Blog

USarts is an exhibition at the Margaret Harwell Art Museum in Poplar Bluff, MO.  The show features work from each of the fifty states, and I am very proud to represent the state of New Jersey with fiber.  For more information on the show, visit their website here.

The show’s opening reception is this Sunday, September 7th, from 1 to 4 p.m. at the Etui Fiber Gallery in Larchmont, NY.

I’m very happy to have three small works included in this show, especially considering how few shows I’ve entered this year.  All works are for sale, and two were made specifically for the show — Butterfly I, and Butterfly II.  If they don’t sell at the show, I am going to offer them for sale through my website.

Here is one of the two Butterflies.  Each are float-mounted on 8×10 watercolor paper and framed in a shadow box.  You can see more images from the show here.

Although this show has been going on since June, I recently received the show catalog for Duex: Two Ideas, Inspirations, Two Complementary Quilts in the mail.  This is a Studio Art Quilt Associates (SAQA)  traveling exhibition that was juried by Katie Pasquini Masopust (Kim LaPolla, managing curator).  The full color catalog is 106 pages, and I’m honored to be among the selected work.

“Deux, is a visual conversation that expresses the questions and ideas important to each artist.  Two works show side by side, inviting the viewer to find the connections between them, and see how the artists handle the challenges of composition and technique.”  Kim quotes Martha graham in her catalog essay, “It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable it is, omr jow it compares to other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, stating “I believe she was talking about being true to your voice and your instinct, filtering out the xternal advice of the voices around you.” Katie had the difficult task of selecting just 25 artists and 50 pieces from the many submitted to the exhibit.  Katie states she was looking for “two great works from each artist … I hope that the pieces that I chose will show the world that our art quilts can compete side-by-side with paintings for the eye of art collectors and art admirers everywhere.”

The selected artists

“The Journey”

“Another Journey”

The catalog is available for purchase directly from SAQA here.

Full exhibit: IQF-Chicago, Rosemont, IL, June 2013
Quilts selected for Deux-Europe:
Carrefour Européen du Patchwork, Alsace, France, September 2013
Vicenza Festival, Vicenza, Italy, October 2013
The show will also be at a variety of location throughout the US through 2014.

After my trek to the Guggenheim, we headed to a few other places, including the Leslie Feely Fine Art Gallery to see an exhibit of collages and box constructions by Hannelore Baron, an artist Benedicte spoke very highly of.  The pieces on display were primarily from private collections and her estate. I found the work haunting.  The more I read about her, the more I found myself looking deeper into her pieces.  I learned Ms. Baron was born in 1926 in Dilligen, Germany to Jewish parents who were the owners of a small textile shop.  During “the Night of Broken Glass,” she witnessed Nazis horrors, including the destruction of the shop and her father beaten with a hammer. You can read more about her from this news release from Stanford News Service  and this Wikipedia page. Eventually she and some of her family managed to get out of Europe and settled in the Bronx where she studied costume design.  Sadly, she suffered from depression throughout her life, had the first of three nervous breakdowns after age 20.  She died in 1987.

– Michael Kimmelman, from a The New York Times, October 1, 1993 described the defining characteristic of her work as fragile, “both physical and spiritual-the sense of quiet, private anguish expressed through forlorn materials and cryptic, edgy scrawls.”  Here is another New York Times review on her work.

Photographs were allowed, and I share several images below.

From the catalog, ” Everything I’ve done is a statement on the, as they say, human condition…the way other people march to Washington, or set themselves on fire, or write protest letters, or go to assassinate someone. Well, I’ve had all the same feelings that these people had about various things, and my way out, because of my inability to do anything else for various reasons, has been to make the protest through my artwork…” H.B.