Redefined

Dipping my toe back into the traditional quilt world

The Wichita Art Museum just installed an exhibit of masterpiece antique quilts from the Shelburne Museum in Vermont. During the planning stage, the chief curator also asked the local quilt guild to display work from some of their members and, a few months ago, they sent me a letter asking if I would be interested in being part of this. My first reaction was, "Do they know what they are getting into?". Hmmm, antique quilts, traditional quilts from the guild members and... my work, which would be incredibly different from the rest. However, I said yes and they selected Connected, which at least hangs on the wall. That's about as traditional as I get these days.

I haven't been a part of the Prairie Quilt Guild for years, but I'm back on the list again after they realized I was no longer a member and sent a tactfully worded email requesting that I send in my dues, because the exhibit was for members only. As a bit of trivia, PQG has approximately 900 members, making it the largest local quilt guild in the world and virtually every member creates very traditional work. In fact, many of them don't think I've been successful as a quilter because they've never seen my work at the Kansas State Fair. Ha! Can you imagine the reaction of the state fair judges if they were asked to judge a quilt that is 1-1/4 inches wide by 70 yards long? They'd probably melt into a puddle.

The opening reception for the museum show was Friday evening and they held a quilt symposium on Saturday afternoon. One of the speakers was my friend, Anita Holman Knox, who is one of the nicest people around, as well as a very talented art quilter. Her hand dyed fabric is positively delicious, as I have discovered by nibbling some of her scarves when her back was turned. During the week, she is the acting director of the Kansas African-American Museum and she gave an excellent presentation on African-American quilts. The only problem she experienced was that, by the end of the day, her scarf had little bite marks around the edges and I don't think they were all from me.

Laced - Part 4

The lace is done and I even put the aglets (tips) on it, using shrink wrap tubing. Don't they look cool? The lace/quilt is 2" wide by 25'  long and the aglets are 6".

The next step is to create the toe section for the sneaker. I've been dreading this part because it's going to be harder to do properly than the rest of the pieces were, but I'm a big girl now and I'm sure I'll get through the process without too much hair pulling. My fingernails may get bitten off, but the hair should remain in place.

How to improve juried shows

Here are some ways that organizers can improve exhibitions. Of course, these suggestions are from the viewpoint of an artist, but happy artists make for good exhibitions.

- Don't place the entire expense of the exhibit on the backs of the artists. Entry fees these days average around $30-35, yet there are no guarantees that an artist's work will be accepted. This is a very expensive lottery system and if someone enters a number of shows each year, entry fees alone can add up to many hundreds of dollars, with possibly nothing to show for it. Please keep entry fees down to a fair number and find additional ways to fund the exhibit, such as grants or preview parties, where viewers pay to see the work first.

- Artists are expected to adhere to a show's entry deadlines, but many shows don't bother to send out notifications by the date they specified. Be kind to the artists who enter and send the notifications by the date listed on the prospectus, if not sooner.

- Please don't make the artists wait months and months between the deadline and notification. New work has a short shelf life. I no longer enter certain shows because the wait time is so long that it's not worth it. I even know of one instance where the juror took a trip to Europe in the meantime and decided to stay there an extra long time. The notifications went out about three weeks later than they should have, even though the artists had already waited about 2-1/2 months.

- Don't have the same juror all the time. The shows start to look all alike and even non-artists begin to notice.

- Send out rejection and acceptance letters at the same time. The artists who did not make it into the show may want to enter the same pieces somewhere else. Time limits mean that there is a small window to enter artwork before it gets too old to exhibit.

- At opening receptions, find some way to identify and honor the artists at the opening reception, such as name tags. This makes the artists feel special and is a wonderful ice breaker for attendees who want to talk to them. I have been to openings where artists travel halfway across the country, yet nobody knows that they are there.

- Take installation photos of the exhibit and post them on your website. It is very frustrating as an artist to get into a major show, yet have no idea what the show actually looked like. The artwork is shipped off and shipped back, with no paperwork, reviews or even a thank you. Between the entry fee and the shipping charges, it's likely that the artist has spent $100 or more to exhibit in the show, so anything you can do is a kindness.

- Encourage sales. Artists like to sell their work every now and then to cover their expenses.

Laced - Part 3

I finished the shoe's tongue. I always make the pieces too big and then trim them down, so all three of these sections are extra big right now. The bottom section of the tongue will be cut off at the correct length when I am ready to assemble everything into the final form.

Today, I cut the fabric for the "lace", layered it with batting and began quilting it. Although this is one of my shorter quilts, I'm using a modified version of my usual system during the quilting process, letting the quilt fall into a box on the other side of the table. When the quilt is longer, I have a box on my side of the table, too.

Notice the flourescent orange thread I'm using for the quilting. Did I mention that I like bright colors?

Getting a little chili out there?

I know this is an artist's blog, but artists don't need to starve. Here's a recipe I developed for a really delicious and healthy bison chili that costs about $1.50 per serving, including everything. I make it in large quantities, then freeze it into one or two person servings. On a cold evening, this is a great meal.

