Zoom Gallery Walk with Curator Julie Silber
Join us for a captivating hour with the Iowa Quilt Museum and the curator of our latest exhibit, Julie Silber. Dive into the fascinating history behind the exquisite quilts adorning our “Welcome Home: A Celebration of House Quilts” exhibition.
Mark your calendar for Tuesday, August 29th, at 5:00 PM, as we take this journey together online via Zoom. Best of all, it’s absolutely free!
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/82746670101…
Meeting ID: 827 4667 0101
Passcode: 989699
Don’t miss out on this enriching experience that unravels the stories woven within each quilt. See you there!
Past Tuesdays@12 Events
Listen to Rachel Burke from AmeriCorps Green Iowa as she ventures into the world of sustainable fabrics. The fabric industry notoriously lacks transparency when it comes to its environmental impact. This one-hour presentation will provide quilters and sewists with a basic toolkit to navigate fabric choices in a more environmentally aware way. This webinar will touch on the environmental impact of Polyester, Cotton, Linen, Tencel, and Hemp
Have you ever wondered how much water it takes to grow enough cotton for a pair of denim jeans? Have you ever thought “hemp?! What is hemp doing at my fabric store?”. Did you know that it is possible to compost clothing?
To answer these questions or if you just want to learn more about how to reduce the carbon footprint of your quilting and sewing projects join us on April 19th at 12:00 for the ‘Sustainable Fabrics: The Basics’ webinar.
They were regular women with husbands and children who fought for women’s right to vote. Some became well known, while others remained in the background. Either way, there are countless women who fought for the rights we have the privilege of using today.
Join us on March 29, 2022, for another panelist webinar featuring four quilt artists from the Deeds Not Words: Celebrating 100 Years of Women’s Suffrage exhibit. Our guests include:
- Maria Billings, who is a bi-cultural artist (Europe, USA), and specializes in hand-made textile images.
- Patricia Kennedy-Zafred has been telling stories through the medium of textiles and art quilts for well over twenty years. Her prize-winning work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and has been published in books and magazines throughout her career.
- The Pixeladies are Deb Cashatt and Kris Sazaki. Collaborating since 2003, they use the computer to draft compositions, which they collage with texts and phrases cut from magazines and newspapers
Moderated by Iowa Quilt Museum Director Carissa Heckathorn, this presentation is part of the IQM Tuesdays@12 series of programs highlighting quilt artists.
Featured Quilt Artists:
Maria Billings is a bi-cultural artist (Europe, USA). In 1980, she earned a B.A. degree in textile and fiber art at the University of Cologne, Germany. Billings specializes in hand-made textile images. Starting with either her own photography or a hand-painted background, she stitches the image to create more tactile values, often with three-dimensional effects. Her inspiration stems from her respect for nature and people, as her artistic explorations lead to representational as well as abstract art. Billings has award-winning works in private and public collections around the world.
The Pixeladies are Deb Cashatt and Kris Sazaki. Collaborating since 2003, they use the computer to draft compositions, which they collage with texts and phrases cut from magazines and newspapers. For the Pixeladies, the texts have literal meaning as well as aesthetic value. The Pixeladies often take everyday objects and imbue them with political or social meaning, working primarily in fiber because of its tactile nature. And, they like to sew.
Patricia Kennedy-Zafred has been telling stories through the medium of textiles and art quilts for well over twenty years. Her prize-winning work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and has been published in books and magazines throughout her career, most recently Art Quilts Unfolding (Schiffer Publishing, 2018). Her art is part of the permanent collection of the State Museum of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg, The Textile Museum in Washington, D.C., and the San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles, as well as multiple private collections.
In a time when women were meant to be docile and keep a home, suffragists were raising their voices and marching in parades. Their mission—to secure the women’s right to vote. In doing so they positively turned the world upside down.
Join us on March 15, 2022, for another panelist webinar featuring three quilt artists from the Deeds Not Words: Celebrating 100 Years of Women’s Suffrage exhibit. Our guests include:
- Hollis Chatelain is an internationally recognized artist specializing in textile painting. Her quilt, Federation Gertie, highlights Gertrude Weil, a suffragist from Goldsboro, North Carolina.
- Shin-hee Chin is a fiber/mixed-media artist and Professor of the Visual Art Department at Tabor College. Her work portrays the courage and humanity of the Grimké sisters, who are considered “the first American female advocates of abolition and women’s rights.”
- Sandy Curran, who started quilting with Baltimore Album appliqué in 1998 and soon transitioned to her own artistic style, still using appliqué and quilting. Sandy’s quilt, Honor Her, shows a single woman in a jail cell and honors the women who were incarcerated for standing up for their rights.
Don’t miss out on these wonderful quilts described by the women who created them.
