Master Pieces
The art of the Texas quilt.
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If anything, it’s variety that characterizes the quilts from Texas’ first 100 years. And today, quilt patterns are just as plentiful. They are based on time-honored patterns such as the Nine Patch, the Mariner’s Compass, and the Flower Garden, some of which are over 100 years old. (The Lone Star pattern, by the way, is not named after the five-pointed star of Texas, but after the biblical Star of Bethlehem. But it has been so popular with Texas quilters, says Bresenhan, that many call it the “national quilt of Texas.” The background image featured throughout this story is an example of this popular pattern.)
Innovative Quilts
Innovative Quilt: Crewell Swirl, Patricia Creswell
Those quilts that don’t follow a distinct pattern are termed “innovative” quilts. They are original creations aimed at a fairly broad audience. Often they are based on traditional favorites, but the end results reflect the creative whimsy of their makers.
Art Quilts
Art Quilt: Spirit Dancers, Earth, Beth Kennedy
Art quilts, or contemporary quilts, evolved 15-20 years ago from the innovative quilts, as a means of embracing the abstract and asymmetrical. Art quilts appeal to the refined or acquired taste. They are intended for appreciation in the context of painting, sculpture, and other contemporary fine art. Art quilts adorn walls, not beds. They can be made with bits of paper, paint, and even small ornaments, and ever since their emergence in the 1970s, they have stretched the seams of the very definition of quilt. Art quilters consider themselves quilting’s avant-garde; they use cutting-edge techniques to transform fabric into multimedia marvels.
Art Quilt: Hugs and Kisses, Beth Kennedy
“There is a less distinct line now between paintings and quilts,” says Beth Kennedy, a maker, teacher, and judge of art quilts. “Quilts are doing well and acknowledged in multimedia art shows. They are being recognized as art by the art community and not just by quilters.”
Art Quilt: A Nuestra Señora, Beth Kennedy
Representational or abstract, venerable or irreverent, art quilts are designed as freely as the imagination roams. At art quilt shows such as the prestigious biennial Quilt National in Athens, Ohio, quilts need only have two layers in order to qualify for selection, says Kennedy. She has broken even that convention with her Texas Cave Art series, comprising quilts made entirely of hand-dyed batting, the stuffing that normally goes inside a quilt.
Kennedy is a former linguist who professes a love for communication, especially through images, and for cloth. So it seems natural that she is fascinated with the earliest attempts at visual communication—cave drawings. Cave drawings found in Spain inspired her series of Spirit Dancers quilts. Spirit Dancers, Earth is made from hand-dyed and discharged cotton cloth that she pieced and quilted by machine. She left a small trail of fabric on the bottom left side, she says, “to allow the spirits a way out.”
Kennedy, who took many trips to Mexico while growing up in Dallas, fell in love with the Spanish language and with Mexican culture while still a teenager. As a feminist during the sixties, she also began to appreciate female imagery. These interests come together in her best known work, A Nuestra Señora, La Virgen de Guadalupe. Named after the patron saint of Mexico, A Nuestra Señora is designed to resemble Mexican retablos, or home shrines. She based it on a traditional medallion pattern but embellished it with embroidery, tiny yarn dolls, and milagro charms. This quilt was selected for exhibition at Quilt National in 1991, after which it toured in Texas and overseas for two years.
Art Quilt: Rapture, Libby Lehman
Also working in this genre is Houston art-quilter Libby Lehman. Lehman’s quilts are so beguiling, one pair of gallery-goers is said to have left convinced that she embroidered them with human hair. Lehman says she learned to make quilts the way most people have since the late 1970s: by taking classes at local quilt shops, going to regional seminars, and following instructions in how-to books. She insists that until she pieced her first quilt top at the age of 24, “Holly Hobby decoupage” was the peak of her artistic ability. Now 50, she has gained an international reputation as a master art quilter, with corporate clients including Visa International and Texas-based Cogen Technologies.
Art Quilt: A Snickeroo, Libby Lehman
The unique look of her quilts comes from a technique she has perfected called sheer ribbon illusion. It creates an appearance of translucence on the surface of her quilts. Rapture, the first quilt she made with this technique, won an Award of Excellence at the IQA show in 1991. She also used the technique with Escapade, an art quilt that has been purchased by the Museum of the American Quilter’s Society, and with Joy Ride, an innovative piece based on the Diamond-in-a-Square pattern. Lehman now travels most of each year teaching her style of quilt-making as far away as New Zealand, Switzerland, and Japan.
Though quilts have evolved from the coverlets that kept Texas’ earliest settlers protected from the elements to wall-hangings that serve as cultural icons, they continue to retain the handicraft spirit—one in which the mastery is not invisible in the art. No matter how sophisticated the method or the medium, quilts possess an inherent humility that will make these works accessible for years to come.
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