I once thought that if a quilt weren’t made entirely by hand, involving no use of any sewing “machine” other than the maker’s proper two-fisted digits, it wasn’t a “real” quilt. That belief was short-lived. As soon as I got serious about making a living at making quilts, I understood that sewing machines had a more than rightful place in this particular craft tradition. Exigency disabused me of any Luddite tendencies I harbored.

That set the stage for my more ambitious embrace of technology in 1984, when I acquired my first Macintosh computer, the little “classic” desktop model that, by today’s standards, did relatively little but signified much. The day-to-day of managing a studio career and coordinating an international teaching schedule would be facilitated by the interface of a modem, a keyboard, and those previously mentioned digits. I was on my algorithmic way.

Mind’s Eye, 2002. 61” h x 82” w. Hand-painted and digitally-printed cottons; textile pigments & reactive dyes; machine-pieced & machine-quilted. Collection of the Racine (WI) Art Museum. This was the first quilt that I completed containing digital fabric developed and printed on the Mimaki TX1600–S printer at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. The specific section, in the upper right-hand quadrant, was a kind of “selfie,” a print of a Photoshop-colored MRI scan of my head acquired some years previously.

Fast forward to 2002. I’m still a fledgling academic, still tentatively finding my way within the ivory tower. A textile chemist colleague researching new uses for soybeans and other agricultural products launches into experimental development of ag by-product dyes for inkjet textile printers and, as part of his team’s research initiative, brings a Mimaki TX1600–S printer into the department. Installed in the design studio where I was doing a lot of my teaching, it was impossible to ignore. It seemed to have big P “POTENTIAL” written all over it. The Mimaki technician who’d come to set up the printer offered the design faculty as well as the textile chemistry team some basic instruction in the machine’s operation and in the software that drove it, a program called Artbench by Sophis. “Take it from there” was his parting mandate.

A university program called UCARE (Undergraduate Creative Activities and Research Experiences, then largely funded by Pepsi Corp. that at the time had exclusive soft drink vending rights on the UNL campus) made possible collaborations with students – here at left, my former UCARE undergraduate partner Heather (Morris) Kully transferring her own designs to the Mimaki TX1600–S, and printing yardage from them; at right, non-repeat images-in-progress in Adobe Photoshop. These were manipulations from close-up photos of fire-damaged glass door panes and would find their way into many of my quilt surfaces in the ensuing years.

Experience had already taught me that regardless the software, sitting down and using it, applying it to diverse purposes and projects and doing so daily, often for hours at a time, consistently and persistently, was the only way to learn it. So I committed myself to the Artbench software interface and especially to Adobe’s Photoshop and Illustrator programs, both of which were highly adaptable to image-making for both repeat and non-repeat textile pattern design. I quickly realized that the potential I’d initially sensed far exceeded my original limited imaginings. Here at our fingertips, for myself, my colleagues and our students, was the means to straightforwardly put onto fabric pretty much any visual imagery we could create. We were off and running. My understanding of the university’s role as a kind of Medici, facilitating the advancement of both scientific and artistic innovation, came into extremely sharp focus very quickly.

Mind’s Eye, detail view. 2002. 61” h x 82” w. Hand-painted and digitally-printed cottons; textile pigments & reactive dyes; machine-pieced & machine-quilted. Collection of the Racine (WI) Art Museum.

“That makers of art should be housed in universities,” writes Harvard professor Marjorie Garber in her study of arts underwriting in contemporary American society, Patronizing the Arts, “at the undergraduate, graduate, research, and teaching levels, is as reasonable, natural and logical as that the university should contain and nurture other makers: engineers, or chemists, or applied mathematicians.”* Or quilt makers.

“In the nineteenth century the word ‘scientist’ was created on the model of the preexisting word ‘artist,’ “ Garber explains. “Now it may be time to recreate the ‘artist’ on the model of the scientist, with art laboratories, expensive and delicate equipment, and an atmosphere that encourages, recognizes, and rewards collaborative work.”** This was the precise position I was fortunate to find myself in just two years out from the largely “free agent” first half of my career. Equipment that I could never have afforded or been able to maintain as a private sector studio operation was now available, along with a stimulating cadre of colleagues and student assistants to train, to train with, and to be trained by, all under the auspices of an institution that valued and supported entrepreneurial initiatives and risk-taking, and provided the necessary resources to bolster the likelihood of successful outcomes.

Memento vivere, 2002. 57” h x 90” w. Hand-painted and digitally-printed cottons; textile pigments & reactive dyes; machine-pieced & machine-quilted; collection of the Fuller Craft Museum, Brockton, MA. The left-hand checkerboard panel is pieced of hand-painted fabrics; the middle panel alternates hand-painted dark green rectangles with digitally-printed rectangles; the right-most panel is entirely digitally developed and printed. Digital imaging suited the ideas around which I was structuring these surfaces: rot, decay, decomposition and our human transience. Photo credit: Larry Gawel

As I mentioned earlier in this collection of blog posts, seeing students develop their skill sets – intellectual and problem-solving, artistic and visual, critical and analytical – over time, something that the limited format of short-term design workshops had rarely allowed, was a key motivation to enter academia in the first place. This played out more impressively than I’d ever imagined.

I’ll take as one example, my young collaborator Heather Kully, at work at the digital printer in the second photograph above. After completing her undergraduate degree in graphic design in the Department of Art, and bolstered by coursework and the UCARE experience in the textiles department, she was hired by Dye-Namix, a small, multi-platform design firm catering to the fashion, interiors and theater industries and based in Manhattan. That hire was due in part to her hands-on experience with digital textile printing technology. After several years in that position, she was hired by the Princeton, NJ architectural firm Michael Graves & Associates as a textile designer and put to work on that dimension of a series of the firm’s international hotel projects. These were significant career achievements for someone fresh out of the gate, made possible in part by her experience in full-time academic programs that modeled rigor and professionalism, and that provided students and faculty alike with the wherewithal to grow both their talents and their ambitions.

Memento vivere, 2002, detail view.

“Contemporary art making, with its increasing reliance upon technology, digitization, and expensive machinery, has perhaps brought art and science closer than at any time since the Renaissance – even in the studio.” ***

* Garber, Marjorie. Patronizing the Arts (New Jersey, Princeton University Press,

2008), p.188.

** Ibid, p. 177.

*** Ibid, p. 172.