Featured Quilt Artist
Hollis Chatelain is an internationally recognized artist specializing in textile painting. Her work addresses challenging social and environmental themes, with dye-painted scenes of multi-cultural life conveying the untold stories of women, children, families, and the environment. She is inspired by her dreams, her experiences of her life in Africa, and her passion for fighting for social reform since her teenage years.
Shin-hee Chin is a fiber/mixed-media artist and Professor of the Visual Art Department at Tabor College. Chin’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including Washington DC, Tokyo, Hampton, Geneva, Tainan, and Seoul. She has taught drawing, painting, color theory, and mixed media, and was elected as Distinguished Faculty in 2008. Influenced by feminist traditions, Christian spirituality, and Eastern philosophy, Chin has created a coherent narrative addressing complex issues of the female body, cultural identity, cultural hybridity, and sense of belonging.
Sandy Curran began quilting in 1998, with a Baltimore Album appliqued and quilted by hand. A cheerful obsession ensued. It took only two years to move from traditional applique to a completely innovative approach, but still with hand applique and quilting. Eventually, in order to tackle the designs she wanted, machine work became necessary and later fusing and painting. A love of animals, fear for our planet, frustration with aging, love of color, and empathy for people in pain are her driving forces.
Meet four more quilt artists from our “Deeds Not Words: Celebrating 100 Years of Women’s Suffrage” exhibit during Tuesday@12 on March 1, 2022.
Let’s keep learning about these “dangerous women” and their roles in women’s suffrage along with the journey of each artist in depicting their topics.
Our guests include:
- Laura Wasilowski, whose quilt features Jane Addams using hand-dyed fabrics and pictorial images.
- Jayne Gaskins focuses on the legislative highway using digital art and appliquéd pieces.
- Sandra Sider, co-curator of the exhibit, highlights Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s speech at the 1866 Eleventh National Woman’s Rights Convention.
- Alice Beasley makes a big impact using portraits to show black civil rights activist and journalist Ida B. Wells, who refused to walk behind the white suffragists in a suffrage parade in Washington, D.C. in 1913.
Hear directly from the artists on their creative process and more about these “dangerous women”.
Featured Quilt Artists:
Laura Wasilowski creates hand-dyed fabrics and threads, pictorial art quilts, and free-form embroideries. Her whimsical textile pieces tell stories of family, friends, and home. They express her joy and love of making artwork. The artist is also a lecturer, quilt instructor, pattern designer, and author of Fanciful Stitches, Colorful Quilts and Joyful Stitching: Transform Fabric with Improvisational Embroidery.
Alice Beasley has been making portraits of people and objects since 1988. Fabric is my chosen medium of expression through which I incorporate the same light, shadow, and realistic perspective used by artists in other media. Rather than using paint, dyes, or other surface treatments, however, I rely instead on finding color, line, and texture in the print of commercial fabric and thread, or in fabrics that I print myself.
Jayne Gaskins work has been exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the world and can be found in both private and museum collections as well as in numerous publications. She is a Juried Artist Member in Studio Art Quilt Associates and currently serves on the Board of Directors. Gaskins, who holds a BFA and an MBA, left a successful career in communications to pursue her love of art, where her imagination takes her places she never knew existed.
Sandra Sider, a New York quilt artist since the early 1980s, has led critique workshops since 2005. She holds an M.A. in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Sider has served as president of SAQA, and today she is Editor of Art Quilt Quarterly and Curator of the Texas Quilt Museum. She has written or edited more than a dozen books concerning contemporary quilt art, including Art Quilts Unfolding: Fifty Years of Innovation.
Get the inside details on quilts in the Here Comes the Sun exhibit curated by Joe Cunningham.
Heidi Parkes, tells us more about her quilt titled The Loveliest and Saddest Landscape in the World and how it became a bereavement quilt after the passing of her Dad.
Sarah Nishiura takes us back to quilts her grandmother quilted and how those became her inspiration for her postage stamp quilt. We also learn more about Sarah’s design process.
Sherri Lynn Wood gives us more background on Ova, an assemblage quilt that was a part of a larger exhibit in 1999.
Finally, we learn more about how we all view orange and how that color plays into quilting and can represent so many different emotions.
VIDEO LINK: https://youtu.be/WBg2Q8cEIIo
Follow Heidi, Sarah and Sherri for great quilt content.
Heidi Parkes
Instagram: @heidi.parkes
Website: https://www.heidiparkes.com
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/heidiparkes
Sherri Lynn Wood
Home Bodies / Portfolio: https://sherrilynnwood.com/#/home-bodies/
Instagram: @SherriLynnWood
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sherrilynnwoodartist
Sarah Nishiura
Website: www.sarahnishiura.com
Instagram: @sarahnishiuraquilts
Watch the recording of our virtual quilt event with quilter, designer, and lecturer, Joe Cunningham. In this one-hour call, you’ll learn more about our guest curator and how he joined the quilt industry. Joe will also give an overview of the quilts in the “Here Comes the Sun” exhibit.
