Two Vero artists are exhibiting works this summer at the first and only museum in Florida devoted to textile arts.
Melbourne’s Ruth Funk Center for Textile Arts, on the campus of the Florida Institute of Technology, is holding a summer show that lives up to the high standard set by its previous exhibitions.
“Florida in Fabric II: Wish You were Here!” is a juried invitational comprising 36 art quilts from Florida residents. A companion exhibit, “Oil Stains,” is an art quilt series by Eleanor McCain that contemplates the cause and effects of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster of 2010.
“Florida in Fabric II” was designed to showcase in-state quilters. The competition elicited 68 submissions, of which 36 pieces made their way into the current show.
Two of the quilts on display are by Vero Beach artists. Susan Rienzo’s “Sunshine State of Mind” (2014) features six depictions of the blazing Florida sun in a palette of yellow, orange red and blue. The work is executed in machine appliquéd raw-edged cotton with machine quilting. Barbara Miro Soumar’s “Luna” (2014) is also executed in raw-edge appliqué. A dark-hued night scene, the work depicts a Luna moth hovering near a palm hung with dimensional white Cereus blossoms. In the shadowy darkness near the bottom of Soumar’s composition, the red jeweled eyes of an alligator and an armadillo sparkle.
The juror for “Florida in Fabric II” was Martha Sielman, Executive Director of Studio Art Quilts Associates (SAQA), an international organization with chapters across the U.S.
“There are a lot of people who have opinions about Florida, and Florida means a lot to a number of people across the country,” says assistant museum director Keidra Daniels Navaroli.
“We wanted to stay true to an interpretation of Florida by Florida artists,” she says, adding that next year’s juried exhibition, titled “Southern Accents,” will be open to artists across the South.
The current show has a dazzling array of variations on the theme, from Florida’s lighthouses (“Album of Florida Lights” by Mary Jo Kuhn of Jacksonville) to its bathing beauties (“Golden Apples of the Sun” by Sandra Donabed of Jupiter).
These aren’t your granny’s quilts. In this show, the stuff of which arts quilts are made include paper and plastic as well as cotton, linen and synthetic fabrics; acrylic paint, scrabble tiles and Swarovski crystals as well as thread, yarn and embroidery floss.
The Ruth Funk Center has a couple thousand objects in its collection and a rotating schedule of exhibitions that make it a convincing advocate for the variety and expressiveness of textiles as a fine art medium.
The versatility of textile art is something that assistant museum director Navaroli says she underestimated before she began working at the Ruth Funk Center in 2010.
“I definitively had a narrow definition of what textiles were before I really saddled up. It really spans the gamut,” she says.
Navaroli, who came to the Ruth Funk Center from the development department of the Orlando Museum of Art, has an Master’s degree in Fine Arts in art history from Florida State University. Her areas of study were African and Oceanic art, but she says she gained a peripheral knowledge of textile art through the study of traditional weaving and cloth production techniques among various ethnic groups.
An exhibit of Gee’s Bend quilts at the Orlando Museum of Art shortly before she arrived at her current position was a revelation. In the mid-20th century, tiny Gee’s Bend, Alabama was home to a group of African American women who pushed the limits of traditional quilt making with their improvisational approach to composition, color and pattern. After their work was compared by big city aesthetes to the best abstract painting of the era, museums began to exhibit the women’s quilts as modern art and recognize the individuals who created them as fine artists.
Navaroli and Director of University Museums Carla Funk (no relation to Ruth Funk) dream of bringing an exhibit of the quilts to the Ruth Funk Center, but that, according to Navaroli, is easier said than done. She explains that the quilts are similar to classic abstract paintings of the same era in yet another way: they are fragile and expensive to transport.
But there is still plenty of time to plan for a Gee’s Bend show. Scarcely five years old, the Ruth Funk Center has wasted no time in presenting some pretty marvelous exhibitions. For example, last year’s “ReDress: Upcycled Style by Nancy Judd” was a rags-to-riches story starring materials that usually end up in the landfill. Judd is an environmental activist and artist who creates improbably elegant ensembles from such things as worn-out airline seat covers, cereal boxes, old inner tubes and plastic signs from defunct political campaigns.
This spring, “Tying the Knot: Global Wedding Costume and Ritual” lured fashion-savvy Vero Beach residents to the museum for a feast of traditional wedding garb from around the world.
“We had three centuries of wedding dresses and garments represented,” says Navaroli.
The checklist for that show included everything from imperial Chinese wedding costumes to a contemporary Vera Wang gown.
The exhibition that shares the center’s generous gallery space with “Florida in Fabric” is a sort of counterbalance to that show’s predominantly sunny take on life. “Oil Stains” by Eleanor McCain comprises a dozen works in her series as a commentary on the BP oil spill.
Created from hand-dyed fabric, the quilts are composed of myriad, freely-sized rectangular blocks of color “marred” by inky blotches. McCain, an artist and practicing physician from Fort Walton Beach in Florida’s Panhandle, created the series as an emotional response to an environmental outrage.
Calling that catastrophe a “spill” does not convey the indelibility of the situation, says Navaroli.
“McCain’s artist statement says that instead of calling it an oil spill, she very intently and purposely called it a stain. Because a spill is something that can be cleaned up, and a stain is something more permanent – something that is left behind.”
Rather than create realistic pictures of oily birds, crude-coated beaches or moribund sea creatures, McCain used abstract color and evocative titles to give substance to concepts that are difficult to describe visually.
The quilts titled “Beach,” “Bay,” “Marsh,” and “Gulf” evoke nature in subtle ways, including the blue, green and off-white colors of those quilts and the stitched outlines of animals and undulating waves.
In works like “Society,” “Conscience,” and “Money,” the artist asks individual viewers to consider their part in the tragedy’s mechanism. Most wrenching of all, the work titled “Heart” – blood-red and quilted with a pattern of arterial veins – suggests that our feelings for the vitality of the Gulf were absent until it was too late for them to be of any use to its survival.
McCain will present a talk about her “Oil Stains” series in the gallery on July 26 at 1:30 p.m.
Both exhibits are on view through August 23. The Ruth Funk Center for Textile Arts is located between Evans Library and the Botanical Gardens on the campus of Florida Institute of Technology. The college is located at 150 West University Boulevard in Melbourne. Museum hours are Tuesday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Saturday from noon to 4 p.m. Admission is free.
