If you like your art with a twang, the exhibition of art quilts called “Southern Accents” that opened last week in Melbourne is pure Dixie.
Don’t expect your grandma’s bedspreads; the quilts on display at Florida Tech’s Ruth Funk Center for Textile Arts cover everything from William Faulkner to Elvis, kudzu to collards, fresh water springs to the Gulf oil spill. And that’s just for starters.
All of the pieces in the exhibition are superb examples of the art and craft of the artist-made quilt. Presented by the southeast chapter of Studio Art Quilt Associates, the exhibition was selected by Sandra Sider, a quilt artist and author who serves as curator for the Texas Quilt Museum in La Grange, Texas.
“Southern Accents” started out as a juried exhibition. Its call for entries went out to textile artists living throughout the South, from Virginia to Florida, and as far west as Arkansas and Louisiana. Sider selected 43 quilts from 119 submissions.
While most of the entries were up to snuff in craft and visual interest, “quite a few of the submissions did not conform to the theme, which was important,” Sider says.
The 43 artworks selected didn’t fill the Funk’s galleries, however, and Sider says that the show at that point lacked breadth.
For one thing, the exhibition needed more large-scale artworks, more compositions that were abstract or conceptual in execution, and more irregularly shaped quilts. Most of those submitted for jurying, Sider notes, were squares and rectangles.
Entries to the competition also tended to be from artists living in coastal areas, and Sider says she wanted to see work from the inland regions of the south.
“I also wanted more men – at least a couple,” she says, acknowledging the dominance of women in the art quilt field.
To round out the show, Sider invited nineteen additional artists to exhibit, bringing the total artworks on display to 63 (a few artists, including Susan Rienzo of Vero Beach, are represented by two pieces).
She got her two male artists: Ron Hodge of Blufton, South Carolina, was juried into the show; Arturo Alonzo Sandoral of Lexington, Kentucky, is part of the invited group.
The only way a visitor to the exhibition can tell who was juried in and who was invited, is to look at the upper right corner of the wall labels, where the words “Southern Highlights” designate the invitational works.
That, however, is the only way to distinguish between the two. While most of the artworks conform to the traditional definition of a quilt – a sandwich of padding enclosed between two layers of fabric and held together by stitching – the materials used in them are anything but conventional. In addition to cotton and the occasional silk fabric, these quilts employ such off-beat materials as long leaf pine needles, 35 mm film strips, aluminum foil, dryer sheets and lint.
In fact, the only thing that stands on tradition in this exhibition is its subject matter. Every quilt is an expression of what it means to live in the American South.
Many of the quilts from Florida artists explored variations on the theme of sunshine and water.
Susan Rienzo’s “Sunshine State of Mind” and “Sunshine State of Mind II” are abstract compositions that feature multiple depictions of the sun as a burning wheel in shades of yellow, orange and red. Bonnie Dubbin Askowitz of Miami shows the sun in a gentler, but no less colorful, mood with “Gazebo Sunset,” while her fellow Miamian Maya Schonenberger looks to the inviting waters of inland Florida in her “Fresh Water Spring.”
Nature is an oft-referenced theme in the show. A few artists chose themes that elevate the lowly, sometimes to humorous effect, as in “Groundhog + Kudzu: A Love Story” by Jane Broaddus of Dahlonega, Georgia. Seated on its haunches, a blissful woodchuck is surrounded by an all-you-can eat kudzu leaf banquet.
Sider, who juried the piece into the show from a digital photograph, saw the quilt first-hand on her recent visit to the Funk Center.
Composed of silk, cotton batiks, tulle, paper, buttons and beads, the piece “is richer in surface than I could have imagined,” she says.
Sider was also surprised upon seeing the work of Floridian Jayne Bentley Gaskin in person. She accepted two pieces from Gaskin on the strength of their imagery, little realizing that the artist had given high relief dimension to her subject matter with the addition of polyester fiberfill. Gaskin’s “Land of Cotton,” a close-up depiction of a branch of plump cotton bolls, makes especially good use of the technique.
Born in Alabama, Sider studied at UNC-Chapel Hill, eventually earning a Ph.D. in comparative literature with a focus on text and image. She had spent her early childhood in South Carolina before moving to North Carolina at age seven; one grandmother made quilts; her other grandmother tatted and spun her own yarn.
It was that grandmother’s collection of feathers stuck into vases around the house that today gives Sider a warm appreciation for Patricia Errion Nelson’s “Collector’s Delight.” A still life in fabric, paper and aluminum foil, its imagery includes two vases filled with wild bird feathers.
And, to Sider’s Southern-tuned ear, the sentiment emblazoned across a quilt by Kristin La Flamme of Charlottesville, Virginia is pitch-perfect. “Suck it Up and Drive On” speaks to the experience of “military families that have to pick up and move often,” Sider explains. The motto, she adds, epitomizes the sassy stoicism of a true daughter of the South.
The show is not all folksy fun and pithy sayings, however. According to Sider, most of the pieces have “an oblique Southern theme,” but a few bear pointed references to the history of the South.
Valerie S. Goodwin’s “African Burial Ground III” and Kathleen Loomis’s “Crazed 11: Marching On” are two such works. Both quilts are map-like in their compositions of intersecting lines enclosing fields of color.
In “African Burial Ground,” an aerial view of a cemetery forms the backdrop for a graveyard where modest tombstones sprout like seedlings. Flanking them like twin guardians loom two strong figures: a black woman in 19th century dress, and the Statue of Liberty.
“Crazed 11: Marching On” is a network of red lines that lock myriad small rectangles of blue and gray in symbolic battle. The blue rectangles (for the Union forces) at the top end of the quilt gradually infiltrate the gray area (Confederate territory) at the composition’s bottom. Rather than a distinct line of engagement, the interface between the two sides is a vast, speckled area where neither color prevails.
Jane Burch Cochran, from the unlikely-sounding town of Rabbit Hash, Kentucky (population 315) took on the subject of loss, both of ancestors and traditions, in her quilt, “Then I Was the Only One Left.” The composition features six panels on which ladies’ gloves, arranged and ornamented like heraldic figures, are appliquéd against richly patterned fabrics. The quilt is a memorial to the artist’s mother and grandmothers, who were, no doubt, proper women for whom attendance to church or a formal tea would include the wearing of dress gloves.
A discussion of the South would not be complete without mention of a few of its famous sons. William Faulkner and Jimmy Carter both have works dedicated to them in the exhibition, but Arlene Blackburn of Millington, Tennessee bowed to the inevitable with her “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Elvis.” Dancing Elvises and jukeboxes border the quilt; its center, framed by black and white piano keys, discloses the ghostly apparition of Elvis’s head hovering over the flower-wreathed gates of Graceland.
Every quilt in the show is a revelation, but Sider says that she does not deserve all the credit for the exhibition’s success.
“No matter how well you choose the works to be included in the show, the installation is important,” Sider says, acknowledging the work of Assistant Director Keidra Navaroli and her staff at the Funk Center.
“They put a lot of thought into how the show is displayed.”
The quilt exhibition runs through August 22.
