So you could have knocked me over with a knitting needle when after so many years of noodling my way along as a fiber artist, I found myself suddenly taking a sharp right turn into a brand new medium – wire!  Thanks to a class at the Richmond Art Center, I’ve discovered that I can make gestural drawings by knotting and twisting wire.   They are like three-dimensional line drawings but with bounce and spring.   Of course, since I’m still doing figurative art it’s not really such a stretch, perhaps more a further advancement of what I’ve learned over the years about drawing.

Because I’m using a fine gauge wire, the pieces are not meant to stand up without support; so I have mounted them on stretched canvas.  This is the first piece called “Waiting for the 3:15.”

"Waiting for the 3:15" 18" x 30" ©2011 Alice Beasley

I’ve used bits snipped from aluminum cans for the books that the figures are holding.   It drew favorable response from a gallery so that just egged me on.

"Waiting" (detail) ©2011 Alice Beasley

My second piece is a line of zebras called “Hiding in Plain Sight.”   I’ve begun adding acrylic paint to the canvas to give the figures a more interesting background.

"Hiding in Plain Sight" 12" x 24" ©2011 Alice Beasley

What’s great about wire is that the figures cast interesting shadows onto the canvas backing (or wall if mounted alone), depending on the lighting.

"Hiding" (detail) ©2011 Alice Beasley

The third work is a playful comment on the fitness craze called “Flex Time.”  I’ve used colored wire (the type used in jewelry making) to make their hair.

"Flex Time" 18" x 24" ©2011 Alice Beasley

"Flex Time" (detail) ©2011 Alice Beasley

I have a lot of practical reasons for wanting to continue to work with wire.  For example, we’re about to go off on one of our rv trips.  In the past trying to pack my quilting supplies and sewing machine into a camper was daunting.  Finding the space to sew was even more so.  Wire is much more portable.  In fact, I did some of the zebras in my lap while my husband was driving during our trip back to Quilt National.

Plus wire is durable.  None of the warnings that I have to give purchasers of my quilts about not exposing them to direct light, the potential instability of commercial dyes, etc.  And as commercial fabric has climbed above $10 per yard, it’s a relief to pay $3 for 100 feet of wire. And even less as I’ve found bulk suppliers.

I feel as excited about this new medium as when I first learned that I could make fabric portraits out of commercial cotton fabric.   I am looking forward to exploring ways of combining fiber and wire.  If any of you have done that I’d love to hear from you.

Kathleen Dawson, the national director of Quilt National was nice enough to forward this picture of me talking to Geri Barr in front of my quilt “Entre Nous” at the Quilt National opening.  And, of course that’s also me in the quilt talking to my husband Dave.

Are you talking to me?

Then there was this photo sent to me by Marion Coleman.   I had the great pleasure of speaking to the African American Quilt Guild of Oakland on Saturday. Marion snapped this picture of what looks like Guild President Marilyn Handis and me fighting over some hapless man.  No worries.  He’s just a fabric portrait of my grandfather from a quilt I’m working on that I brought to demonstrate my process to the guild.

Unhand that man!

]]> http://alicebeasley.wordpress.com/2011/06/26/life-imitating-art-imitating-life/feed/ 1 alicebeasley blogqn blogguildmeet http://alicebeasley.wordpress.com/2011/06/20/from-heidelberg-with-love/ http://alicebeasley.wordpress.com/2011/06/20/from-heidelberg-with-love/#comments Mon, 20 Jun 2011 21:34:41 +0000 alicebeasley http://alicebeasley.wordpress.com/?p=201 Continue reading →]]>

Heidelberg Street, Detroit

After the great uplift of my weekend in Athens, OH attending the opening of Quilt National, we jumped in our rental car and took a 1000 mile tour around the Midwest before returning home to California.  Our first stop after Athens was my hometown Detroit, Michigan.  I hadn’t been back in 20 years and it was good to catch up with old friends and classmates.   After the bad rap that Detroit gets, I was pleasantly surprised to see that there are also pockets of vibrancy in this city; one of them being the Heidelberg Project  on Detroit’s east side.

