Quilt Makers Research Articles

“Ma semblable, ma soeur”: Negative Capability and Self-Fashioning in “The Quilt Maker” by Angela Carter and Flights by Olga Tokarczuk

ABSTRACT Reading fiction by Angela Carter and Olga Tokarczuk side by side is a fascinating but eerie experience: the celebrated British fabulist and the Nobel-winning Polish writer-cum-public intellectual share some indefinable quality – their oeuvres resonate. My aim in this paper is to add to the critical debate on self-fashioning in Carter and Tokarczuk by comparing how they script their lives as reflected in their fiction. The following discussion of Carter’s short story “The Quilt Maker” and Tokarczuk’s Flights points to how they portray the ambiguities involved in being a female writer. Both writers emphasize the extreme subjectivity of their projects, both script their lives as reflected in their fiction, both create their literary personas with allusions to their real biographies, and both make these personas create constellations and patchworks of narrative fragments employing negative capability to suggest – rather than – tell stories.

Data becomes quilt: Encoding meaning through social semiotics

There are accepted academic traditions about how data is visually represented, most often in the form of graphs, tables and maps. To visually represent the findings of a study about quilt makers in New Zealand and be congruent with the research topic, the researcher made a quilt to represent the findings. While much of the existing research about quilts focuses on the analysis of meaning, this article is about encoding meaning in a quilt. The article describes the processes of design and making which drew on a diverse range of quilt making traditions and forms of data representation exemplified by the theory of social semiotics. Quilt design decisions were informed by pattern, symbolism and fabric choice and drew on traditions where quilts have been made to convey information such as quilts as signs for escaping slaves on the underground railroad, storytelling tivaevae quilts from the Cook Islands, and the contemporary temperature quilts where daily high and low temperatures are recorded. Data is also communicated in traditional ways such as through graphs made from fabric. This article describes the process of conceptualizing the design and includes photographs of the finished work.

American Quilts in the Industrial Age, 1760-1870: The International Quilt Study Center and Museum Collections ed. by Patricia Cox Crews and Carolyn Ducey

Reviewed by: American Quilts in the Industrial Age, 1760-1870: The International Quilt Study Center and Museum Collections ed. by Patricia Cox Crews and Carolyn Ducey Katie Knowles American Quilts in the Industrial Age, 1760-1870: The International Quilt Study Center and Museum Collections. Edited by Patricia Cox Crews and Carolyn Ducey. (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2018. Pp. xiv, 502. $90.00, ISBN 978-0-8032-9592-6.) In this second book of a multivolume catalog of the collections of the International Quilt Study Center and Museum (IQSCM), the contributors provide in-depth analysis of American quilts ranging in date from the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century. The book is arranged with chapters focused on style groupings of quilts. Each chapter contains essays that provide close readings of a few quilts, emphasizing the importance of careful, deep study of individual objects. The introduction is an excellent display of how such close reading can be used to create interesting data that reveals patterns when analyzing quilts. The editors give detailed information about how they thought through terminology to define objects that often cross multiple categories of analysis or that come with limited contextual information. Geographic area of origin seems straightforward, and only 5 percent of the quilts studied for this book were made in the South according to the defined regional categories. However, the slave state of Maryland, home to distinctive styles of applique quilts in the first half of the nineteenth century, is categorized under the mid-Atlantic region. The book's strength is in the individual quilt stories told throughout. For example, by examining the seams of the main portion of an early-nineteenth-century red wool quilt, researchers determined it was made from a hooded cloak that was deconstructed, with the bedcover's borders made from a recycled quilted petticoat. [End Page 154] While the authors excel in the physical reading of objects, they provide an outdated nationalist narrative of the triumphs of westward expansion and industrialization. The consequences of the first on indigenous peoples and the relationship of the second to chattel slavery are completely absent from the book. The authors note numerous times that the availability of cheap cotton in the early nineteenth century allowed for the expanding popularity of quilting. At no point do they explain that these cottons were cheap because the labor system of chattel slavery supported industrialization. The authors draw only on connections between Western European art and aesthetic movements when analyzing the quilts. The exclusion of slavery and of enslaved people from this book is striking, particularly since it is framed as a catalog representing the IQSCM's examples of American quilts. In the preface, the editors state that African American quilts are not included because they will be presented in a separate volume of the series. Yet a close reading of one quilt made in Kentucky references a second quilt of similar rococo revival style that is "[a]ttributed to enslaved 'sewing women'" from South Carolina (p. 388). The only detail about the construction of the quilt attributed to the black makers is that it is of lesser quality than the Kentucky quilt. Were the enslaved women not African American quilt makers? Were black people not making American quilts during this period? Did aesthetics such as the strip weaving techniques of West African cultures not influence pieced quilts made in the United States? These are important questions that remain understudied in textile history. This book makes valuable contributions to the field of quilt scholarship through the physical reading of the objects. But romantic stories of quilts as commendable survivors of the Confederacy or of intrepid pioneers carrying textile heirlooms across the Great Plains do not help us to fully understand the complexities that objects hold as historical sources. Katie Knowles Colorado State University Copyright © 2019 The Southern Historical Association

