The Sum of Many Parts: 25 Quiltmakers from 21st-Century America is a program conceived and sponsored by the United States Embassy-Beijing. The exhibition and its tour throughout the People’s Republic of China has been jointly developed and managed by Arts Midwest and South Arts, with additional assistance from the Great Lakes Quilting Center at Michigan State University.
Partial funding provided by the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.
Additional support from Alabama State Council on the Arts, Illinois Arts Council, Iowa Arts Council, Kentucky Arts Council, Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs, Mississippi Arts Commission, North Dakota Council on the Arts, Ohio Arts Council, and South Dakota Arts Council.
The quilt of mine in the exhibit:
Portmanteau
(2011, 93 x 93 inches, 2888 pieces)
March 22, 2012 update from South Arts on the exhibit:
The exhibit has been fully curated with all 25 quilts and artists selected. It really is an amazing array of talent that we’re very proud of. Many traditions and styles are represented.
We finally have an exhibit name that works in both English and Chinese:TheSum of Many Parts: 25 Quiltmakers in 21st-Century America.
The exhibit tour is still under development. Our colleagues at the US Embassy in Beijing are contacting museums in China and using their connections to secure the showings.
The start of the tour has been pushed back due to some unavoidable requirements from customs. The exhibit will now open early this fall, with the quilts themselves travelling to China in the summer. Currently the quilts are still in South Arts’ care, safely and securely awaiting that day.
July 10, 2012 update from South Arts on the exhibit:
Dear Artists, and Friends and Family of Artists-
We wanted to give you an update on the exhibit, The Sum of Many Parts. The biggest news is that the first venue has been selected! The exhibit will open September 7, 2012 at the Shanghai Museum of Textile and Costume at Donghua University in Shanghai. It is a beautiful Museum that will be perfect for displaying your works. As the rest of the tour is finalized, we will keep you posted about additional dates and locations.
The quilts have been packed away and are ready to ship. We are sending them off in the beginning of August to the US consulate in Shanghai. This will give her ample time to handle any unforeseen issues with customs before the museum has to install the show.
The catalog is near completion.
July 12, 2012
Two days after my 45th birthday, I received an invitation from South Arts to represent the Midwest for The Sum of Many Parts in Shanghai, China. Louisiana Bendolph, a quilter of the Gees Bend (Alabama) quilt collective represented the South. Our delegation included the exhibit’s co-curators Teresa Hollingsworth and Katy Malone (both South Arts), Board President Margaret Mertz (South Arts), Matt Arnett (Curator -Tinwood, Atlanta, Georgia). We left from Detroit, Michigan on Sep 4th and returned to the US on Sep 14th. Once in Shanghai, we were met and greatly assisted by David Fraher (Arts Midwest – Minneapolis, MN) as well as Cultural Affairs staff from the US Embassy (Beijing) and the US Consulate (Shanghai). While in China, we presented numerous educational programs and did some sight-seeing along the way. Needless to say, this was the experience of a lifetime and a tremendous honor. There’s no way to capture the breadth or depth of the experience here. I am hoping the following photos (in no particular order) will at least provide some sense of the trip. Enjoy…
January 9, 2013 update from co-curator Katy Malone of South Arts:
The exhibit left its second venue – the Yunnan Nationalities Museum in Kunming, China—in December. The Embassy reported that 30,000 people saw the exhibition while there. The senior advisor on the exhibit, Marsha McDowell, travelled to China with her colleagues during this leg of the exhibit to present on the show’s behalf. She provided us with this report:
The exhibition looked beautiful at Yunnan Nationalities Museum (YNM) – they really took a lot of care and their area for the installation really suited the display of quilts.
As one of the activities staff prepared a table-top display of quilts and quilted and/or patchwork textiles from their collection. Unfortunately it was in a room that was really hard to photograph in.
Mary Worrall, Lynne Swanson, and Kurt McDowell, and I all gave PowerPoint presentations to a group of about 30 which included YNM staff and invited locals who were interested in museums and/or in textiles. Kurt and Lynne focused their presentations on museum practices as part of the Asian Cultural Council-funded museum staff exchange; Mary and I did presentations on quilts. Then we also had a chance to do a short “walkabout” in the Sum of Many Parts exhibition and YNM staff conducted a tour of their textile collections storage area and showed us their computerized collection management database system.
All of our activities at YNM were unexpectedly condensed into a day and a half as the YNM crew thought it very, very important that we get a sense of important local cultural and natural features to gain a better understanding of the region. Hence, we visited a historical park and a historic street district in Kunming, took a side trip to the Stone Forest, and ate very, very well at different restaurants. All in all, we formed friendships that we know will help us continue to work together.
A few days ago the exhibit opened at its third location, the Guangxi Museum of Nationalities in Nanning. Quilter Carole Harris travelled to Nanning on behalf of Arts Midwest to do educational programming for the show.