One of the polka dot houses

Started by outsider artist Tyree Guyton more than 25 years ago, the Heidelberg Project is a two-block art project that looks like an explosion in an Easter egg factory.   Located on Heidelberg Street in what was a toothache of urban decay, you’ll find assemblages of doors or ironing boards or doll heads; rusty signs; crudely handpainted pictures, shopping carts hoisted up to the top of telephone poles; houses painted with polka dots or wild clock faces.

How to get to Sesame Street?

In short, it’s a vast assortment of refuse reclaimed as bold artistic statements.  Guyton doesn’t seem to self-edit and no much is ever too much in this continuously evolving outdoor display.   But I loved it.

Guyton began the project on Heidelberg because it was the street he grew up on and that he watched decay as family after family fled in the face of poverty and crime.  He found a paintbrush a better way of striking back at the ruin around him than a gun.

Nevertheless, the Project hasn’t always been welcomed.   For many years neighbors bombarded the City with complaints, preferring abandoned houses to ones with busted appliances and auto parts hanging off of them.   In their view Guyton’s creations were the blight, not an artistic response to it.

Time knows no artistic boundaries

Events came to a head in 1999 when the police descended on the street with cherry pickers, front loaders, dump trucks, helicopters and a police escort and began tearing down Guyton’s creations and tossing his scavenged materials into a dumpster.

Now that the Project attracts a quarter million visitors per year, the City appears to have made peace with it. although  Guyton remains taciturn and suspicious as ever of the City’s intentions.

The shopping cart tree

If anything, the Project has gained so much acceptance that it may lose its outsider cache as planning and fundraising are underway in partnership with the University of Michigan for a 10,000 square foot facility that will include performance space, studios and a cafe.

In the meantime the cultural conditions that created the Heidelberg Project remain largely unchanged.  I visited my old neighborhood on the west side of Detroit where gaping holes in the block created by the Detroit riots in 1967 still remain unfilled, with houses falling deeper into ruin.  I could only hope for a Tyree Guyton to paint bright polka dots of hope on this sad picture.

Since I’ve always considered Fiberarts to be the most sophisticated of the fiber/textile mags, it was good news indeed to be included in this issue.  Then the fiber community got the shocking news that this would also be the last issue of this fine publication.   As they explained it in their letter to the issue’s contributors:  ”times change and the support for Fiberarts has not been strong enough over the past several yeas to continue keeping it in circulation.”  So as far as Fiberarts goes, this issue was my opening aria and my swan song.

Perhaps some things are covered as well by instant pop-up journalism online but frankly fiber isn’t one of them.  By it’s nature fiber is lush; it’s tactile and is best seen in person.  Barring that it needs to be ruminated over; thumbed through slowly on the pages of a book or magazine not just tweeted like Lohan twattle.

But, hey, that’s what I said about Gourmet and life went on.  I guess I’ll get over this too.

.

Fiberarts Magazine RIP

"Entre Nous" 26" x 89" © 2010 by Alice Beasley

The smile hasn’t left my face yet.  Attending the opening of Quilt National 2011 at the Dairy Barn in Athens, Ohio, it was as if I had a kid who had been admitted into Harvard and I was going to visit.

Pride of place near Bonnie Bucknam's Best of Show winner at the entrance to QN '11

There she was, my quilt “Entre Nous” right up there with all the other “smart kids”.  And even better the placement wizards had given her a prime spot right at the entrance where you couldn’t miss her.

I’d like to be cool about this, but frankly it is a big deal.  More than 1000 quilts were entered and mine was among the 85 selected for this biennial exhibition.  The opening is special enough that 66 of the artists came from all over the world to attend the opening festivities.

Quilt National is dedicated, not just to quilting, but to the best in contemporary quilting and the works selected reflect that forward edge.  Here are just a few of my favorites in the show:

Leslie Joan Riley's "Broken Fence"

Leslie Joan Riley’s “Broken Fence manages to combine both intricate piecing and a dynamic color play.

"My Space" by Jean Evans

Jean Evans’ “My Space” reminds me of a Braque painting, beautifully executed and somewhat cubist in nature.