Doubling: there’s no escape from terror/doubling: there’s an escape from commodification …?

Purpose Commodification doubles self and work, life and object, uniqueness and standardization and art and management. For the artist, the unicity, beauty, inspiration and creativity of art is doubled in the sale, marketing, display, distribution and mass production of “art works”. Making art is intimate, personal and individual; selling art requires public display, pleasing the all important customer(s) and dealing with many sorts of in-betweens. What commodification is on the artist/art work level is doubling on the I/me, self/persona, private/public and in-group/out-group level. This paper aims to examine the commodification and doubling in the case of the Gee’s Bend quilt makers. The quilts foreshadowed the modernist aesthetic and are of the highest aesthetic quality. But, they were made in a traditional rural society by very poor, uneducated black women. The quilts were not made to be sold but were dedicated to familial remembrance and to immediate aesthetic pleasure. But now that they are on display: is escape from commodification possible? Design/methodology/approach Reprint for special issue. Findings Doubling, in the original article below, was tendentious but artistically and politically to be overcome; doubling currently seems much more ominous, omnipresent and out of control. Signifyin(g) has become bomb throwing. Present day doubling apparently produces terror and not just commodification. Originality/value Invited for publication.

Mental Health Recovery and Quilting: Evaluation of a Grass-Roots Project in a Small, Rural, Australian Christian Church

A small project in a rural community church setting was undertaken to promote mental health recovery for one person and to develop a positive conversation about mental health amongst the wider group. Social capital within the group of people was successfully harnessed so that a warm and supportive recovery environment might be fostered within the broader community. The goals of the project were to reduce mental health stigma and to foster recovery. This was achieved as a mental health nurse, quilt maker, and a team of sewers came together to produce a quilt as a tangible expression of care and support for both the quilt recipient and each other. This project, as a case study, demonstrates how a church faith community and mental health care can be combined and yield positive outcomes. This article outlines how the project proceeded and presents the results of a post-project evaluation survey.

Doubling: there's an escape from commodification ...?

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to pursue the themes of feminine identity, doubling and (in)visibility; first in terms of “signifyin(g)” as a cultural and literary strategy, and second, in terms of quilting seen from the fiction of Alice Walker to the quilting of Gee's Bend. In the background, there plays the relationship between art and commodification.Design/methodology/approachThe paper examines “commodification” and “doubling” in the case of the Gee's Bend quilt makers. The quilts foreshadow the modernist aesthetic and are of the highest aesthetic quality. They were made in a traditional rural society by very poor uneducated black women. The quilts were not made to be sold, but were dedicated to familial remembrance and to immediate aesthetic pleasure.FindingsCommodification doubles self and work, life and object, uniqueness and standardization, art and management. For the artist, the unicity, beauty, inspiration and creativity of art is doubled in the sale, marketing, display, distribution and mass production of “art works.” Making art is intimate, personal and individual; selling art requires public display, pleasing the all‐important customer(s) and dealing with many sorts of in‐betweens. What “commodification” is on the artist/art work level, is “doubling” on the I/me, self/persona, private/public, and in‐group/out‐group level.Originality/valueThe author proposes, from the example of quilt‐making, a wide‐ranging interrogation: “Is escape from commodification possible?”

Dis/Cover/ing the Quilts of Gee's Bend, Alabama

The phenomenally popular US exhibitions of quilts from the rural African-American community of Gee's Bend, Alabama, are analyzed here with a view to cultural politics, including issues of race, class and the stakes entailed in aesthetic taxonomy and description. The exhibition organizers, the catalog authors and enthusiastic critics generally classified the quilt makers' remarkable textiles not as “mere” craft but as art. The present essay, while concurring in that high opinion of the objects in question, argues instead for the prospective merits—both for the quilt makers themselves and for the “art world”—of reclaiming their status as craft production.