We invited two quilt collectors from the Here Comes the Sun exhibit to share how they became collectors and their experiences in collecting quilts.
Speakers
Bill and Linda Volckening
Bill and his wife, Linda, have an extensive collection of quilts and have published a variety of books, including “New York Beauty, Quilts from the Volckening Collection”. We have one of those New York Beauty’s in our Here Comes the Sun exhibit.
Bill Volckening bought his first quilt in 1989 to display on a wall in his home. He soon realized that he was going to need to rotate the quilt due to its age and value, so he bought another. It snowballed from there.
You can learn more about Bill and Linda’s adventures on his blog Wonkeyworld
Roderick Kiracofe
Roderick started collecting old things he found in his family’s basement, garage, and his grandmother’s home in small town Indiana. This passion soon turned into attending auctions and his interest in things from the past grew.
Once he was introduced to “unexpected” quilts of the last half of the 20th century he started to check out eBay and other sources to find these quilts. Roderick is most passionate about pieced quilts, often crudely quilted or tied, and full of printed fabrics. Most importantly, they are the quirky, funky, and soulful expressions of a quiltmaker who broke the rules.
Roderick wrote a book about these quilts called the Unconventional & Unexpected. Due to its popularity, Roderick and Quiltfolk put together an expanded second edition. You can read more about Roderick and his quilt collections at https://www.roderickkiracofe.com/main.
When we think of the women’s suffrage movement, we often think of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, the leaders of the movement. Beyond these two fascinating women, many other women were doing their part to fight for a universal-suffrage amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Join us and four quilt artists from the “Deeds Not Words: Celebrating 100 Years of Women’s Suffrage” exhibit and learn more about:
- How Amelia Jenks Bloomer and her association with the women’s clothing reform style known as bloomers led quilt artist, Robin Schwalb to create her quilt.
- How the Declaration of Sentiments, written by Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a huge inspiration for Adrienne Yorinks.
- How Joan Schulze was inspired by Inez Milholland Boissevain who was seated on a white horse leading the Woman Suffrage Association’s parade in Washington, DC in March 1913.
- How the words of the Nineteenth Amendment, a grand tour de force, became the background of Hope Wilmarth’s quilt.
Our virtual webinar will take place on February 15, 2022 at 12 PM Central Time.
Featured Quilt Artists:
Joan Schulze was awarded the 2017 Distinguished Woman Artist by the Council of 100, Fresno Art Museum, California, Joan Schulze has other singular honors, including a 2016 solo exhibition, Shenzhen Art Museum; 2018, Tsinghua University Art Museum, Beijing, China; 2010, her retrospective exhibition Poetic License, The Art of Joan Schulze at the San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles. Her work is held in public collections, including recent acquisitions by The Newark Museum, Racine Art Museum, and Fresno Art Museum. Schulze maintains studios in San Francisco and Sunnyvale, California.
Robin Schwalb studied painting at the State University of New York at Binghamton, where she received her BA in 1974, and has worked as an archivist and media tech at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City for more than thirty years. Her quilts have been widely shown in both juried and invitational exhibitions in the United States, Europe, and Japan. Her work also has appeared in numerous publications, including The Art Quilt by Robert Shaw, American Craft, The New York Times, Canadian Surfacing Journal, FiberArts, The Detroit News, and Patchwork Quilt Tsushin, and is represented in the collections of the Museum of Arts and Design in Manhattan, the Visions Art Museum in San Diego, and the National September 11 Memorial & Museum as well as in corporate and private collections, including the John M. Walsh III Collection of Contemporary Art Quilts. Schwalb was awarded a grant by the Empire State Crafts Alliance in 1989 and received the Quilts Japan Prize at Quilt National ’05, which was awarded and given by Japanese publisher Nihon Vogue and allowed her to visit and teach a workshop in Japan. The experience of traveling to Japan resulted in several quilts, as had earlier trips to China and Russia.
Hope Wilmarth created her first art quilt in 2009, responding to a juried gallery call. The experience led her into the world of fiber artists, which continues to challenge, educate, and open new opportunities to explore surface design. Wilmarth’s professional background is that of a Registered Nurse, during which time she enjoyed traditional quilting, calligraphy, embroidery, and other media that she now applies to her art. She is a published fiber artist, exhibiting nationally and internationally, and a Juried Artist Member of Studio Art Quilt Associates.
Adrienne Yorinks is a fiber artist whose work has been exhibited throughout the U.S. and around the world. Described as an abstract expressionist, she is known for her bold sense of color and movement. She has created numerous private and public commissions, many depicting historical or commemorative themes produced via photo transfers. Yorinks has authored and illustrated several books, including The Last Will and Testament of an Extremely Distinguished Dog, an essay written by Eugene O’Neill in 1949.
Video coming soon.