En Masse Exhibit Video

 

Nine quilts are highlighted in this video of my solo exhibition En Masse in the Kruk Gallery at the University of Wisconsin – Superior. The twelve quilts span from 2017-2025.

Quilt List:

Blue-Eyed Son, 2021
Even the Silence, 2024
Counting Stars, 2022
Poppy Field, 2017
The Last Time, 2023
New Harmony: Water, 2025
New Harmony: Earth, 2025
May Day (You Are Here), 2019
Strata, 2021
Voices of the Desert, 2019
Parallel Universe, 2021
Lincoln Slept Here (And Other Specious Claims), 2025

 

Didactics:

Blue-Eyed Son, 2021

This quilt’s simple checkerboard block paired with a muted palette evokes soft baby blanket comforts of my earliest childhood while belying complexities. At eight-months old I was permanently separated from my mother and grandmother in St. Louis, Missouri, placed and reidentified within a family in a small town upriver, where through my east-facing bedroom window I watched the moon’s bright face shimmer on the rippling water of the Mississippi. The quilt title is borrowed from a repeated question in Duluth, Minnesota native Bob Dylan’s A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall – a song that holds a kind of mystical connection to the late-1980’s search for my family of origin. Dylan reflects on his question-and-answer lyrics with, “Every line in it is actually the start of a whole new song. But when I wrote it, I thought I wouldn’t have enough time alive to write all those songs so I put all I could into this one.” Perpetually in possession of more than a lifetime of ideas, I share Dylan’s sentiment in as much as I strive to be fully present in each quilt I make – every one a step further into awakened consciousness, external evidence of my internal world.

Lincoln Slept Here (And Other Specious Claims), 2025

Historic sites, particularly presidential homes, were frequent childhood family vacation destinations. My most enduring souvenir is a scar in the crook of my left arm from a puncture wound inflicted by the wrought iron fence around Andrew Jackson’s grave. This quilt is based on an overshot woven blanket design I saw at the historic Abraham Lincoln home in Springfield, Illinois the summer of 2022. I was intrigued by the dynamic juxtaposition between the repeated blocks that form an overall lacey, lattice design, and the delightfully modern punctuation of bold orange and red sashing. This quilt utilizes the last of the vintage handwoven indigo fabrics (lao bu) I collected ten years prior while in Shanghai as a participating artist in a U.S. Embassy quilt exhibit that traveled throughout China, and later the United States.

 

May Day (You Are Here), 2019

The unexpected revelation of my true paternity at age 50 was a complete disruption of the life story I’d been told and believed up to that point – an upheaval that led to a six-week relocation from Iowa to Washington state. The title’s double meaning references both alarm and the date I started the quilt (May 1, 2018), amid the chaos and regret of my ill-fated, albeit necessary, existential exodus. I finished the quilt a few months after I returned to Iowa, with an August tornado siren blaring outside my studio, which seemed altogether fitting. The confrontational red X marks a crossroads – the end of one personal cosmology, and the beginning of another. The bold, graphic strength of the X illustrates the undaunted grit and determination of a resilient quest to find identity, place, and belonging in the hard-won, forever incomplete excavation and reconstruction of my origins.

 

Parallel Universe, 2021

A compelling “x +” pattern from a digital advertisement inspired this quilt, constructed during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. The quilt expresses the separation and surreality of a time when the humdrum machinations of daily life ground to a halt, replaced by copious amounts of dire data; broadly familiar landscapes were reduced to intensely intimate isolation; and the rhythm of everyday routines became a template for survival. The quilt telegraphs a kind of redundant, abstract calendar – a tally of binary values in a calculus of brutal uncertainty.

 

Counting Stars, 2022

Based on the same design foundations of my largely monochromatic quilt Apogee (2009), this version combines dimensionally sequenced foreground values with a background of pastel variations. The implied light source suggests crisp California sunlight falling through eucalyptus leaves across the sharp-edged surface of an architectural façade. I was initially drawn to the medium of quilts for the infinite combinations of two-dimensional geometric forms. While quilts as a medium remains fixed in debates over art vs. craft, and traditions historically deemed “women’s work” continue to be undervalued and misunderstood – the joy and liberation of the creative process, no matter how futile it may seem at times, remains critically and urgently consequential to maintaining one’s humanity.

