"Contemporary Quiltmaking" with Nancy Crow

[Music] now I normally don't do and excuse me such a enclosed intellectual lecture because I'm pretty much straight up and out it shoots from my mouth so I'm going to sit down and read from my notes which I have refined and refined so I don't put you to sleep and try to give you an overall view of myself as an artist and as a quilt maker at 20 years of age I became a Potter's studying ceramics as an undergraduate at Ohio State University throwing on the wheel for months on end I began to learn my first valuable lesson which is the figure must be beautifully formed against the ground my work was fair as an undergraduate at age 22 I was accepted into the three-year MFA program at Ohio State University I began working with slabs of clay and building plots with positive-negative patterning as my minor I hand appliquéd cotton layers with positive negative imagery always trying to hone greater figure-ground relationships also at a time when I was told that this was absolutely unacceptable in art school I began to learn to wheeze note there are the very motifs later used in my quilts as I said I was always and still very strong-minded and to some extent a risk-taker in 1969 when it came time for my final MFA exhibition I took a stand in defense of my very large body of work up until that time at Ohio State University all MFA candidates had only the use of the front hallways in the Fine Arts Building for their exhibition but I said no I said that I wanted my work in the gallery and only in the gallery and I won I'm sure when you look at how I had to install my pieces you can see that I was pretty financially broke at the time sketches for a small weaving after graduate school I started doing custom leather work I needed to wait for earn an additional income as a young wife and mother of two young boys I always tried to figure out a way to earn money to pay for my studio I needed the income to pay for art supplies and I was trying to save towards building an official studio I sold at craft fairs I'm sure many of you have been through this little charade until one day I realized I hated hearing all the comments and I quit I made a promise to myself I was not going to do this past age 40 the important point in lesson was to understand instinctively that I could not and would not ever compromise my real art by making it to sell part to quilt sold for cheap this was my king's ex one of my earliest quilts from 1975 the magical price during that period of time in my life was $400 most of the quilts from that period of time were 96 inches by 96 inches and one by one I sold them off for $400 most of these pieces had been hand quilted in a quilting bee and the going price hold on to your heads at that time was 15 dollars to do a big quilt this was a quilt that actually never was exhibited from the time it was finished a woman in New York City purchased it for $400 and I have no record of where it is to this day because I didn't keep good records but it was intensely quilted as you can see and then I did a very complex piece 96 by 96 again never exhibited but I was desperate for money and sold it for $400 and incredibly finally quilted and then came crosses it's not also part of this group of huge quilt it did sell for more than four hundred dollars and the last one from this series of big pieces actually was purchased by the Renwick for twenty eight thousand my philosophy is and has been prices increase but never decreased by it now because it will be more expensive next year during the 1970s when I was in my early 30s I received a lot of very important emotional support in this photo I am sitting next to my mother and my sister and is sitting on the other side of my mother she's 20 years older than I am and from as early as I can remember she always encouraged me and told me Nancy just keep practicing you know you're going to get better if you just keep practicing another sister sent me cards with beautiful figure-ground compositions I spent cards and postcards back to her and she would do oil paintings including our cards in the oil paintings she was a tough critic as regards composition and I listened to what she had to say I also looked for other great figure-ground compositions such as this a father and son by the great painter Mary Cassatt of her brother and nephew I loved the way their their clothing combined Jinju out an incredible abstract configuration in 1979 Paul Smith the director of the American crafts museum in New York City chose to hang my quilt high in the front window of the museum this is the year that my career took off standing there in front I am I'm surrounded or next to Judy James and Trevor under the umbrella later Paul Smith included pieces from my bittersweet series in an exhibition about patterning bittersweet 14 and Venice is sweet 20 from a series of 2024 quilts part three edward Boyard for in 1868 in France that most of his life in Paris self-portrait in a mirror who yard was extremely sensitive to and to others timid cautious self effacing and naturally serious in appearance he was a short fine bone man with red hair and full beard portrait of his mother Marie Marie boo yard owned a corset making shop in Paris and raised Edouard and his sister as a single mother after the death of their father although his mother was a formidable person he was extremely close to her and she in turn was compassionate and steadfast in encouraging his artistic leanings the seamstress who Yard had always been considered and has always been considered an infamous not only because he preferred to paint small-scale pictures but also because he concentrated on evocative depictions of family and friends and familiar surroundings almost without exception he chose interiors as the setting for the intimate subjects so close to his art in other words what he knew was what he painted Madame blue yard sewing the central character in many of his small paintings is his mother whom he called his muse his paintings pay homage to her and to her profession they are lyrical tributes to the subject of women at work what I love in this work from this very young period in his life again is how he took the figures and