This marks the half way point of the tour. There are three more venues left.
photos courtesy of the US Embassy, Beijing, China
PODCAST
Here is a link to Artisan Ancestors and a great podcast of Teresa Hollingworth and Katy Malone, co-curators, talking about The Sum of Many Parts exhibit recorded post-trip to Shanghai, September 2012.
7:00PM – “The Road Home” presentation with Q&A session/trunk show
Concordia Lutheran Church, Kirkwood, MO.
Thanks again to my friend Hallye Bone for connecting me with Thimble and Thread. A very special thanks to Serena Crisp for her extraordinary hospitality and kindness (and that yummy snack plate).
7:00PM – “The Road Home” presentation with Q&A session/trunk show Mulford Evangelical Free Church, 2400 Hershey Ave, Muscatine IA
The ladies and gentleman of Muscatine Melon Patchers are an exceptionally enthusiastic audience. It was truly a pleasure to spend the evening with them. Thank you…especially to the member who mentioned our connection through a mutual (late) friend, Reggie Cihla. How very special – and what a small world it is. We are all connected! Also, thanks to the “Ladder Ladies” who held up my quilts for the guild to see.
7:00PM – “The Road Home” presentation with Q&A session/trunk show
Our Redeemer Lutheran Church, Court Street & 1st Avenue, Iowa City, IA.
So glad my parents could join me for the first time and my Aunt Alice for the second time. The Old Capitol Guild was a great audience – which included several friends – Linzee Kull-McCray, Stef Rose, Danette Angerer, and Nancy Lackender (owner of Inspirations quilt shop in Hills, Iowa). Was also pleased to have Dee Grems in attendance. Dee is a pediatric nurse at the University of Iowa Hospital and Clinics (UIHC) where she specializes in cleft lip and palate repair surgeries. For the past six years Dee has joined Iowa’s Miles of Smiles on a trip to Guatemala where many lives are changed forever by the philanthropic work they do to repair cleft lips and palates of those who would likely otherwise never receive such services.
7:00PM – “The Road Home” presentation with Q&A session/trunk show First Presbyterian Church, W. Welsh & S. Highland Streets, Williamsburg, IA
It was great to present “The Road Home” to the Iowa County Heartland Quilters in Williamsburg, Iowa! Williamsburg was the first place I lived when I moved to Iowa in 2001. My quilt career moved forward leaps & bounds while living there. Living in a small town was rather lonely, but gave me lots of time to create quilts.
I bought a new shower curtain on Saturday. The one with the PVC. Not because it was the cheapest, but for the smell. An olfactory trip back to the most highly anticipated day of my childhood year – Christmas! The smell of new toys. Plastic toys. That just-opened burst of chemical off-gassing. So many presents! Big Jim and all his macho man accessories. Tents, campers, motorcycles, race cars, tree stumps. Each was individually packaged in its own plastic isolette, ready to serve a supporting role in my ever expanding action-adventure tableau.
Occasionally my sister would invite me across the hallway to play Barbies. She’d already be set up in the largest open floor space of her lavender bedroom, between the foot of her bed and the double closets that spanned the north wall. From the floor, the vertical lines of the closet doors shot up to the ceiling above her Lively Livin’ dream house like two colossal high-rise office buildings or apartments – like the kind where Mary Tyler Moore worked and lived, after she traded her cozy Victorian shag-covered sunken living room for a breathtaking view of greater Minneapolis through the sliding glass doors of her precariously railed balcony. I was relegated to more of a Sanford and Son kind of operation down on the south side of my sister’s dresser, an awkward and cramped corner near the door with zero curb appeal, about half a block away in 1/16th scale. The zoning laws were apparently very lax.
Along with the couple of low-ranking Barbies my sister would send over as loaner girlfriends (wives? hookers?) for my Big Jim and his buddy Big Josh, she’d also provide a meager allocation of home-building materials: doll cases and cardboard. Though Big Jim and Josh stood several inches shorter than my sister’s dandy, Ken, they were far more work-ready with well-defined, spring-loaded, woodchopping biceps. While do-nothing Ken was busy playing house with his Barbie beards, Big Jim, Big Josh and I launched a nascent version of Extreme Doll Case Makeover! Far from throwing together some kind of house-of-cards shanty, we pulled out all the stops and mounted a low slung, multistoried, mid-century modern, Frank Lloyd Wright/Mike Brady-esque cantilevered triumph, which consistently surpassed my sister’s sterile, store-bought house in both originality and style.
Like the faint aroma of a once new shower curtain, so too did Christmas slowly lose its luster, starting with my sister’s blunt announcement that Santa Claus wasn’t real. She chose to break her news bulletin at the step between our dining room and a room where I listened to records, though it could hardly be called a “music room.” Christmas magic faded further with my increased awareness that all things were not equal. All kids were not opening the kinds of toys that I was. I first realized this when my Mom ever so earnestly undertook a charity project of sewing homemade doll clothes (at a time when homemade was considered second-rate) for hollow-legged, off-brand, dime store dolls. Once finished, they were delivered as gifts for kids at the Cheerful Home. It made me anything but cheerful. The disparity saddened me to tears, privately shed. It was my first experience of an inner, wordless ache; and the fact that my Mom hated to sew.