 

The Last Time, 2023

This quilt is a response to fallout from an unfortunate incident that resulted in temporary estrangements and permanent shifts in family dynamics. Absent seductive colors, the sole power of composition is proven in shifting, somber neutrals. Chain-like strands cascade across the surface like oily tire tracks, weeping willow branches, or the slow ooze of bark-staining tree sap – elegiac reminders of the fragility of life, and its precious limited span. After this quilt was completed, a friend selected its design template for a memorial quilt she entrusted to me. I solemnly cut and pieced twelve of her late husband’s dress shirts, each remembered quite vividly, as he was my boss for several years. From blacks and greys to deep blues and lavenders, the shirts yielded both the providentially exact amount of fabric to complete the quilt, and a visual result astonishingly distinct from the original. The completed commission Scott Alan Miller (1969-2020) can be seen in the Modern gallery of my website.

 

Even the Silence, 2019-2024

Symbols of limitless potential, the cyclical nature of life, and unbroken unity, circles have long been employed to express immeasurable spiritual and emotional truths. A paradigm of three-inch light circles hand-appliquéd onto three-inch dark squares suggests the soft circular orbs of wide aperture bokeh (Japanese for “blur” or “haze”) photography, in keeping with the “lost” years of a worldwide pandemic when the quilt was constructed. Partially hand-sewn during a socially-distanced vacation in Lutsen, Minnesota, the portability of this project proved timely during the isolation and time-altered pace imposed by pandemic life. The title is a line, “It all counts, even the silence,” from Meg Howrey’s 2022 novel They’re Going to Love You, a gripping exploration of complex family estrangement, and the sacrifices artists make to realize creative ambitions. With a palette inspired by the surface patina of Richard Serra’s steel sculptures, the quilt’s weighted base reinterprets visual vocabulary from a previous quilt (Kirichigae, 2009), and anchors the composition as ballast for the hypnotic, dizzying repetition of circles.

 

New Harmony: Earth, 2025

New Harmony: Water, 2025

Though my need for creative expression in the medium of quilts is rooted in personal loss and grief, I aim for the end result to be a transformative, hopeful experience of awe and wonder. Based on an overshot weaving design fragment, this four-part series utilizes four modular components, rearranged slightly in each quilt to generate a different mood and intention. Drawn from nature’s four elements (Earth, Water, Fire, Air), the series title implies a deep concern for the health of our shared planet, and our collective need to find a truly regenerative way of being here. It also references the four-part harmony of shape-note singing, as well as the contemporaneous 19th-century town of New Harmony, Indiana – the site of two utopian communities which were a center for science, education, and social equality, and which left a lasting legacy in American art, architecture, and education.

 

Poppy Field, 2017

Titled after a symbol of remembrance and sacrifice, Poppy Field is the first colossal-scale quilt Wolfmeyer completed, and one of his most personal pieces to-date.  It foreshadowed and subsequently documented the recurrent loss and resurfacing of his mother, paralleled by that of his own identity.  He employs only primary color solids – red, yellow, and blue to tessellate a small section of a weaving pattern into a grand recital of intersecting lines and shapes.  True to Hemingway’s Iceberg Theory – the full story known only to the artist, he edits out what need not be said, and presents only that which distills his essential aim.  If the visible art object alone represents 20% of Hemingway’s iceberg, its largely abstract elements leave ample room for what remains to exist solely in the transaction between the viewer and the quilt.

(Didactic credit: A collaborative synthesis of student writing from Art 260: Modern Art at Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, Iowa in response to Wolfmeyer’s 2021 exhibit Totis Viribus. Full video available on YouTube)

 

Voices of the Desert, 2019

Impossible to divorce artists from the places in which they live and work, Voices of the Desert calls on the long history of landscape as creative influence. The mapping impulse is powerfully evident in the topography echoed in this quilt by the Iowa-based artist.  Inextricably linked with a return from the American West to the Midwest, the artist’s process bears greater resemblance to journaling than deliberate research.  Past and present are illuminated in warm, earthy tones that reflect both time spent in the desert and farm fields ripe for harvest.  Neatly constructed triangles form alternating hourglass and bow tie shapes in vibrant pinks, greens, blues, yellows, oranges, and browns, which undulate in patterns that retain the wild fractals of nature.

(Didactic credit: A collaborative synthesis of student writing from Art 260: Modern Art at Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, Iowa in response to Wolfmeyer’s 2021 exhibit Totis Viribus. Full video available on YouTube)

 

Strata, 2021

1. A layer or a series of layers of rock in the ground.

vein, seam, lode, bed, thickness, sheet, lamina

2. A level or class to which people are assigned according to their social status, education, or income.

echelon, rank, grade, station, group, set, bracket, caste

Origin: Latin

sternere – strew

stratum – something spread or laid down