Deidre Adams

Façade VI, 38 x 63 inches, ©2008 Deidre Adams

Fabric of Legacies is an annual juried exhibition of art quilts shown at The Lincoln Center in Fort Collins, Colorado, a beautiful center featuring performing arts events along with galleries for visual arts. This year’s show features work from 29 artists. It’s amazing to think that Fabric of Legacies is now in its 28th year, a positive affirmation of public interest in quilts as an art form.

I’m honored to have been invited to show my work as the featured artist for this year’s exhibition. Several of my pieces, including Façade VI, will be displayed in the Walkway Gallery near the other artists’ work for the duration of the exhibition.

Details:
28th Annual Fabric of Legacies Exhibition
July 6 – August 28, 2009
Lincoln Center
417 W. Magnolia St.
Fort Collins, Colorado

Gallery Hours: M-F 8:00 am – 6:00 pm
Selected Saturdays: July 11, Aug. 8 and Aug. 11, 12:00-6:00 pm

There’s an opening reception on Friday, July 10, 5:00-7:00 pm. I’ll also be giving an informal artist’s talk on that day at 6:00 pm. If you’re in the area, hope you can make it!

This is a photo of my grandfather. It came from an old square-format negative that was hanging around at my parents’ house for years, stuck in an envelope full of other such miscellaneous pieces of film that had long ago lost association with any known prints. My mother had always wanted to “do something with them someday.” At some point I acquired the ability to have negatives scanned, so she gave over the responsibility for this envelope to me. Some time later I did scan a lot of them, but a concrete idea of what to do with them never materialized. They were all taken long before I was born, and so I don’t know all of the people in them, but I do recognize my grandparents in some.

I always have a hard time figuring out what to do for my father on Father’s Day, partly because he lives in a different state and partly because, well, let’s just say we haven’t had the most traditional of father-daughter relationships. After my mother died a few years ago, we started talking on a somewhat more regular basis than at any prior time in my life. A couple of weeks ago, when I got an e-mail from iprintfromhome with an offer for a free 11 x 14 print, I got the idea that he might appreciate seeing this photo in print again. I needed to make the square into a rectangle, so I cropped the original and added some cloudy background stuff to impart a little drama and mystery. In the end, I liked my letter-size test print that I had made myself on my Epson R1800 better than the large one, so I put it into an 8×10 window mat to fit the 11 x 14 frame I had bought for it. Then I packed up the whole thing into a double box with lots of bubble wrap and sent it off, crossing my fingers that the glass doesn’t get broken in shipment. Hope he likes it!

Iterations #2, 30 x 66 inches, ©2009 Deidre Adams

I finished this piece about a month ago, just before I left for Ohio (see images of the work in progress here and here). The commission was to make a copy of a work that had sold previously. The difference was that I needed to make the orange more red to coordinate with a swatch of fabric from some furniture that will be in the lobby area where the work will be hung. The swatch also has a kind of shiny copper look to it, so I put some metallic copper paint into the new one as well. I’m posting the original here again because it’s fun to see the comparison.

Iterations #1: Aquamarine, 30 x 66 inches, ©2006 Deidre Adams

While I was working on the color in the new piece, I was looking at an image of the old one on my computer screen in the studio and trying to make judgments based on that, but now that I see the photos together, I’m really surprised at how different the second one turned out. I knew the spaces between the stones were bigger and I had consciously decided that I wanted the negative spaces to be darker in this one, but the colors are more different than I expected, with a lot more contrast. I guess for me, making an exact copy turned out to be more difficult than I would have thought.

I delivered the piece just before I left town, and Judy and Kate from Translations both said they liked it better than the original, so that set my mind at ease. I hope the Ritz-Carlton likes it too.

Now, for another twist on this story. Translations moved into a new gallery space in the heart of Denver’s LoDo area last month. It’s a beautiful new space and the location offers much greater visibility and traffic potential than their old one. (They got a good write up in the Denver Post, which I meant to talk about here on my blog, but never got a response from the Post as to whether I could have permission to repost the photo, so I forgot about it.) A new customer came into the gallery and saw the work which was going to the Ritz-Carlton, which includes this piece:

Horizon IV, 24 x 24, ©2006 Deidre Adams

She loved this one, and so now I have another commission to recreate an existing piece — except she doesn’t like yellow too much and wants me to make it more red.

