Blocks (ca. 1975) and Bars, ca. 1920, possibly made in Canada. The exhibition was mounted at the conclusion of the course in the Textile Department’s Robert Hillestad Textiles Gallery.

As difficult as the adjustments to academia were, the opportunity to contribute to and help to refine and develop curricula in design foundation studies, in advanced multi-media textile design, and in quilt studies and material culture was deeply enriching. Whether working with first-year, entry-level students fresh out of high school, or fully mature, mid-life and non-traditional adult students, these university learning environments were enormously stimulating and satisfying. Faculty colleagues both within the textiles department and from other disciplinary areas of the campus pushed and motivated me to apply my creative impulses to the studio classrooms and lecture halls where we brought our respective professional experience and expertise to bear in teaching our students both how to see and how to think. I held those students to high standards, and I hope these many years later that they hold themselves to even higher ones.

"Teaching is...the gift of one person to another. It is a compassionate extension of self in acknowledgment of the needs and aspirations of someone else, usually but not always younger than we are and always, for a time at least, dependent on us for some kind of knowledge. In that gift of self consists teaching's greatest satisfaction–the giving not so much of knowledge, which each person must acquire, as of habits of mind and heart and powers of thought."

– from "The Elements of Teaching" by James M. Banner, Jr. and Harold C. Cannon. ©1997, Yale University Press, p. 135.

Umbilical, 2000, 12” h x 12” w; hand-painted & African tie-dyed cotton; machine-embroidered; machine-pieced & -appliquéd; machine-quilted. Private collection.

Between 1974 and the start of 2000, I typically completed an average of 7 quilts a year, varying in overall size from about 16 sq. ft. to 64 sq. ft. In my first academic year, I started and completed just two works, including this 12” square mixed media piece. There simply was no time for the studio; the academic learning curve took all of my energies and more. I’d eventually get back to a studio practice closer to what I’d been used to as an independent maker, but that would take a couple of academic year cycles.