Quilt National 15: the best of collection “Contemporary Quilts B”

There!  Now do you feel like you are in France?  (This is what I saw every morning.)

I am recapping, in a series of posts, my experience in visiting the Carrefours European Patchwork Meeting, in the Alsace region of France this past September.  In case you came at this topic sideways (which is usually how the internet works), I have created a master post, with links to the exhibits.

After visiting the vendors, and Gabrielle Paquin, the next quilt exhibit we went to was the best of the Contemporary Quilts B collection from Quilt National.  They have several groupings of quilts that travel, and since their European partner is this show, we were lucky to see some of these quilts.

If you don’t know about Quilt National, whose headquarters are in a former dairy barn in Athens, Ohio (above), you might want to read more about them.  Suffice it to say that their quilts are more artistic, less traditional and always intensively creative.

The exhibit was in this site, with its half-timbered walls.  Inside it was very modern.

Jayne Gaskins’ Memories (USA, 2014) paid homage to a street scene from somewhere in the Andes in South America (I assume), and was heavily thread-painted.  Detail is below, where you can see the dimensionality of this piece.

Skylight by Elizabeth Busch, USA, 2014.  Those spatters looked like dye discharge, and I wondered how she did it. It may have also been a batik-like process where she dyed it, then blocked it with a wax resist, then over-dyed it.  As this exhibit had no title cards, there was little information to go on.

This piece was quite large; I assume each panel to be about 20″ wide and 40″ long (couldn’t read the dimensions when I got home). It’s titled Entropy, by Kathleen Loomis (USA 2014).  I loved her use of striped fabric, not only to subdivide the sections of fabric, but she also used them like Gabrielle Paquin did, as a way to get texture and design into a flat area but without using floral or other motifs in the fabric.  Detail, below.

Pam RuBert is a favorite of mine, and this is her quilt London–Wish You Were Hair (USA 2014).  (You can find another one of hers elsewhere on this blog.)

Rough-edged and exquisitely hand-quilted, Kate Gorman’s A Keeper of Secrets and Parakeets was a quiet, subtle masterpiece.

Amaryllis Set, by Jill Ault (USA 2014) appears to be multiples of the same photograph, printed on a fine fabric, then cut as to reveal different colors and shading. Detail, below.

Okay–is this a quilt?  Straps with paint and grommets on a tinker-toy-steel-rod grid?  Diane Nunez’ Cross Section (USA 2014) certainly makes me wonder.

Roofs of Mumbai, by Jean Renli Jurgenson (USA 2014) was interesting because of the materials used: some stiffened, quilted fabric and some was non-woven, almost paper-like. Details, below.

I’m not usually drawn to the deep, dark, moody quilts, but her construction and the material she used was compelling. (See detail below for the small knots she used for keeping the layers together).  Judy Langille’s Nocturnus IV (USA 2014) is about 35″ high by 47″ wide.

Maria Shell’s To Agnes Martin with Color (USA 2014).  Now I know what to do with all my scraps of solids.  Again, I put my hand up for scale.  Those crosses are tiny!

This has got to be one of our favorites.  Janet Windsor’s Crumbling (JP 2014) looks like  stream bed with multi-colored stones.  It looked, upon closer inspection, that they were wrapped fabrics around puffiness with a cardboard backing?  Some stones looked like they’d had some color applied, but that could have just been the fabric.  Talk about a quilt that you want to touch–this was it.

Morning Walk, by Joan Sowada (USA 2014).  I left it uncropped so you could glimpse the exhibit’s layout on either side.

Conflict No. 5 Mugging, by Judy Kirpich (USA 2014) made me wonder if she was had been the victim of a violent crime, with its shards of red and ominous, oppressive sky.  The quilting (below) was outstanding, expressive.

Cecile Trentini’s C5–Red Circonvolutions was Picasso-esqe in its design, the quilting providing all the texture and interest.

Central Park West Winter VII by Linda Levin (USA 2013?)  This was large (can’t read the dimensions) but mostly it looked like a very cold and blustery day, writ in fabric.