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Artist's Bison Chili
from Jill Rumoshosky Werner

4 lbs. ground bison, browned
2 large or 3 medium sized onions, coarsely chopped
2 12-oz. cans tomato paste
4 large green peppers, cleaned and coarsely cut into pieces
3 15-oz. cans red kidney beans, drained
4 16-oz. cans peeled whole tomatoes
3/4 cup chili powder (yes, that much!)
2 tsp. dried, minced garlic
2 Tbs. cumin (ground cominos)
3 10-oz. cans diced tomatoes and green chilis
Shredded cheddar cheese, Fritos chips and chopped onion for garnish

Throw it all into a large pot, cook till the onions are cooked through, stirring frequently. Cool, ladle into containers and freeze. Microwave it when you're ready to serve. Serve with the cheese, chips and onion.

Notes:
- You probably don't need to add salt, as there is salt in the canned tomatos and that seems sufficient.
- The diced tomatoes with green chilis come in varying degrees of heat. I usually make mine at least half "mild".
- This a a very solid meal and it doesn't take much to fill you up. Don't overdo the portion size. A heaping ladle per serving is enough.
- I used homegrown, canned tomatoes instead of the canned variety in my last batch and it was the tastiest yet. I threw in a couple of small cans of green chilis, too
- You can use dark or light chili powder. I've even mixed them half and half.
- Keep some chopped onion and a bag of shredded cheese in the refrigerator, plus a bag of Fritos in the cupboard, so you can enjoy this any time you want.
- This is a very forgiving recipe. You can adjust the amount of each ingredient according to your taste.
- Get someone else to chop the onions for you and open all the cans. Apologize to them later.

Laced - Part 2

I completed the upper part of the shoe. To give you a sense of scale, these pieces are 50" from top to bottom. By the time I'm done making this shoe, Shaquille O'Neal and the Jolly Green Giant might be knocking on my door, asking to try it on. I bet Manolo Blahnik never had that happen.

You can see the beginnings of the lace over on the left side of the picture. I've now completed enough to be able to calculate the length of the lace I need, which is about 20 feet. If that sounds like a long quilt to you, remember that I recently made one that was 70 yards long for Knitted. Now THAT was a long quilt.

The binding is a stretch suede knitted fabric. I added large decorative stitches about 1/4" from the sewn inner edge of the binding to mimic the machine stitching you would see if the shoe were normal size.

I needed giant sized grommets and spent a lot of time prowling through home improvement centers and hardware stores, but the ones I found were all too small. I also called an awning company and they wanted to charge me a minimum of $40 to install them, even though they expected me to supply the grommets, too. Finally, I found drapery grommets, intended to be placed at the top of lightweight curtains so you can thread a curtain rod through them. They turned out perfectly.

There is enough canvas left over to make the shoe's tongue, but I needed more to create the toe area.This morning, I went back to the fabric store and to my surprise, they had just enough canvas left for what I needed and a little more. This never happens, so I bought it all.  I'll have to wait till Monday to prewash the fabric because six yards of canvas is too heavy for my washing machine. The tub would start bouncing around so hard that my machine would probably walk across the floor and out the door, taking a nice stroll in the park. Like last time, I'll visit the local laundromat and wash it in the double loader. I hope I can get out of the place without getting a tattoo or grafting a small child onto my hip.

Summing up my art career... so far

Next Monday, I will send off my application for an artist's fellowship from the Kansas Arts Commission. As part of the paperwork, I need to provide a one-page artist's statement "connecting the artist's work with process and career path". My usual artist's statement is much shorter, so I wrote a new one and later realized this is the perfect wrap up to the blog entries which documented my art career. Here is what I wrote.

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Artist's Statement
In 1993, I took some classes in traditional quilting and quickly became obsessed. My progress as a quilter was so rapid that I was soon teaching and winning major awards, but after a few years, I was making so many beginner samples that I was being dragged backwards artistically. In the summer of 1999, I made the conscious decision to stop teaching and leave traditional quilting so I could concentrate on creating art, using quilting as my medium.

After taking workshops and experimenting with materials and processes for a year or two, I created Discombobulated, which became the seminal work for my current style. It was the first time I had used quilting to create a three dimensional work and the first time I treated the quilt as if it were raw material rather than a surface to be decorated. This was a major turning point for me. In the years since, I’ve used quilted forms as lines, planes, structures and even metaphors in my work. I credit the artist Eva Hesse and the architect Frank Gehry for showing me, with their own work, how to effectively move through and embrace physical space with an object.

My past professions, particularly my time as a technical writer, have influenced my artistic voice the most. As a writer, I always wondered how a person could convey complex concepts without using words. As an artist, the answer has been to create my own version of a visual dictionary. Some of the words in my Definitions series reflect my technical background, but lately I have been adding even more layers of meaning to my work, including social commentary. I plan to continue doing this even more.

My work isn’t easy to categorize, but I usually call myself a conceptual artist because the idea is the most important part. The finished works can take many forms, but I am best known for my freestanding work, so I also consider myself a sculptor. I may incorporate several different materials to get the effect that I want, but one or more quilted elements always appears in each piece. I love bold, bright colors and use them liberally to give excitement and energy to everything I make.

In the future, I hope to create several large wall-mounted installation works based on the concept of graphs and charts, as well as continuing to expand my Definitions series. I’ve only begun to scratch the surface of my ideas.