Making Quilts without Sewing: Investigating Planar Symmetries in Southern Quilts

An activity for “making quilts without sewing” that enables high school students to develop their understanding of planar symmetries and wallpaper patterns. This activity incorporates the culture and traditions of quilting into the study of geometry. From the same block, students can make quilts with different patterns by using various combinations of transformations, in addition to the possible combinations of transformations that might have been used to create a quilt or wallpaper pattern. Students may also reflect upon the cultural activity of quilt makers and the art of quilt making.

Mary Schafer, American quilt maker

Mary Schafer, American quilt maker

From Drunkard's Path to Kansas Cyclones: Discovering Creativity Inside the Blocks

This essay discusses how the author missed the significance of creativity in the process of the quilt making she was studying. This is attributed to societal views of what is creative. However, in listening to what quilt makers said, it became evident that creativity was a significant source of meaning in what they did. The paper proposes that doing is essential to being creative, and is supported by the structure and ruleii of traditional crafts. Community is another important support for doing creative occupations.

The Role of Learning in Quilt Making

During data collection for an ethnography of quilt making in North Carolina, learning was identified as one of the central activities of individuals and quilt guilds. This paper describes that learning in terms of its formal and informal characteristics as well as whether it is more or less social. Eight clusters of learning are developed: learning how to make a specific quilt, learning about tools and how to use them, learning aesthetics, learning how to make any quilt, learning to be part of the quilt making culture, learning that one is a quilt maker, and learning to stretch oneself. Many different structural elements of quilt making and quilt groups promote this learning, but taken as a whole the learning is socially situated. Wenger's (1998) concept of a “community of practice” is used as an explanatory frame for the quilt maker learners in this study. One conclusion is that learning is central to occupation, and may be a basic human need.

Tar, Feathers, and the Enemies of American Liberties, 1768-1776

ON 2 October 1775, the New York Gazette and Weekly Mercury was pleased to report a droll affair lately happened at Kinderhook, New York. In that small village south of Albany, a number of young women had gathered for a quilting bee when their peace was rudely disturbed: A young fellow dropped in on their frolic uninvited. This fellow-an enemy to the liberties of America, the Gazette reportedthen commenced a lengthy harangue, as usual, against the Continental Congress. The quilt makers apparently endured the young man's malediction for some time, but at length, exasperated, they laid hold of him, [and] stripped him naked to the waist. To punish him for his impudence, the girls tarred and feathered him. Well, not exactly. For want of tar, they covered him with molasses, and for feathers, took the downy tops of flags, which grow in the meadows, and coated him well.'

Work, ritual, biography: a Muslim community in North India

This text provides an ethnographic account of a community of Muslim weavers in north India. It analyzes the place of weaving in the Ansari social structure, the work of Ansari women as quilt makers, the ritual of circumcision and the biography of an Ansari individual. These domains are linked in the manner in which the Ansaris represent the body and how in turn these representations reconstitute the body. It is intended for researchers in the disciplines of social anthropology, sociology, sociology of religion and cultural studies.

Healers in Gloria Naylor's Fiction

manifesting itself in care of others, been better presented than in the novels of Gloria Naylor. Less familiar than the triumvirate of Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Maya Angelou, Naylor won a National Book Award in 1983 for best first novel and has published three others. Her works-The Women of Brewster Place (1982), Linden Hills (1985), Mama Day (1988), and Bailey's Cafe (1992)-feature themes of ancestry, generational conflict, economic exploitation, and lost dreams. In particular, Naylor has celebrated the power of love as a force that heals, bringing peace and wholeness. Her characters share their wealth: some through literal doctoring, others through psychic healing, still others through inspirational documents that they have left behind, and finally some through providing a haven for the needy. Although Naylor's healers sometimes resort to AMA- and APA-approved methods of restoring health, they transcend merely prescribing aspirin and engaging in talk therapy. Rather, they use holistic methods, archetypal practices, and even voodoo, linking themselves to atavistic practices of Africa. They heal heart and soul as well as body. As one of the major, though somewhat overlooked, African-American authors of the past two decades, Naylor herself has become what Marjorie Pryse terms a metaphorical conjure woman, a medium who, like Morrison, Walker, and others, make[s] it possible for . . . readers . . . to recognize their common literary ancestors (gardeners, quilt makers, grandmothers, root workers, and women who write autobiographies) and to name each other as a community of inheritors. Like her contemporaries, Pryse notes, Naylor highlights connection rather than separation, transforming silence into speech

Quilt Maker

Quilt Maker