23 August, 2018
September 4 – 30, 2018
Reception: Friday, September 14, 7 - 8:30pm
What is a quilt? It’s a homemade way of warming your family and yourself, making good use of fabric scraps left over from other projects. It’s an ancient form, spottily historicized, often a household task imprinted with a woman’s intuitive or deliberate taste, sometimes rising to great aesthetic finesse. It’s a visual field in which symbols can express complex meaning; there’s some historical debate whether geometric signs in quilts hung in yards gave directions to slaves escaping on the Underground Railroad.
All of these ways to be a quilt can be seen in Sewn Together: Selections from the Marathon Quilters Guild, on exhibition from September 4 through 30 in the Lotvin Family Gallery at the Hopkinton Center for the Arts. A free reception for the quilters and the public will be held at the gallery on Friday, September 14 from 7 to 8:30 pm.
Cathleen Dinsmore pairs A Crack of Hope, a 30x44” wall quilt, with a two-page poem, Step Into the Crack. Both are invocations to social action; specifically, they invite white people to face racism. In the quilt’s upper third, fragments of cloth swirl, each imprinted with words: “justice,” “dignity,” “police who defuse violence.” In its middle, simple figures sit poised, each a different shade. “Nobody’s black or white,” Dinsmore says. Beneath them floats a spray of our ills: “gerrymandering,” “redlining,” “I can’t breathe.” “Wrongs that have been committed up to right now in our backyards,” adds Dinsmore, who lives and works in Hopkinton. Dotting the piece are references to Tamir Rice, Starbucks, and tipped scales of justice.
“Once you become aware of systemic racism, you look at our society differently,” Dinsmore continues. “I mulled this piece for two years, wanting to get the message about racial justice across without offending, wanting to get the conversation started, or, if it’s started, keep it going.”
While the show was being juried, a young actor came into HCA for rehearsal, saw the piece, and said that some of its symbols recalled a college paper he’d written on quilts as Underground Railroad signage.
A piece by Laima Whitty, one of 700 entries, was recently awarded first prize, contemporary quilts, in the international Festival of Quilts in Birmingham, England. In her piece in the HCA show, Northern Lights (20x52”), central undulating bands of orange, red, and purple are enclosed in a field of black-and-white lines, arcs, dots, and circles. It’s an effect of contained vibrancy, linear delineation surrounding flowing color. “I try to catch interest from a distance, invite in, and then the details,” Whitty, also of Hopkinton, says.
In a piece by Karen Swiech of Ashland, Two Pear (11x8½”), the fruit, paired with its shadow, is delicately rendered in three dimensions by five layered rose and black swatches. Around it dances the text “3 of a Kind Beat 2 Pear.”
Sewn Together is an outgrowth of the biennial weekend show of the Marathon Quilters Guild, which takes place this year September 15 and 16 in the Delbridge Family Performance Space at HCA, exhibiting over 100 quilts by some 20 quilters. “The biennial has always been a big hit,” says HCA co-director Kris Waldman, who organized Sewn Together. “People come from all over to see it. The month-long gallery exhibit is a way of extending the weekend show by selecting outstanding work that is smaller scale and easier for our audience to acquire.”
The quilters in Sewn Together:
Colleen Manning Barnes
Jean Bertschmann
Nancy Burdick
Cathleen Dinsmore
Linda Grant
Yvonne Powell
Karen Swiech,
Kelsey Ullman
Bea Wardford
Laima Whitty
To see more work in the show, click here.
