Left to right: Victoria Gertenbach, Susan Brubaker Knapp, Candy Glendening, Jeannie Palmer Moore, Jamie Fingal, and me in the aptly-named “green room.” (Photo by Jeannie Cook-Delpit, director of national events for Bernina.)

Since I had so much time there, I used the opportunity to take lots of pictures in Cleveland and Akron. I’ll be posting some of them in the next few days.

All of this happened right in the middle of trying to get a lot of work finished for the Evenings with Monet show, which we hung yesterday, the day after I got back. With 4 of us working on it, I think we managed to hang well over 50 pieces in the space of about 90 minutes. Then it was off to a nearby restaurant for a well-deserved margarita.

Eunice pauses from her work to pose for a picture.

Wow, it’s August already. The summer is flying by, and I’ve been lax in blogging once again. Well, no sense dwelling on failure, the only thing to do is try to make up for it and go forward.

One thing that was notable for me this summer was my invitation to be a visiting artist at The Gathering Place, a “refuge for rebuilding lives” located in Denver. Their mission statement is “to support women and their children who are experiencing homelessness or poverty by providing a safe daytime refuge and resources for self-sufficiency.”‘

Prior to the artist’s visit, I was invited to take a tour of the facility. I cannot tell you how impressed I am by the scope and methodology of this enterprise. Besides just the very basic things like food, shelter, and clothing, they provide so many things we take for granted: showers, hair cuts, laundry, phones and voice mail, computer/internet access, child care, and just a place to BE. They strive to maintain a community of acceptance, requiring “that everyone at The Gathering Place remains non-judgmental toward each other’s unique circumstances, and demands that everyone show each other mutual respect.” The Gathering Place operates primarily through private funding and donations.

Besides the basic necessities, The Gathering Place also provides a host of additional activities and opportunities: Yoga classes, art classes, computer and writing skills, even GED preparation. One of the art activities is The Card Project, where women can create original handmade notecards which are sold for $2 each through the Gathering Place and through various other distribution channels. The women receive 75% of the proceeds when their cards are sold.

During the month of July, the card project is on hiatus and in its place, various local artists are invited to come in and share their work and “artistic vision and journey as an artist” with the group. I was honored to be asked to participate. In preparing for what I was going to present, I knew that nobody was going to want to listen to me yammering on about myself for any great length, so I decided that it might be fun to create a project for the women to work on.

I have a body of work involving lots and lots of hand-stitching over collaged fabrics and bits of stuff – I’ve never shown it nor posted about it mainly because I don’t know if it’s going anywhere, but I work on it while watching TV or in some kind of a waiting situation. It’s a kind of free-association doodling; I enjoy it immensely and it’s great therapy for me. Anyway, I got the idea that this might be a good jumping off point for a project, so I put together a bunch of little kits with a felt base and collaged elements, with a few stitches started in with different colors of embroidery thread. I also brought a big mishmash of scraps of all kinds of things and more thread.

I thought I was going to need to do some demo about how it should be done, but to my surprise, everyone just took a kit and jumped right in without waiting for me to direct them. Most of the people I know outside of my sewing friends would rather have their teeth drilled than fix a button or a hem or stitch anything at all, so I wasn’t expecting this. But these women were right at home with the whole idea and just took to it like they’d been doing it forever. Not content to just leave it with what I’d started, they happily dove into the scraps and fearlessly made their own compositions.

Top, left to right: Eunice, Ricki, Gloria, and Tracey
Bottom, left to right: Janet, Madaline, and Madaline’s work

My only regret is that the time we spent together was too short. I didn’t get the chance to get to know anyone as much as I would have liked. I hope to have the opportunity to see the finished projects at some point.

My intention to post about this in a more timely fashion didn’t materialize due to other stuff getting in the way (as usual), but yesterday I received a reminder about it — a beautiful thank-you card from the group. This card was done by Eunice, who loves quilts.

Colorado Speaker of the House Terrance Carroll and me in front of All the Answers I

There’s so much going on this week, it’s hard to know where to start! Last week, the highlight of the local Denver art scene, at least as far as I’m concerned, was a reception at the Colorado State Capitol for artists whose work was chosen for display in the offices of the state legislature. Terrance Carroll, the speaker of the house, is highly supportive of Metropolitan State College of Denver in general, and of the art department in particular. I was proud to have 2 pieces chosen for display in his office.

Next on the list is an update on the situation with our thesis show. A temporary space has been secured for the show, and everything is going forth as originally planned in the new location. I will be working like crazy to have my work finished in time for delivery there tomorrow by noon. If you’re in Denver, please join me for the reception this Friday:

Friday, April 23, 6-9 pm
Center for Visual Art
3001 Larimer St, Denver, 80205 (temporary location)

The exhibit will also be open Sat. 12-5 pm, and Weds-Friday, April 28-30, 11 am – 6 pm.

The second thesis show will be in the same location May 7-13, with a reception on Friday, May 7, 6-9 pm.

And finally, I will be giving a talk on “Quilting in a State of Change” at the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum in Golden, Colorado, this Thursday, April 22, at 6:30 pm. The address is 1213 Washington Avenue in Golden. More information is available here (scroll down for the current event). Hope you can join me for that as well!

Machine Quilting Unlimited magazine includes a regular feature called “Art Studio.” I’m the featured artist for the November 2009 issue. I enjoyed writing the copy for it, since the subject is one with which I’m intimately familiar — and I can always use the practice talking about my work. The magazine did a fantastic job with the layout, as you can see. This is a beautiful publication, with articles of interest to both traditional and art quilters. Single copies and subscriptions are available at their web site, http://www.mqumag.com/home/.

I’m woefully behind in posting this news, but better late than never, right? This wonderful new book by Spike Gillespie profiles 20 art quilters, detailing their stories and working methods, with beautiful photography and layout. I’m honored to have been chosen to be a part of it. It was also really cool to find out that 2 of my pieces were featured on the cover, along with work by Lisa Call and Margot Lovinger.

Spike traveled around the country to meet the artists in person, and she came to Denver, along with photographer Ori Sofer, to interview me and Lisa for our respective articles. They were lots of fun, with interesting personal stories of their own. Ori took a lot of great pictures of me and my studio, and generously gave me copies of them. The photo I’m using on my About page and for my Facebook profile is one that he took. I like it because it pretty much looks like me but still looks decent, if you know what I mean!

The best part of this book is that it’s not just pages of the artists’ work, but also includes photos from their studios and little blurbs of advice from each one. I had to squirm a little when I saw mine in print, because Spike didn’t clean up my somewhat uncivilized language, but quoted me verbatim. Ahem!

But I couldn’t be more thrilled about being in this book. Here are a couple of spreads from my section:

Quilting Art is available through Amazon or directly through the publisher, Voyageur Press.

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!

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?)