Is it true that something becomes more desirable when it’s unobtainable? (Like that guy I broke up with once in my younger years but then wanted him back as soon as I found out he had a new girlfriend and was going to take her to the Bob Seger concert? Wow, dating myself here!)

Die Spur Der Steine, 74 x 90 cm (29 x 35 inches), ©2008 Isabelle Wiessler

By far the most interesting aspect of keeping a blog is meeting new people, both nearby and from the other side of the globe. It has opened up a whole new world for me, mostly online, but sometimes in person.

This week I was fortunate to have a studio visit from a friend I met through my blog. Isabelle Wiessler, an artist from Gundelfingen, Germany, and her husband were travelling to the U.S. to visit her daughter, who is working in a nearby town, and to see some of the sights in Colorado and neighboring states. She e-mailed me before coming over, asking if I ever had open studios. I don’t live in an area with many other artists, so I’ve never had an open studio, but I replied that I would be happy for her to just come for an informal visit some time while she was in the area.

I was somewhat apprehensive as to what I would talk about, since I’m not the most outgoing of individuals. But it turns out I need not have worried, because Isabelle is warm and friendly and genuinely interested in everything relating to textile art.  We had a lovely conversation about our different working methods as I showed her my studio setup and my work. I also learned something more about what it’s like to be a textile artist in Europe versus here in the United States. We here are very fortunate to have so many opportunities to exhibit our work.

Verfall, 70 x 104 cm (28 x 41 inches), ©Isabelle Wiessler

While I was looking at her web galleries, I was especially struck by this image. It looks like something I would have photographed myself if given the chance. Isabelle uses a lot of different materials in her work, including Tyvek and Lutradur, as well as dyeing her own fabric. She also includes a lot of embroidery and handwork. Beautiful!

(Images posted with permission of the artist.)

Have I mentioned how much I love Kansas City? I thoroughly enjoyed my time here, for many reasons. I loved buying something in a store and being told “thank you very much, and have a nice day!” This is something you don’t hear too much in Denver, where people often act like they are doing you a huge favor by ringing up your purchase. Although I’m used to it now, the lack of friendliness was shocking to me when I first moved to Denver from Albuquerque, where people are much nicer. It’s the same in K.C., where I struck up conversations with total strangers on a regular basis. (And anyone who knows me very well knows that’s highly unusual for me.)

I also loved the city itself, which has a wonderful mixture of eclectic architecture, with the old happily existing alongside the new. I’m still going through all the pictures I took — that will be a long process. But before too much time went by, I wanted to post some pictures from my very favorite find: a little section of town full of marvelous old warehouses, some still in use, and some waiting for new tenants, but none seeming in imminent danger of demise. I first saw the cluster of tall old warehouses from the freeway when I was on my way in for the conference, and I knew I had to come back and take a closer look.

My first foray into the area was on Sunday evening, and the logistics were more complicated than I had imagined, due to one of the main routes into the area having been closed off for reconstruction. At that time of day, the place was more or less deserted, and it had an eerie feel. I got sort of lost in a maze and was feeling rather apprehensive since I wasn’t familiar with the area. It seemed like a movie set, with all these amazing old buildings and no one around. I took just a few pictures and then decided I’d better find my way out before it got dark.

The next day, I was leaving to go back home, but on my way out of town I decided I wanted to go see the buildings again in different light. Since it was now Monday morning, the place had a totally different feel with people bustling about their business, some visible through open garage-type doors working inside at various industry, some doing touch-up work on the buildings, and some even out walking dogs.

The area boasts a fun-looking local restaurant:

And the residents evidently have a good sense of humor:

What’s not to love?

I had fleeting thoughts of how it might be fun to have an entire floor in one of these buildings for an artist’s studio, up high with views of the city visible from the windows. Look, now here’s one for sale:

I do really love my current studio, and the convenience of having it in my house cannot be denied. But wouldn’t it be great to have some room to stretch out in? It’s fun to dream, and it doesn’t cost anything.

