David Caras setting up to photograph Sound and Fury in his Belmont, MA studio in early 1997.

You go in your studio, and you may think you're alone, but there are always lots of folk in there with you, in one way or another. There's an oft-repeated John Cage quote to that effect: "“When you start working, everybody is in your studio – the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas – all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you're left completely alone. Then, if you're lucky, even you leave.” His Buddhist point is well taken. He was talking about a mindset, an approach to the work before you that requires a kind of dissociation from most external influences, a lowering of the volume on all of those voices from one’s present and past.

Sound and Fury, detail view. 1996. 39” h x 61.5” w. Wool challis & cotton broadcloth; machine-pieced, machine-embroidered, hand- and machine-quilted. Photo by David Caras.

You can't have a career without support, though. None of us can go it completely alone. I've been fortunate to have had some great support over the course of these past fifty years. As I begin to guide this year-long account of my time and efforts in the dog-eat-dog world of quilts (just kidding!) to its conclusion, I feel that I want to doff my cap to several people who were a part of this enterprise along its course. Obviously, family and close friends were always there, much needed and appreciated. This is more specifically about folks who had a direct hand in the business of the studio, providing indispensable services that studio careers, in one way or another, require.

Out of the gate I was far too under-financed to do anything but photograph my own work, but after a half dozen years or so, I was finally able to budget for professional photography. It was critical in terms of representing the work accurately – far more people would see it in reproduction than would ever see it in the cloth. That would include juried exhibition selection committees that typically review submissions in slide form (actual slides then, digital images today), museum curators, gallery personnel, and so on.

The Metaphysics of Action (Entropic Forms) shown here in David Caras’s photography studio in September 1994. Whether large, as here (the piece measures 101” square), or small, David unfailingly lit the works evenly and completely. I always worked toward a high degree of precision in my studio output, and admired and connected well with anyone who held themselves to similar standards.

I no longer recall who pointed me to David Caras, but he was already reputed to do excellent work when I first contacted him in 1981. His work, from the outset and through the nearly twenty years that he photographed my quilts for me, was expert, plain and simple. I decided early to document my pieces not only with 35mm slides but also with 4” x 5” color transparencies, preferred as they were for print reproduction. David’s confident eye and technical prowess always produced competition-ready images. Each time I visited his studio I knew that the end result would meet every expectation. Admittedly, I was, and remain, an exigent client. [Once, on a visit to pick up an order of duplicate slides at a Providence, RI color lab that I used through those decades, I noticed, scrawled across an invoice duplicate that a receptionist hadn’t slid out of my range when she went to fetch my order, the notation “This customer is very demanding.” Mea culpa, although, better to be thought of as demanding. I was nearly always fully satisfied with that lab’s work!]

Sound and Fury, 1996. 39” h x 61.5” w. Wool challis & cotton broadcloth; machine-pieced, machine-embroidered, hand- and machine-quilted. Private collection. Photo by David Caras.



Relocating to Nebraska in 2000 meant launching a search for a new photographer. In a relatively short time I learned that a university colleague’s husband was an artist and professional photographer, and after making Larry Gawel’s acquaintance, availed myself of his expertise and high technical standards for the ensuing twenty years. As was the case with David Caras, a strong friendship grew out of our professional association. If my works of art have held their own in mechanical reproduction, it’s largely to the credit of these two top-of-the-line professionals.

The Nature of Things, 2003, 52.5” h x 108” w. Digitally-developed and digitally-printed cotton; reactive dyes; machine-pieced & machine-quilted. Private collection. Photo by Larry Gawel. Immediately below, a view of the back of this quilt, also photographed by Larry Gawel.

The Nature of Things, detail view. Digitally-developed and digitally-printed cotton; reactive dyes; machine-pieced & machine-quilted. Private collection. Photo by Larry Gawel. The model here was a former graduate student, Nao Nomura, who at the time was pursuing a masters degree in quilt studies. I’d had Nao don a traditional yukata for the particular photo session, and we tried different shots. I had in mind what I was after, and after multiple tries that produced unsatisfying results, I suddenly shouted at her as loud as I could. Her surprised reaction gave me the emotional energy I wanted her to express, though I completely unnerved her. A number of graduate and undergraduate students over the years contributed in various much appreciated ways to the ongoing development of my studio work.