the patterns and combine them into abstract configurations this one's titled mother and sister these by the way are all very tiny on the order of 12 inches by 15 inches they're all done in oil and then this beautiful piece called interior his paintings offer claustrophobic glimpses into an intimate life he grew up to be obsessed by the microcosm of the world around him family life confined within these ever-present walls aroused powerful emotions complex claustrophobic theatrical this is probably the favorite my favorite painting of his which depicts his mother and his sister and within this very tiny painting you clearly understand how strong a personality the mother was as his sister rather disappears into the wallpaper woman in blue woman sweeping and that's lunch and you consider that these pieces were done in the late 1800s they are so timely there is nothing dated-looking about them mother and child woman in a striped dress these painted these paintings creat created between the ages of twenty and thirty two are considered to be his most innovative and original they were painted from his center from his most intimate life experiences in these small paintings he addressed the relationships between form and color and their power to convey meaning independence of what they depict after the age of 32 most of his work was outside of his centre because most of his work or Commission's part for Emily can wari born in 1910 died in 1996 moving to the other end of the age spectrum I have chosen to show you seven paintings by a famous Australian Aboriginal woman Emily can wari emily began painting on canvas at age 79 and died seven years later at age 86 there are many books published about her work she is widely considered to be one of the finest Aboriginal artists of the late 20th century her painting subject matter that you see in front of you is based in body designs and dreaming sights associated with yam tubers and flowers she uses polymer on canvas sitting on the ground and scooting around the edge of the canvas never standing at an easel to me these are absolutely some of the most beautiful figure-ground drawings this is actually of a yam tuber likewise this one also her work is large yes I'm sorry I don't have a I have these in centimeters 152 centimeters by 40 491 centimeters but I don't know what that is in inches but Michaels saying about 60 inches across okay I do this have painting in by Brice Marden because you know at least in my teaching students are always bringing up the subjects of what's derivative well here we have Brice Martin in the United States doing on his huge series of paintings with the same kind of motifs as Emily and I assume that neither saw either one neither saw the work of either one this is also the work of Emily they got her work got very complex these were done when she was 85 years old she is extremely arthritic and had to be helped down to the ground and also picked up from the ground in order to get the paintings done part five these are paintings that relate to those of Emily done by my nephew Peter crow when he was only 36 years old I know that he never knew the work of Emily I'm showing you these pieces these eight paintings and reading a statement that he felt about this work at the time they are all gouache and they are approximately 30 inches across and 44 inches tall he said to me play is an experiment without hypothesis and that is what these dried kelp constructions are about I found the dried kelp on a beach in the San Juan Islands I was amazed that these natural objects looked exactly like the gestural movements in my paintings when I picked them up their shadows cast loose linear drawings on the beach I began to play with them in my studio I put them together took them apart combine them into extraordinary arrangements questions started to come up such as what happens if their edges touch or overlap what does it mean to have a little or a lot of space between each shape what relationships do they have to each other I look at these constructions in an open non-judgmental way it concerns me that I have given up on my ability to play and have therefore lost some of the cutting edge of my creativity and I hastened and hatefully have to tell you that after doing this work he was so discouraged he destroyed all of this part six of sampling on my own work starting from 1995 for the past 13 years I have been most concerned with the process of eliminating and finding the essence finding the truth in my own work through observation imagination and revelation 1995 was a pivotal year as it was a year I made my first quilt the one that you see in front of you titled constructions from this first composition I discovered the seeds for six or more different series within the larger series of constructions I will show you most of the quilts in sequence rather than groups so you can see how my mind works my mind goes back and forth there laterally I have no ability to stay linear I get bored very easily as far as this group of quilts are concerned I have to admit I love most of them although I admit there are some that are not so wonderful again in this very first quilt that I just showed you were all the ideas that I've sort of explored in the constructions so the first 13 quilts that I did there you will see that they're closely related the biggest challenge when I started was to die up a new palette of colors that I hadn't worked with before I'm not going to give you titles I'm just going to flip through these the bulk of them have been hand quoted by Marla Hannibal in this series I started making these very tall vertical pieces for the first time so throughout construction series there are a number of these tall vertical pieces I would say that with the construction series I started to realize there are certain sizes that I like working with and I tend to make those sizes almost naturally without realizing it I have time I got to this one as you can see I was bored and it looks boring so what I did next was I started making small studies trying to find my footing trying to figure out where I wanted to go with my work and so the next number of quilts don't really relate to one another they're very