Sorry if this post is a bit over the top on pictures, but just before I went on the trip, I treated myself to a new camera kit. I now have a cool 24-105 zoom lens. With my old camera/lens situation, I was limited to a 35mm focal length on the wide end, so having the 24mm is new and fun. I’ve been entertaining myself with all the wonky angles I can get on things now.

Kerr Grabowski, May 2009. Photo by Deidre Adams.

Today’s SDA conference agenda included a variety of lectures and demos related to textile arts. The most inspiring for me today was a demo by Kerr Grabowski, in which she shared her techniques for working with things normally associated with art on paper — like charcoal, graphite, pastels, and water-soluble media — and making them permanent on fabric. Kerr is known for her beautiful garments and her innovative explorations in screenprinting techniques.

Samples Kerr made using her new process:

I had taken Kerr’s workshop on deconstructed screen printing years ago, and I remember how much fun it was and what great marks could be made on fabric using this process. I still have some really beautiful fabrics that I made in that workshop. Kerr is a generous, sharing person (she even provides a video of the DSP process right on her home page), and her enthusiasm for the process is infectious. She started her demo by saying that she wished her audience to try some of these processes and to let her know what we discover; she wants to start a dialog of artists working together. I left the demo wishing I could go home right then and start playing with some of these techniques.

Later I attended a lecture by Dr. Maria Elena Buszek titled “Minding the Margins: Craft, Criticism and Contemporary Art.” It had to do with the divide between craft and art, but I have to be honest — she talked so fast and furiously I couldn’t keep up with her and I’m not sure even now what her point was, except maybe that so-called “craft” artists should try harder to place themselves in the wider art milieu and expose ourselves to criticism in that realm. She has a Ph.D. in art history, so her view must necessarily be somewhat academic. As textile artists, we can all decide for ourselves whether any of this matters to our pursuit of happiness or fame and fortune or whatever it is we seek in the long run. Evidently she is ruffling some feathers, but I confess to not knowing a lot about this topic. She did give several references for reading which I have put on my to-do list.

The day was capped off by “Textile Fusion: An Interactive Fashion Performance.”

The logistics of the thing weren’t well planned, and nobody seemed to know where they should stand or where the action was going to be headed. It was all very conceptual, with live music that at first seemed pleasantly appropriate but which soon turned relentless and repetitive. Plus, the whole fashion thing in general is very much beyond me, and wearable art is no exception. However, the planners had the good sense to hold the show in the Bloch Building at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art. This was my second visit to the museum, and as I had not had time to get to this part of it earlier, I found a ready opportunity to escape this scene and immerse myself in the quiet solitude of cavernous halls full of good old-fashioned modern art for a refreshing change of pace.

The collection holds a good variety of Abstract Expressionists:

Jackson Pollock (left) and Willem DeKooning (right)

They also have a wide variety of all your modern, postmodern, minimalist, and pop favorites, including Rothko, Kline, Diebenkorn, Warhol, Oldenburg, Rauschenberg, Rosenquist, Judd, LeWitt, Martin, Murry, Riley, and several Thiebauds. One of the more interesting is a huge painting by Kerry James Marshall done on banner canvas, called Memento #5, celebrating the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.

One of the most interesting exhibits in the museum is an exhibition of photographs by Homer Page, a mostly unknkown photographer who created this body of work in 1949-50 in fulfillment of a Guggenheim fellowship. They are street scenes of New York City, often including images of advertisements in ironic juxtaposition with ordinary people. According to the museum’s promo page, this work “represents a ‘missing link’ between the warm, humanistic, and socially motivated documentary photographs of the 1930s and early 1940s in the works of Dorothea Lange, and the tougher, grittier and more existential work of the later 1950s as seen in the images of Robert Frank.” I would love to have more time to go back and look at these again. May just have to order the book instead.

This week I’m in Kansas City attending my first Surface Design Association (SDA) conference. This time I wanted to make a concerted effort to get a photo from an actual conference event, so here you see a shot of the Thursday night dinner. Not exactly a stunning example summing up the heart and soul of what this conference is about. Oh well, no Pulitzer for me this time!