The final sentence of that caption leads me to my longtime studio assistant, Leah Sorensen-Hayes, with whom I first worked in our debut semester at UNL in Fall 2000, she launching work as a graduate student in textile design, and me just in the door as a fledgling Senior Lecturer. We were both orienting ourselves in that unfamiliar environment and it took a few months for me to figure out that I could make the best uses of Leah’s many skill sets in my studio rather than in the campus classroom. There she became invaluable both with my creative production and with all of the organizational and administrative work that helps to keep an artist’s studio working efficiently, from cataloguing and documenting that work, to packing and shipping it for exhibition, to corresponding with gallerists, curators and organizers, and to keeping track of all manner of deadlines. For nearly twenty years, Leah handled every aspect of my studio’s operations with the utmost professionalism and thoroughness, nearly always ahead of deadline. That we were both afflicted with an innate perfectionism was our mutual cross to bear, but it was also the key to an ideal working relationship, at least from my perspective. Leah always quickly learned how I did things and what I expected, and even when a process that I spelled out or demonstrated differed from how she’d do a similar task with her own studio work, she adapted to my preferences. I can’t understate the confidence it gave me to feel that I had a doppelgänger in the studio.

Leah Sorensen-Hayes quilting Alcove in my home studio, 2005.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s I’d paid a family member, my mother-in-law Florence Dionne, to sew strips for me when that large body of work was rolling along healthily. She did that work from her own home, though, and my studio remained the mostly private retreat where I did every step in the creation and execution of my work, contentedly undisturbed. I’d thrived on that isolation and privacy and it was with some anxiety that I came to consider how it would feel to share my private creative domain. I was beyond fortunate to realize early in our working relationship that Leah and I were entirely on the same page with just about everything that the studio required of me as creative principal and of her as major-domo.

3 works by Leah Sorensen-Hayes. You can hear Leah in her own words at this link:

https://youtu.be/_pA4-6i6vjw?si=eqkt82M7N4AK37i5

Leah quilted, bound and sleeved nearly eighty, perhaps ninety percent of my studio output between 2001 and 2020. From the moment I began developing my own fabrics digitally, I created and constructed all of the quilt “tops” and nearly all of their backs as well. After marking the quilting patterns in parts or all of each quilt top I completed, or after describing to her what I suggested she do in response to the fabrics in the surfaces, I’d turn the balance of the execution over to her. Unfailingly, she nailed it, every time. We soon reached the point of a full accord and mutuality where the work was concerned, and I’ll be forever grateful that my career was advanced and enriched by her dedication and by the efficiency and creativity she brought to every challenge or task I put in her skillful hands.

The Concept of Qi, 2008. 50.5” h x 52” w. Digitally-developed & digitally-printed cotton; reactive dyes; machine-pieced & machine-quilted. Private collection. Photo by Larry Gawel. I developed this quilt surface in the Fall of 2007, the year of my first trip to China, where the natural and built environments often fused to create resonant and evocative impressions. Leah quilted this surface by “mapping” its territory, contouring and delineating in response to the images and textures articulated in the fabrics. The detail below offers a close view of that “mapping,” an intimate and purposeful wandering over the quilt’s surface.

By 2005, I’d been appointed to fill the Ardis James Professorship in Textiles, Clothing & Design (Ardis, with her husband Robert G. James, founded the International Quilt Study Center & Museum at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln; we shared no parentage), I’d been promoted to full professor with tenure, and been named department chair, the corner office fellow to whom both good news and bad would be directed for the next fifteen years. My working relationship with Leah Sorensen-Hayes became all the more critical from that point.

Increasingly, Leah’s skill sets were being broadened as much as my own. I trained her on the use of the digital printer and its embedded software, and on the machine’s maintenance. I’d provide her with completed files ready to be printed, she’d set them in repeat if they happened to be repeat prints, and she’d print the desired yardage, steam it to fix the reactive dyes, and finally, wash and iron it. Having her turn over to me the freshly pressed and folded fabric was always exciting, and hundreds of yards of it sit in my current studio to this day. I doubt I’ll live long enough to use more than a fraction of it. Each length or piece holds significant memory – of travels and related discoveries, of themes and variations, and, significantly, of a long and fruitful collaboration from which approximately 122 quilts materialized and went out into the world.

