Posted on Wed, Apr. 26, 2006
ArtQuilts at the Sedgwick, an internationally known show and one of the most
prestigious of its kind, is up for adoption.
"We're struggling to survive," says Deborah Schwartzman, one of the local quilt artists who first organized the exhibit in 1999 at the Sedgwick community art space in Mount Airy. "It's an amazing show. Someone should want us."
For the moment, with the Sedgwick in flux, the show is in artistic foster care. This year's juried exhibition of 44 quilts is running through May 21 at the Philadelphia Art Alliance.
Unlike traditional quilts, these pieces are made from almost any material you can imagine: sheer silks and thick canvas, bits of salvaged lace, old New York subway maps, and the plastic tabs from bread bags. The designs are impressionistic and stark, complex, religious, floral, poetic and political.
The quilts were chosen from 618 submissions by 260 artists from the United States, Canada, Australia and Europe. Over a marble fireplace on the ground floor hangs Bob Adams' Rhythms of Summer, the show's only quilt created by a man. (One other was done with a man's collaboration.)
Adams, a middle school art teacher from Indiana, took up the medium because his wife, a traditional quilter, continually asked him for advice about color and placement. His piece in the show is appliqued and densely stitched, but with a Rothko-like simplicity. Its deep blue background is dissected by a broad streak of orange, crossed with sinuous vertical lines of pea green.
The Surface Design Association's Award of Excellence went to Judy Langille for her Torn Forms II. The quilt was made from a piece of black cotton and thickened dyes. She used strips of paper to remove pigment from the cloth and create raw-edged rust and umber patterns.
One of the most moving quilts is an oblong banner made of fluttering swatches of material printed with prayers. Kristin Hoelscher-Schacker, a fabric artist from Lake Elmo, Minn., made the piece when her sister-in-law was diagnosed with cancer.
"The model is Tibetan prayer flags that are printed with prayers and images and hung in the wind; the wind carries the prayers to heaven," Hoelscher-Schacker writes in her statement. "Eventually, I hope to install this piece in a semi-sheltered spot in my garden so the wind can do its work."
Nearly 400 people attended the opening of the ArtQuilts exhibit, which has adopted the acronym AQATS. More than 1,500 have come to view it thus far.
Although both the AQATS organizers and the Art Alliance are happy with the
arrangement, they have yet to commit to a long-term relationship. And since the Art Alliance is currently between executive directors, no decision will be made
any time soon.
"We'd like to have a dialogue about that," said Carole Shanis, president of the Alliance. "The show is being very well received."
It was a stroke of luck that allowed the show to happen this year at all, let alone in such an elegant gallery space.
As Norman Tissian, the man who made it happen, tells the story, the seed was a bit of hubris.
"I'm a Center City egotist," he says.
Tissian, a retired advertising executive, raised his family here and has invested himself in serving on boards and promoting the city's interests. He also likes quilts.
So in April 2004, he ventured to Mount Airy to see ArtQuilts at the Sedgwick. "I thought the show was spectacular," he recalls. "And when I spoke to the woman who organized it, I said, 'Why are you here and not in Center City?' "
That woman was Cindy Friedman, a quilt artist who worked with Schwartzman to develop the exhibition into the only major art-quilt show on the East Coast. Friedman explained to Tissian that the Sedgwick was beloved for its architecture and community ties, and that while she appreciated the offer, the show was happy in its current home.
He gave her his card anyway and said, "If anything changes, call me."
Well, things changed.
The Sedgwick's director retired and the center closed for an extended period. Although it has reopened, the artists could no longer count on it as a secure venue for the quilt show.
So last spring, Friedman dug out Tissian's card and called.
"It was just a fluke," Tissian says. "I'd recently become a board member of the Philadelphia Art Alliance." The Alliance, housed in a mansion right off Rittenhouse Square, had both the interest and the gallery space to accommodate the show.
"I thought it was a marriage made in heaven!" Tissian says.
Schwartzman does, too, although only a few buyers have come forward at the Alliance, whereas every year at the Sedgwick at least a dozen and as many as 22 quilts were sold during the course of the exhibition. The difference, she says, may be due in part to Mount Airy's support for the Sedgwick and the time it takes for a new audience to develop an appreciation for this kind of work.
Still, she says, "The Alliance is a magnificent space." She just hopes to find a permanent venue that is as much in love with the exhibit as its organizers.
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