The SDA’s mission is “to increase awareness, understanding, and appreciation of textiles in the art and design communities as well as in the general public” and to “inspire creativity and encourage innovation, and further the rich tradition of the textile arts through publications, exhibitions, conferences, and educational opportunities.” The schedule this year includes a wonderful variety of speakers and demonstrations of textile-art related topics. Yesterday’s highlights included a lecture called “Organic Cotton — Beyond Oatmeal and Granola Colors,” given by Harmony Susalla of Harmony Art Organic Design, an inspiring story of a young woman who left a successful textile-design career to start her own business of producing organic printed textiles because she truly wanted to make a difference in the world. She’s not just spouting the “sustainability” and “green” buzzwords like so many other companies these days, she’s actually doing something about it. Plus, while she’s a savvy businesswoman, she’s also delightful and unassuming in person.

I must say I’m quite enthralled by this city. There’s an ample supply of interesting old buildings mixed in amongst the new, the people are amazingly friendly, and the art-viewing opportunities seem to go on without end. I’m staying on the campus of the Kansas City Art Institute, and just across the street are both the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art. Today’s SDA events included “Exhibition Extravaganza,” a tour of local art gallery events around town. The tour included a stop at the Belger Arts Center, a former warehouse space now converted into exhibition space on two floors with corporate offices in between. There were five individual exhibitions to see in this cavernous space. First was “Surface Matters,” the SDA member show, a series of 18 x 18-inch squares which included a wide range of techniques and themes.

In the upper level were several more shows, including work by Ray Materson, who makes miniature narrative embroideries which become all the more amazing when you hear his personal story. I also got to see the embroideries of Alice Kettle, another artist with an obsessive process involving lots and lots of stitching, whom I’ve admired for a long time since seeing her work in several magazine articles. It was a treat to see in person. Another room featured the work of Jennifer Angus, an installation of elaborate wall designs consisting of very large and strangely beautiful insects arranged in circular patterns, along with freestanding dollhouses populated by insect citizens going about their daily tasks. Finally, the gallery had on display several large pieces by El Anatsui, an artist making amazing large-scale “cloths” from recycled materials, including caps from liquor bottles and other items gathered in and around Nsukka, Nigeria.

I’ve seen these in magazines, too, but it doesn’t compare to actually seeing the work in person, where you can get a full appreciation for the sheer size and detail, as well as the amount of time that must go into the making of these amazing tapestries. Anatsui does not currently have a functioning web site, but I did find this YouTube video that features him explaining his own work:

Well, I knew there had been a big push during the last several years to privatize all the public resources, but this is going just a bit too far, don’t you think?

What’s that you say? Oh, you mean this isn’t the real Gateway Arch?

OK, you caught me. Alert readers will notice that the shape isn’t quite right, but it’s still fun. This particular arch can be observed just off the highway in Vandalia, Illinois, gracing the fine establishment so named.

The real thing is still standing here in St. Louis, as yet unscathed by promotional adornment.

Chairs, ©2009 Deidre Adams

I have been in Athens, Ohio, all this past week. For three days I taught a Photoshop class, and then for the next three I attended the SAQA conference, where I met some wonderful new friends and listened to some interesting discussions about making and promoting artwork. I also went to the opening of Quilt National 2009. All of this is evidence that as a documentary photographer, I pretty much suck, because I did not get a single photo of any of these things. So instead you see before you a photo of the west side (loading dock?) entrance of the Bromley Hall, a dormitory on the campus of Ohio University, where I’ve been staying this past week. (At least I’m sparing you images of the wildly creepy basement of this place!)

Some thoughts:

Promoting one’s work: Outside of the obvious, there are many ways you can form relationships with people in business to get your work seen. Finding a business that has a symbiotic relationship with your particular work and making connections is one way to start. (From Lisa Chipetine’s Marketing Outside the Box session.) Alyson B. Stanfield also gave a keynote presentation on marketing and promotion, all of which is fantastic advice for artists. These are things I know I should be doing, but at this point in my life I want to pull back and make some work without any distractions. (Er … what was that about not making excuses?) Bottom line here: I will still not be doing the Facebook or the Twitter any time soon.