Anne Smith's "Mother me Mother You"

I love the colors sported by Anne Smith’s wonderfully playful high stepping elephant.

Jayne Bentley Gaskins in front of her quilt "Solitude".

My 2-D photo can’t do justice to the incredible 3-D portrait created by the intricate machine embroidery and trapunto quilting of Jayne Gaskins.

In a weekend that had many wonderful moments, the best for me was the artist’s walk in which we had the gallery to ourselves with each of us given two minutes to talk about our piece to the other assembled artists.  What a treat to hear from both the quilting legends and those who were newbies like me to Quilt National.

Lisa Call elaborating on her beautiful quilt "Structures #113".

De Borchgrave began creating these costumes in 1994 after visiting a retrospective of Yves Saint Laurent at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. She was so impressed by the historicity of fashion that she threw herself into making what she refers to as “sculptures” of period dresses, waistcoats, lace ruffs, shoes, jewels, down to the intricate hairdos of the mannequins themselves — all made from paper but so lifelike that it makes you want to disregard the museum’s “do not touch” signs in order to stroke the “taffetas, silks, laces and embroidered velvets.”

What appear to be lace organza neckpieces are in fact made of lens paper.

So real are some of the “fabrics” that as I stood next to one woman we debated whether the sheer “organza” that we were microscopically inspecting could possibly be paper.  She concluded that it had to be fabric — perhaps some type of interfacing.  I thought the artist would hardly dare use real fabric when the obvious point of the show was to honor the fake.   I turned out to be right: de Borchgrave uses lens paper (the stuff used to clean your glasses) to create these sheer illusions.  (She must have bought out Baush and Lomb to have acquired that many yards of lens paper).

Some of her most interesting “art imitating art” pieces are de Borchgrave’s interpretations of figures appearing in paintings, such as her 2010 version of a Neapolitan Woman commissioned by the Legion of Honor to depict a woman in a painting already owned by the museum.

De Borchgrave's recreation of a 1635 painting by Massimo Stanzione.

Or the Van Dyck “reinvention” in which I had a friendly debate with another museum visitor because it seemed the feathers in the hats of the depicted mother and child that rippled when you blew on them could not possibly be paper.  (They are).

I feel a natural kinship with de Borchgrave.  She uses paper where fabric is expected to create a new art object that honors realism — in her case fashion design.  I use fabric where paper might be expected to create a new art object that honors the realism of what might on initial viewing look like a painting.  In both cases the tribute to illusion or trompe l’oeil lies at the center.  To me, it is a validation and an inspiration to keep applying fresh approaches to the medium of art quilting in hopes of producing in viewers the response I heard time and again at this exhibition:  ”How did she do that?”

“Pulp Fashion” continues at the Palace of the Legion of Honor until June 5, 2011.

Dr. Carolyn Mazloomi

I met one of my she-roes last weekend.  In town from her home in Ohio to give a speech at the Textural Rhythms exhibit at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MOAD), Dr. Carolyn Mazloomi (the curator of the exhibit) took time to have dinner with several of the black quilters that she has mentored over the years – including me.

I’m not sure where I’d be in my art without Dr. M, but I certainly would not have had the opportunity to have my work shown at such fabulous venues as the American Craft Museum in New York, the American Folk Art Museum in New York, the National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center, the Anacostia Museum of the Smithsonian and others.   Each of these locations and many other places was the site of a show curated by Dr. Mazloomi.   She invited me to participate, flattered my contributions and has just generally acted as an unpaid creative guide and talent agent.  When she wasn’t encouraging me to submit work to the shows she was curating, she was whispering a word in others’ ears.  I’m sure that’s how I came to the attention of Lark Publications with the invitation to be one of the submitting artists for Masters: Art Quilts, Vol. II.

