POAC show pieces together regional artists

Correspondent

Abstract quilts transport traditional medium to gallery walls

SANDPOINT - For generations, the art of the quilt has been overshadowed by its function. Art quilter Marty Bowne seeks to change that view in an upcoming Pend Oreille Arts Council (POAC) show titled “Arts Quilts: Beyond Tradition.”

The show, which opens April 18 and runs through June 9 at the POAC Gallery in the Power House building, will feature more than 20 artists from Idaho, Washington and Montana.

“The hardest part of the quilt movement is getting people to accept them as art,” said Bowne, who specializes in creating abstract images in fabric. “There's a stigma connected with the word itself - a perception that quilts are functional items. The medium is so familiar that it's not considered esoteric enough to be art.”

One look at the work of the abstract quilters coming to the POAC Gallery, however, will turn that impression on its ear.

“The call was to exhibit work that was non-representational,” the art quilter said. “The thing that makes the show unique for this area will be its focus on abstract art quilts.”

Bowne was first introduced to the medium when she worked at a fabric store in upstate New York, where she proved to have a knack for helping quilters develop design ideas and explore new color palettes. Despite that connection, she didn't warm up to the art form for several years.

“I thought quilting was crazy,” she said. “Anybody who would cut fabric down into little pieces and then sew it back together had to be nuts.

“And when I finally got involved, I thought the interest in quilts would be fly-by-night - like macramé,” Bowne added. “I never imagined it would still be around all these years later.”

But the interest remains very much alive and has grown to create a $4 billion industry. Bowne has owned two quilt shops - near Syracuse, NY, and on the Olympic Peninsula - where she hosted visiting master quilt artists and introduced traditionalists to the abstract form.

“Most quilters - at least 75 percent of them in the country - are making functional bed quilts,” she said. “Almost every art quilter comes from that traditional background.”

The artist, who has worked as an editor for American Quilter magazine, credits the “back to the Earth” movement for reinvigorating the medium. During the early 1970s, one young couple began collecting Amish quilts, going so far as to raid moving vans that were using the quilts as packing material.

“They looked at the quilts for their graphic quality and eventually amassed a huge collection that was shown in the Whitney Museum in New York,” said Bowne, adding that the show was held over before traveling to museums around the world. “That was the start of the huge revival in quilting.”

The increased popularity bred a higher awareness of the artistic aspects, as well as the new creative directions, offered by the medium. A new kind of quilter began to emerge from among practitioners who were focused primarily on re-creating traditional patterns and color schemes.

“There were little pockets of these people all over the country - kindred spirits who were making quilts to hang on the wall, not put on the bed,” Bowne said.

Along with this new emphasis came overtures from museums, which were beginning to notice that quilts were quite a draw.

“Whenever museums brought in quilt exhibits, they were breaking attendance records,” said the Sandpoint artist. “The Oakland Museum had an exhibition called ‘Quilts in Women's Lives' and it outdrew their Ansel Adams Exhibition.”

Outside of the museum milieu, abstract quilts met with resistance in art circles because they were “not the norm,” Bowne noted. One master art quilter and colleague of the local artist, Nancy Crow, bought a dairy barn in Athens, OH, mucked it out and renovated the space for what is now an annual event called “Quilt National.”

“It has become a national art center,” Bowne said. “Every year, they get 1,500 entries and hang 80 quilts.”

Newly popular, quilts were still seen as more folk art than fine art - a perception that is changing as high-end collectors begin to discover them. Bowne is aware of Wall Street financiers and media magnates who are building collections and, she pointed out, a multi-million dollar quilters' museum opened this month in Lincoln, NE. At some future date, these collectors will come to fancy a piece owned by someone else and be willing to pay the asking price to make it their own.

“When quilts change ownership because people want to acquire them as art, that will be the tipping point for them being accepted as art,” Bowne said.

Once that happens, the very familiarity that once kept quilts segregated from the art world may prove to be an advantage. The medium has an added appeal for the artists who use it because it is colorful and approachable, an enhanced attraction because it is tactile and comfortable.

“People are working with hard things all day long - hard drives, hard copies, hardware for computers,” the art quilter said. “They want to work with something that's soft and pliable.”