Leah Sorensen-Hayes and I inspecting a repeat pattern print as it slowly rolled off the second of two Mimaki digital textile printers that came into the department in the course of my years there. This printer, the DS-1600, operated with twice the number of reactive dye reservoirs as our first machine, providing a much improved color density, and it allowed us to use paper-backed fabric (we printed mostly on a pre-treated sateen finish cotton) that assured stable and uniform printing every time. It was wonderful technology to have at our disposal, made possible by the support for creative research offered by the university through our college and department. While I gave up a lot in different ways to take on the role of academic, those sacrifices were offset by many benefits and advantages, cutting edge technology not least. Not for a second have I under-appreciated it. (Photo by Greg Nathan for University Communications)

The work has found its audiences in many ways – in exhibitions of all sorts, in books, catalogues, and other printed reproduction, and in both private and public collections. I worked with a number of galleries through these fifty years, some more or less informally or infrequently, as opportunities arose. Two had significant staying power, and through their efforts many works found appreciative homes.

Snyderman-Works Gallery, a longtime fixture in Philadelphia with a lauded history of presenting studio craft in its diverse guises, included my work in many shows starting in the 1980s and well into the early 2000s, when owners Ruth and Rick Snyderman finally shut the gallery’s doors in 2017, when they retired. Their gallery manager for many of those years, Bruce Hoffman, was my go-to team member and he always facilitated our business exchanges with smart and good-humored authority. [Bruce opened his own studio craft gallery, Gravers Lane Gallery, in Philadelphia in 2012]. Snyderman-Works's participation over many years in the Sculpture, Objects and Functional Art (SOFA) shows at Navy Pier in Chicago provided me multiple opportunities to show my work in that stellar venue.

Partial view of the Snyderman-Works Gallery’s booth at SOFA Chicago, Fall 2004. At right is Magic Carpet, completed earlier that year. On the wall to the left are two framed works by my first wife, Judith James (1948 - 2015), whose work the gallery also showed on several occasions.

In 2008 I began an enduring association with a gallery then called Modern Arts Midwest (MAM), at the time based in Lincoln, Nebraska, where I’ve lived and worked for the past quarter century. In 2011 the owners, Judy and Larry Roots, relocated the gallery to Omaha, changing its name in the process to Modern Arts Midwest. I’ve had several solo shows with them and my work has been frequently included in group exhibitions that they’ve organized. They represent an important cadre of artists from the eastern Nebraska region and beyond, and being artist-owned, they understand the exigencies that artists work under. MAM holds a significant inventory of my work and for nearly fifteen years I’ve been proud to send inquiring collectors to their doorstep.

Installation view of The Life in a Day – New Work, my first solo show at Modern Arts Midwest, Spring 2008. Photo by Larry Gawel. Left to right: Walking Samcheong-dong, The Concept of Qi, and Walking Jin’an, all made with my own digitally-developed and digitally-printed cottons. Ten years later, I showed at MAM a collection of new works called India Through Beginner’s Eyes: New Textiles, a group that documented and interpreted my reactions to that country and my first visit there during the 2016–2017 holiday break. Below is a partial installation view of that show, in a smartphone snapshot that I made after the work was hung, that attests to the impressive recent advancements in hand-held digital photo technology.

We artists do the work, often cocooned in our spaces with the world kept at bay. It takes an arts team or community, though, to give that work reach. We find and employ facilitators and problem solvers of many kinds, and their professionalism and expertise scaffold our dreams and ambitions. If we’re as fortunate as I’ve been, they take our work as seriously as we do. They are as affirmed as we are in our successes, as disappointed as we are in our failures. While the weight of expectations (our own and others’) is solely on us as makers/creators, these teams of allies help to ground us. Professional camaraderie goes a long way to mitigating our built-in insecurities. Speaking from experience.

“Don’t idealize independence or interdependence. They must coexist. Affirm your independence in small and large ways but also affirm your interdependence. Revel in the mystery that both must be affirmed. Identify yourself both as an independent artist and a community member.”

- Eric Maisel, PhD, in “A Life in the Arts–Practical Guidance and Inspiration for Creative & Performing Artists, (New York: Tarcher/Putnam, 1992), p. 204.