desperate dispirit so I went from complex to very fair and then I tried picking up commercial prints again and found that I hated working with them reference to what I love in nature trees and decided to try cutting more linear type elements and work with those but at the time managed to do only this one piece then went back to what I call layering and over layering and cutting through didn't pick up on this again let it go of it I did this deliberately turned it sideways so you can see how it is influenced the next piece so all of these were ideas that I was trying out and when I did this piece I loved this piece it's a small piece relates to the radiator on a tractor works with horizontals grids and I don't know what you call this I love this piece this piece is absolutely encrusted with quilting by Marla anywhere from a 1/8 to a 1/4 inch grid went back and picked up on that earlier motif and realized I didn't want to do that anymore and then so you can see my brain was just splitting here they're trying this trying that back to the grid until finally when I did this piece I thought oh boy I love this piece this is probably one of my all-time favorites and to me it is just the beginning of ideas that I want to explore this is all machine piece I am a machine piece I didn't even bother to say that and it's just probably one of the most complex pieces I've ever done this is actually going back to the vertical lines again more contemporary version of Lady of Guadalupe and one time I saw this tree bark actually in South Africa and realized that it was influencing me on another tall narrow vertical piece changed over to really dark palate there for a while and stay with blues and browns and blacks and grays back to a very tall piece is almost 100 inches tall so you can see that I'm flirting back and forth between very fair configuration trying to concentrate on the idea of line in a more classical way more like a painting and then I started to play with horizontal lines and residence trip piecing this I actually cut every single piece piece by piece and sewed it together this was a really time intensive quote I had just come back from another trip to Mexico and seeing the hats the dancers were wearing in one of the possessions and so I stripped piste up a lot of fabrics that look like the ribbons on the Hat and did this little study and then did a major piece based on that little study the detail of that one because these are all very large pieces approximately 85 inches by 85 inches I'm coming up now to the end of about 2004 part 7 was is just very short and it was it's my attempt to show you that photography the use of photography was always and has been a way for me to hone my eye for composition this is actually on my farm again the vertical lines of trees Chiapas the vertical lines of a fence how it relates to my strip piecing and that quilt that I told you I had cut all the little pieces behind one by one again a fence and then in this picture you see the horizontal line work so these are the kinds of things I'm always looking at this is what informs my own work architecture constructions whether they're man-made or appear naturally vertical shape and then a few more of the what they call the ghost tree eucalyptus tree in Australia part eight is about Rosalie Gaskin my photographs that I have I've taken them from a catalogue on her work when I was teaching in Australia in 1999 I called and asked if I can meet her not realizing that she had been diagnosed with cancer in the weeks before and was dying in this photograph she's aged 81 she was born in 1917 in a suburb of Auckland New Zealand left New Zealand for Australia with her new husband when she was 25 years old and where she quickly bore three children as the young mother she often took long walks observing the landscape training her eye she stays this is a beautiful comment from her through that sort of poverty with things your eye gets very sharp she'd take home anything that interested her especially native Australian plants and big annex and became an expert in preserving flowers and grasses it was very gradual I had to bring things into my house to look at I had a lot of scorn from the neighbors saying what's that they like things they paid money for this didn't worry me then I had to have things that I found interesting there wasn't any stimulation of the eye you fed your eye as much as you could and I think that's why I started I was so hungry for something extra and not the ordinary turnover of the everyday she became well-known in the world of ikebana having studied it for over 25 years all of this training leading her toward a career as a sculptor that began when she was 57 years old because she has spent her entire lifetime creating arrangements made of natural found objects she gravitated toward the dumps made by humans and they're found all the materials for her sculpture this is a detail of her piece called white garden which is made out of the metal siding of sheds notice how closely related her work is to quilts this is her outside studio and this is her inside studio and I have to read to you what she has to say about studios at the beginning she was struggling to construct artworks in the confines of her family home I was working on the dining room table there was no room nobody could walk through the house in 1983 largely at the instigation of her husband a studio was built in the large court courtyard adjoining the garden but she says my work got bigger I needed an airplane hangar you need height above your head because you use the air I could do with four times the space the crowded studio shown here in 1996 reveals much about her work process most of her tools are basic hacksaw hammer and screwdriver the space is packed with reminders of every stage of her career objects she stopped using in 1970 light alongside material she has only recently started to experiment with as she picks her way through the maze print pieces rarely topple over with a resounding crash unmoved she says it's only the artwork falling over you get used to it I'm reading to you in the present tense as if she's still alive but this this catalogs that are reading from came out almost at the