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.
Watering, Phillips Ranch California, 1983, Joe Deal
Remembering a dear teacher and mentor a year after his passing. Joe’s work is on par with the greatest landscape photographers that come to mind. I was thrilled to be able to view an online exhibition of some of his work at the Robert Mann Gallery website. Along with David Hockney, I would site Joe Deal as one of my biggest artistic influences. Deal became dean of the Washington University School of Fine Arts my junior year. He was the crowning jewel and saving grace of my Wash U experience. He once described a large-print photographic portrait series I did my senior year (1989/90) as being like “maps of faces.” Being that Deal was one of the pioneers in the New Topographic movement, I guess such an assessment comes as no surprise, but high praise, indeed.
This is one of my favorite songs of all times…it captures so much of what I feel about my life’s journey up to this point. Everyday, I am a little less incomplete.
Why you should know him: Erick Wolfmeyer, 44, is a professional quilter living in Iowa City. The Quincy, Ill., native moved to Iowa City to expand his quilting practice after living out West and has been here ever since. Wolfmeyer has made more than 70 quilts in his career, each of which takes about six months to create, he said. Wolfmeyer will be hosting a quilt design class at Home Ec. Workshop at noon July 23 and 24.
I got started in quilting when: I was living in California and my then-boyfriend and I went on vacation to see friends in Sisters, Ore. They have a huge outdoor quilt show there. We were there a week after it happened, but it was still in the atmosphere. Our friends just had a baby and I always liked quilts, so I bought my first pattern and (made a baby quilt). After I finished that, I just went crazy.
I sell my quilts: In Kalona at the annual Quilt Show & Sale and at a store in south Amana. But I’m happy to say that I’m doing more direct selling to people.
When I was little, I wanted to be _______ when I grew up: I initially wanted to be an architect. I always say I am a frustrated architect; I have this urge to put things together.
My favorite quilt I’ve ever made is: That’s like asking if I have a favorite child.
I’m inspired by: Almost everything. I’ll take drives and look at old buildings and the rust patterns. Architecture, literature, music, current events lately. I feel like a vessel.
Something I never want to do again is: Touch a snake. There’s no need to, but I was forced to as a kid (and hated it).
Something I’ve always wanted to do is: Go to Europe.
If I weren’t quilting, I’d be: Having a fabulous social life. Quilting is a very solitary thing.
Words I live by: You don’t have to suffer to make art, but making art is worth suffering for.
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