Dr. Mazloomi, Niambi Kee, Keisha Roberts, Me and Marion Coleman at Farmer Brown's. (Photo courtesy of Marion Coleman)

I was prepared to meet the icon over dinner but I think I had forgotten how entertaining and downright funny Dr. M is in person.   Over a marvelous meal at Farmer Brown’s in San Francisco and at her speech at MOAD the next day, she regaled us with some of the back story of her 25+ years dedicated to raising the flag of African American quilters.   As founder of the Women of Color Quilter’s Network , as curator of numerous exhibits and author of several books, she has made it her business to seek out every African American quilter who is doing work of any distinction and to invite them to participate in her projects.  Her reward has been everything from accolades to death threats by the KKK.  She has also amassed a collection of some 700 quilts, most of which she will be donating to a university to continue the process of educating America that the African American quilting scene is not just about Gees Bend.

“Textural Rhythms: Quilting the Jazz Tradition” continues at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MOAD), 685 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA,  through April 24, 2011.

When last seen, my little doll (who I’ve made a cartoon clone of me except she doesn’t have grey hair) was dressing in my clothes and stalking me in Paris.  This is all great except I’ve gotten behind in everything else – working on my current piece, doing this blog, cooking dinner, whatever.  Oh well, I always have a tendency to ditch work time for play time.

I took this photo when I was in Paris a year ago, at right about this time of year. Far from the lovely April in Paris that this pic suggests, the weather was totally miserable: rain, more rain and for something completely different — how about a little more rain?  Thanks to the wonders of Photoshop, I’ve swapped in a picture of me from my wedding (I’m the frowny one on the left).  Clearly, if I can do this after just two weeks of online Photoshop classes, some healthy skepticism about what you see on the internet is in order.

I found a couple of dour pictures of their faces which I photocopied onto fabric, after reducing and re-shaping them to get the elongated visage of the famous farm couple.  Then I recreated the American Gothic scene in fabric.  I opted for a drill in the “farmer’s” hand and a crescent wrench in his pocket because Barney is the kind of guy who can do everything from fix a faucet to build a house.  This picture was just fun to do.   Sorry about the quality of the photo reproduced here but I was just using my IPhone to capture the piece as it was up on my design wall.

That so emboldened me that I decided to do Gustav Klimt’s famous “The Kiss” of my friend ( and fellow SAQA member) Robin Cowley and her husband.  I took a picture of the back of Paul’s head one night when they were here for dinner and used an otherwise lousy headshot of Robin that because of it’s closed eyes was perfect for this little grin.

Then I assembled the rest of the picture from tiny bits of fabric.  I love the lavishness of Klimt and it was a hoot making the man’s rich robe dotted with geometrics, the woman’s flower studded dress and the suggestive languorous hands and other extremities of these two figures.   Although parody art has certainly been done before, it gives me a giggle to do something fast and funny that’s meant solely for its entertainment value.

My final “little pleasure” was the 10″ x 10″ square that I did for SAQA’s “This Is a Quilt.”  The purpose of this traveling exhibit is to show folks who only think in terms of their grandma when they hear the word “quilt” that art quilts today have moved way out of granny’s “comforter” zone.

As with all of my still lifes, I arranged my models (a bunch of beautiful radishes) on my table and composed the picture in fabric directly from what I observed.  Then I ate my models.  (As Hannibal Lector would have said: “with fava beans and a little chianti, yumm!”  I call this piece, “It’s Radilicious.”

For myself, I like to follow the “rules” of realism in terms of form, proportion and perspective while at the same time introducing a freshness through the choice of  the fabrics that I use to depict the human body.  For example, I use patterns and colors of fabric that are not “realistic” but which are intended to convey a mood or add depth to a shadow or carry out the curve of a cheekbone.

In my latest work, tentatively titled “Blue Burqas,” I take another step along my journey of making art that is “real” and yet hopefully has the power to provoke thought.  It’s based on a photo that I have used with permission from Woman for Woman International (who will receive part of the proceeds if it’s sold) and shows Afghan women clad in the traditional blue burqas of Afghanistan.  Several have their burqas pulled back, exposing their faces as they might be if the women were in the confines of an all-female environment.  I expect that those who view this piece will have strong reactions as the burqa is a lightning rod both in the West and the Middle East for prejudices for and against.