same time that she died Rosalie explains that her method of working involves living with her with her in assemblages gradually observing them and changing them until she feels they're right she says I keep everything out I test things they mostly don't get into the act but you've got to try if I don't keep them visible they don't look at me I put them out in the courtyard then I alter them about three hours is all I can do at a time it's like walking an art-gallery your ire your eyes get tired emotionally it's draining you put all of yourself into the work I'm like that about work often I don't see anybody for days you frighten everybody off after a while I don't like other people involved though I've got a helper who puts aluminum strips on the back of finished works sometimes he'll title he'll tidy me up and says you ought to get steel tip boost to protect your feet but as soon as I get this floor cleared I start putting things down again sometimes I can't bear it myself I don't even know what I've got but if something is beautiful or interesting I always take it if there's a lot I take a lot it might be years before I use it I think and I fester sometimes there's something in the back of your mind that you hadn't thought about you got to look at things and be patient good enough is not good enough you got to be right you've got to learn to be your own critic it's Mirage country otherwise something sometimes you do something and you're pleased with it and you come out the next day and say boo nothing works so it vanishes and then something sets hard and you know for you only you've got it this piece by her is called wood ledger and it's made out of wooden crates she made it at age 75 cat's-eye rainforest all that jazz these are made out of kitchen floor linoleum pieces that she found midsummer regeneration regeneration is about the bush fires that burn the gum trees which somehow miraculously survive and begin to shoot out new sprouts these are some shots of the gum trees I took when I was in Australia a couple of years ago after their great fires near Canberra almost like lace feather release branches this is called summer swarm it's a detail it's made out of pieces of wood that you found and look at it closely because it relates to an old antique Australian quilt from 1841 some are divided loopholes full stretch love apples I want to read this final quote from her because for a time she was like the person I felt I could go to and feel like I had a mentor or a supporter art is about what religion is about getting you airborne getting you out of this box which is life into the expanding universe which is what everybody wants people say oh as long as you're happy it keeps you off the streets if it doesn't it's a passion it drives you you have to do it that's the way I really see it it takes everything you've got every facet of yourself you've got to keep it very honest sharp otherwise its Mirage country and you've lost it I think that what I do now is the sum total of all the things I used to do everything that's happened to me everybody that's happened to me makes me what I am today and last part 9 is called crossroads at the beginning of 2006 I wondered if I should just accept that I was old at age 62 give up sit in a rocking chair and top the old talk I was pretty depressed in a way and I'm showing this quilt I actually did two quotes during this period variants it will work for a couple years and the very fact that all of my lines are absolutely straight as like cut with an ruler gives you an idea of how little energy I felt my mind kept asking the same questions over and over Who am I what do I want for myself how can I become who I can be is it possible to create even better work I woke early this is up from my sketchbooks I woke early this morning in an effort to unscramble all the hundreds of thoughts and notions twirling in my brain a condition that seems to get more extreme with age I find it exhilarating but sometimes frightening in all its intensity all I think about our images I am trying to unscramble ideas and thoughts about who I want to be and what I want for myself I keep asking myself questions trying to be as honest and thorough as possible questions such as isn't it all about struggling to change struggling to constantly dig deeper struggling to keep believing one can dig dig deeper struggling to be in touch with my true self struggling to understand the constant anxiety struggling to understand the volcano of anger inside struggling to erupt or keep from erupting struggling to examine my motives and resourcefulness this is the second quilt during that period of time in which I've made very few pieces they're actually both quite large pieces this one's 58 inches across the 96 inches tall so I made the decision beginning of 2006 that yes indeed I had come to a crossroads and the X represented the crossroads for me this is a piece that I actually screen-printed with a small screen over and over and over and simply black dye on white fabric and in it I made small marks when I made the screen because I knew that I always liked making marks but I hadn't really done it and then I went back and I picked up an earlier construction piece that dated from 1991 in which I had played with the X so I wrote out what the X meant to me X is duplicitous X can mean yes X can mean no X can mean a crossroad in one's life X can close doors or X can close out doubt and allow doors to be opened X has enormous energy and intent X can be a line or a long narrow shape X can be configured over and over X can be a crossroad in one's life and can lead to freedom so with that in mind I started working again in my studio I made a ton of fabrics what I call a strip of line sewn to a strip of shape and I began making huge pieces again huge meaning in this case 83 inches across and 75 inches tall all of this work done intuitively with absolutely no planning and going up and down a step ladder so in other words any time that I've pinned a piece on the wall if it didn't work if it wasn't placed correctly I had to come down the ladder stare at it from across my studio go back up the ladder and repin it and that's how this work was made so first through 