Birthdays are bittersweet. Most holidays are. The awkward silence of family get-togethers; so much of me, unable to attend.
Advent calendars were my favorite part of Christmas. Those little swinging doors, patiently opened one day at a time, marked my jubilant, albeit Protestant progression towards the Nativity. Immaculate birth. Virgin Mary. Joseph getting short shrift for his role in the matter.
In March of 1989, I traveled to Montreal to meet my mother again. We’d had no contact since our last on February 2, 1968. I didn’t know I had a younger brother until just a few weeks before my trip. Lying on a trundle bed next to him on the first of my four-night stay, he told me that every year on my birthday, our mother locked herself in her bedroom and murmured sounds of crying would drift through the walls.
The bathroom was the only room in our two-story house with a lock on the door. It was a legitimately private space where Mom wouldn’t question my absence at age six, or less. Sequestered on the toilet, pants up, feet dangling and door locked, I attempted to send telepathic messages to my other mother. Mimicking Disney films where dogs talked, cars flew and little children escaped to Witch Mountain, I was left to wonder whether she ever received them.
There is an evolutionary imperative about our ability to recognize faces. I loved to play records on my family’s green plastic portable stereo. I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. Along with the sunshine. There’s gotta be a little rain sometimes. I sat there fixated on the album cover, mesmerized by her beautiful face, my trance interrupted only by changing the record. Lynn Anderson. We had tickets to see her in concert at the Quincy Junior High Auditorium in 1973. I sat there in rapt anticipation to see my dream girl. When it was announced that she was sick and substitute entertainment was trotted out on stage, I was heartbroken. Mom whispered Anderson’s illness was probably a horse show.
Shortly after moving into my [former] studio at Prentiss & Burlington Streets in Iowa City, I started tuning into the pirate radio station broadcasting from the space across the hall. It featured everything from raw urban rap, to stories read by a gentle-voiced young woman. Without enough DJ’s for 24/7 programming, the station often resorted to long stretches of prerecorded sets and large doses of dead air.
I rarely saw any of the other artists, musicians (including Iris Dement – how did I miss her?), or DJ’s that worked in the building. When I did, we exchanged little more than a terse, under-the-breath “hull-oh.” Eventually, I passed a young woman in the hall who offered me a flier advertising her radio show. It revealed she was the storytelling DJ I’d heard. She was authentically funky, far beyond the usual Iowa City fare, softened by her intoxicating smile.
The daily walk from my parking spot to the studio led me under a concrete railroad bridge-cum-unsanctioned gallery of local guerilla art. Much of it was posted with stencils and spray paint, some with wheat paste. There was one particularly engaging image of an upright man, limbs akimbo, titled: “Le Somnambule,” the sleepwalker. I began to notice similar images in increasingly out of the way places (alleys, dumpsters, transformers, etc) throughout Iowa City. I imagined the work was likely conceived by one person and executed under the cover of darkness. The stencils were mostly single images with one-word French descriptors, a kind of visually sophisticated vocabulary flashcard.
When my beloved sleepwalker was suddenly obliterated overnight, by little more than the cappuccino-colored paint that already covered the concrete underpass, I was crushed. I realized the urgency of an earnest search for the source of this ephemeral work.
I inquired around town among friends I suspected might know and be willing to reveal the identity (under promise of strict confidentiality) of this elusive artist. After she was revealed to me, I invited her to meet me at my studio, only to discover that she was the same young storytelling DJ I’d previously met in the hall. I was instantly enamored. She told me more about the stencil work including her public service goal of teaching Iowa City French one word at a time, and how in return, she was sentenced with public service after being arrested for criminal mischief for posting her stencils publicly.
Eventually, our acquaintance translated into an internationally distributed line of fabric for her wide ranging and truly original artistic expressions. I am honored to have supported her in this way. She generously gave me permission to incorporate her publicly posted stencils into a future quilt project, which I hope to do, once I learn to screen print.
This summer began a trend of people using the Home Ec Workshop, co-owned by two friends of mine, as a means to contact me. One of these contacts turned into an important quilt sale. Another, netted a mysterious package that arrived only after being returned to the sender, who initially mailed the package to my first address in Iowa (eight addresses and ten years ago). I was thrilled to open it and find an original stencil made just for me. It was cut out of a peanut butter Captain Crunch cereal box. It features a tuxedo-wearing man sewing a quilt which gracefully cascades off a sewing machine to his feet where the piece is titled “Le Couturier.” The artist included a note written on stationary that she hand-painted, now housed in a special pocket on the back of the framed stencil.
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