Pricing and commissions: Pricing is a big hairy conundrum and artists are all very different in their approaches. Carol Taylor surveyed a large number of artists and presented a detailed compilation of information about the methods used for pricing (ranging from very methodical calculation to “gut feeling”) as well as the sales numbers for a few of the artists. Apparently only one person out of all the survey respondents is making what I would call really good money.

Self-Publishing: Carol Ann Waugh presented a session on creating your own book. I found this idea very intriguing. Besides the one-off photo books that are available in many flavors now (blurb.com, shutterfly.com, Apple, etc.), there are also some print-on-demand (POD) options that are considerably less expensive, and the quality of the samples she showed looked pretty good. But then, there’s always a catch: evidently you then have to work your tail off to market and promote the book. (Could not have seen that coming!) Still, the idea has some possibilities for me down the road.

Quilt National: The show was fantastic, quite possibly the best QN ever, in my humble opinion. I didn’t realize that on opening night you are allowed to take pictures, so I didn’t have my camera with me. Went back the next day to get some pictures, but the option had been removed by then. But it is a great show, and many congratulations to all the artists whose work is included. And special congratulations to my friends Sandy Woock, who won a Juror’s Award of Merit, and Pam RuBert, whose quilt is featured in a Wall Street Journal article about the show. (Rant: Seriously people, can you just not ever write an article about art quilts without mentioning Grandmother?)

The commission I’m working on is for the new Ritz-Carlton in Lake Tahoe, set to open later this year. This was a very good contract for Translations Gallery, including several pieces by multiple gallery artists. In addition to the commission piece, they also bought this piece:

Horizon IV, 24 x 24, ©2006 Deidre Adams

And this piece:

Horizon XI, 34 x 34 inches, ©2008 Deidre Adams

Progress on the new version of Iterations is coming along nicely. Quilting and blocking the panels separately made things ridiculously fast. No endless scrunching and turning and readjusting. Then all I had to do was square up the adjoining edges and join them to one another.

To put the panels together, I just set them side by side and stitched them together with a closely spaced zigzag stitch. This required getting the trusty Bernina back out, since the Juki does not do anything but straight stitch. Note the use of the very sexy and high-tech masking tape for basting purposes.

After the panels were all attached, here’s what I ended up with:

At this point, I trim off the edges and put on the binding. This is a faced binding which I turn to the back so it doesn’t show. Now all that remains is to do the painting. After the first few layerings, here’s how it currently looks:

Several more layerings of color will be needed to achieve the final depth and richness I’m after. I should be finished by the end of this weekend if all goes according to plan. But other plans for this weekend include writing an 8-10 page paper for Art & Cultural Heritage class, finishing four 22×30 paintings for Watermedia II, doing client corrections on two freelance design projects, and celebrating Mother’s Day and my birthday, both tomorrow!

I’m certainly not trying to say I’m amazing — flat-out crazy for trying to do everything at once would be much closer to the mark. It is very hard to try to do so many things at once and do them all at your very best level of accomplishment. I’ve found myself having to compromise a lot this semester, which I really do hate. I’ve always been (OK, at least since graduating from high school) kind of a sociopath about wanting all As in school. But really, who cares? I’m not some young kid who’s going to be out looking for my first job and has nothing else but a grade-point average to prove my worth. Why can’t I just relax and not stress out about it?

Since I had three studio classes this semester, it really was too much and I just could not devote the amount of time to every assignment that I would have liked. I did make some work that I was pretty happy with, but I wonder how much better I could have done with more time and proper focus? Well, I’ll start posting some of it soon and you can tell me what you think.

I have finals next week, and then on Friday I’m leaving to drive to Ohio, where I will be attending the SAQA Art & Excellence Conference (held in conjunction with the Quilt National Dairy Barn exhibit). I’ll be teaching a 3-day preconference class called Photoshop for Artists. Then I’ll be heading to the Surface Design Association Conference, Off the Grid, in Kansas City. I’ve been wanting to go to the SDA conference for years, and this was the first time it seemed that everything was in place for me to do it. I’m really looking forward to immersing myself in this textile-focused world for a few days. Should be a lot of fun!