2006 and 2007 I created 25 new works again hand quilted most of the work hand quoted by Marla had a ball Marla promised me at one time in her life she's been working with me since 1988 so that's 20 years now she said I said to her Marla come on you got to promise me you'll work with me till we're both 90 and she said sure I'll do it and I have to say that when she worked on these large pieces for the first time ever she said to me I have to tell you that it's starting to hurt my shoulders because these big pieces were done in a floating frame and if you saw the back side there are so many scenes that she went through this is the second one I do want to just go back and tell you that the first one that I showed you for the first time I gave subtitles because as I said to you I had gone through that period of feeling like I could never make another quilt so this subtitle on the first one before this one was called braking control remember I showed you the two quotes that were some tightly-controlled and this one I titled anxiety this one is number constructions number 84 and I called it no so underneath there is the X which is trying to be controlling and all the other and then I took parts of all the rest of the X's and threw them on top these big pieces were physically really hard for me to make they were so heavy by the time I was taking them up and down the ladder pinning them to the wall I thought man crow you got to get in shape you can't keep doing this unless you start getting in shape I also started working with pink I'd always sort of stuck my nose up at pink but I died a bunch of gaudy pink beautiful pink and they're in there this is my studio to show you a work wall in my studio and on the table in front our parts of those strips i sewed together of lines and shapes before i began to make all these big pieces i cut and sewed fabric for two weeks making what I call a fabric vocabulary in order that I can pick intuitively whatever I felt like taking out of that bunch of fabrics and believe me it gave me a total rat's nest so every now and then I'd have to stop and get them all lined up again the piece that's on the wall is now finished totally different look different looking from what's there so anytime I start a new piece because I work totally intuitively it goes through a lot of changes the other problem I have is even though I have these beautiful huge work walls you can see on either side of this I have pinned up so much stuff I just think like everything is an idea and as fast as I'm working another ideas come into my head and now I have to pin it up and before I know it I don't have any work wall left but I'm afraid to take anything down because I'm afraid I'll forget my ideas see that these are some smaller pieces constructions number 86 smaller I think there are about 40 40 inches across and maybe you know 58 inches across and 40 inches tall and this one's probably about 24 inches by 24 inches then after doing all those complex pieces I've pulled off and said I got to work spare and I'm going to work with incredibly saturated orange and I'm only going to throw in a few more colors and I'm going to concentrate concentrate on spatial relationship so these three quilts kind of flew at me they work nearly they just came they just poured out and I have them machine quilted by Kathleen Loomis in Kentucky because by this time Marla couldn't keep up with how much I was making I like the idea of taking a saturated color and flirting with almost becoming garish after doing the machine piecing I would pull off and work with fabrics that I had screen printed so this one's here in the show and it is about the Iraq war basically the little shapes can either be seen as offensive focused as dead people bullets or caskets and the field of red is all the people that have still to die so this is a new series called markings and which I wanted to play with either printing on fabric or in this case doing mono prints and these were pretty much most of them except for that first one I just showed about anxiety in this case Marla's quilting is not a grid it follows the rhythm of the mark and this was an attempt to control the anxiety by putting a grid over it and then I started again working with my screen printed fabrics again this was done with a small screen and when it was placed on the fabric I overlapped on purpose to make those little darker areas that you see on the next one I cut the fabric apart and I put in strips that I hand-painted and these pieces are large I'm just going to make a guess of around 65 by 55 inches this is a small hand-painted piece called compromise and then the last few are called structures and what you see are three complete prints of a huge screen that went selvedge to selvedge I had to have help printing these and I did this in a screen printing shop in Canberra Australia I basically paid to have the entire studio to myself with an assistant who helped me print my fabrics and at home I have a stack of these fabrics that I'm going to be working on with throughout the next year throughout this year and next I'm going to just say this this is this is today the most expensive piece I sold I sold this at my gallery in Philadelphia from $45,000 to a collector in New York City and a second use of that same screen but over died this time with a gold dye or yellow a yellow dye alright I'm going to end I'm just going to make a final statement I know some of you want to run over to see the museum so I'll try to hurry I'm just going to say that it takes intense desire clear vision focused at a time at that at times must be a tunnel vision focus excluding all else in your life it takes absolute integrity it takes discipline it takes energy enormous energy to produce a body of work that begins to explore your perceptions thoughts and emotions and which in turn become identified with you thank you [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] Oh [Music]

Channel: International Quilt Museum

Views: 17,374

Rating: 4.8883719 out of 5

Keywords: art, art quilt, art quilts, quilt, quilts, study, museum, gallery, studio art quilt, saqa

Id: vWhlOoNN3-g

Length: 58min 51sec (3531 seconds)

Published: Wed May 03 2017