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Quilt Language: towards a poetics of quilting

2009; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 18; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09612020903138351

1747-583X

Mara R. Witzling,

Art, Politics, and Modernism

Abstract The aesthetics of quilt making can be defined by exploring three ways in which quilts speak: through their formal qualities, their use of fabric, and their social context. The discussion here is focused primarily on nineteenth‐century America, where quilts were important historical documents that transmitted information about women and their lives that might not have been available through other means and that otherwise may well have been overlooked. Quilts speak through their ‘graphic wit’, their use of formal elements, and their makers were adept at manipulating shapes, colors, and patterns to achieve dazzling visual displays. Fabric was also an essential element through which quilt makers expressed themselves. As well as providing the basic ‘palette’ of a quilt, the fabric was significant in its own right, whether it was purchased new or it was recycled for its emotional resonance. Additionally, although women made quilts, their significance often transcended the domestic realm. Finally, women used their quilts as a way of making utterances: whether to tell stories about the Bible, to collect images related to their lives, or to connect to other people, living or dead. The quilt aesthetic is still a thriving tradition and the transformative potential of using fragments to piece together a whole is especially relevant today. Notes [1] Many of the ideas expressed in this article grew out of a class on Nineteenth‐Century American Women Artists and Writers that I team‐taught years ago at the University of New Hampshire, with Melody Graulich (now Professor of English and Director of the Graduate Program in American Studies at Utah State University, Logan, Utah), and with Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (now 300th Anniversary Professor of History at Harvard University). I also want to thank Anne Anderson for her careful reading and excellent, thought‐provoking comments and suggestions. [2] Before proceeding it is important to clarify two aspects of quilt making’s basic terminology. First, quilts are essentially fabric sandwiches, consisting of a top layer, the ‘top’, which is the part that is usually given the most attention, a backing, the part which would lie face down on a bed, and the ‘fill’, some interior substance added for warmth. Quilting and tying, sometimes called knotting, are two ways of holding these layers together. Tying involves connecting the three layers at individual points with a single stitch or group of stitches that leave a tuft when cut. Quilting, on the other hand, involves connecting the layers by covering the entire surface with continuous stitches that create a visual pattern of their own. To the extent that quilts ever were communal productions, it was usually at the stage of quilting that many hands would work them. Coverings that have been tied are often referred to as quilts. The quilting stitch provides yet another level of decoration, and an otherwise plain, unadorned top can be articulated with quilt stitching alone. Then, there are two basic ways in which quilt tops are constructed—either by ‘piecing’ or ‘appliqué’. In the former, pieces of fabric are cut to particular shapes and sewn together, usually in squares, to create a visual pattern. In the latter, pieces of fabric are cut out into particular shapes and stitched onto another whole piece of fabric, ‘applied’, sometimes in blocks, sometimes over the surface of a large piece of fabric. Quilts created by appliqué can follow patterns, or be free‐form; they can be abstract or literally descriptive. [3] Rozsika Parker (1989) The Subversive Stitch: embroidery and the making of the feminine (New York: Routledge), p. iv. [4] Patricia Mainardi (1982) Quilts: the great American art, reprinted in Norma Broude & Mary D. Garrard (Eds) Feminism and Art History: questioning the litany (New York: Harper & Row), pp. 330–346; first published in The Feminist Art Journal, 2(1), 1973, pp. 1, 18–23. [5] Janet Catherine Berlo (2003) ‘Acts of Pride, Desperation, and Necessity’: aesthetics, social history, and American quilts, in Janet Catherine Berlo & Patricia Cox Crews (Eds) Wild by Design: two hundred years of innovation and artistry in American quilts (Lincoln, NE: International Quilt Study Center and Seattle and London: University of Washington Press), p. 5. The International Quilt Study Center, itself, is an example of how study of quilts has evolved over the last few decades. Established in 1997 at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Nebraska, with the gift of the Ardis and Robert James quilt collection, and the mission ‘to encourage the interdisciplinary study of all aspects of quiltmaking worldwide and to foster the preservation of this important cultural tradition through the collection, conservation and exhibition of quilts and related materials’, it now consists of nearly 2300 quilts, several core collections, and a state‐of‐the‐art museum. [6] The term is from Karen V. Hansen (1994) A Very Social Time: crafting community in antebellum New England (Berkeley: University of California Press), in which she demonstrates that rather than being categorically divided into ‘separate spheres’ of private and public, men and women also participated in the ‘social sphere’, a ‘crucial meeting ground’ for both genders. [7] Jody Fernald (2007) Documented by Women: a Friendship quilt as historical record, unpublished paper, Durham, NH. The paper discusses a variable star single block Friendship quilt, made in the Penobscot Bay area of Maine, in honor of Sarah Freeman of Frankfort, Maine, presumably as she was marrying Stephen Chipman, Jr. The author of the article is a descendant of Sarah Freeman Chipman; the quilt was donated by her mother to the Penobscot Marine Museum, Searsport, ME. [8] Ibid., p. 17, quoting Hansen, A Very Social Time, pp.46–47. [9] Linda Otto Lipsett (1985) Remember Me: women and their Friendship quilts (San Francisco: The Quilt Digest Press) is a classic study of Friendship quilts and their function as autograph albums in cloth. [10] The entire text of Piercy’s poem follows: LOOKING AT QUILTS Who decided what is useful in its beauty means less than what has no function besides beauty (except its weight in money)? Art without frames: it held parched corn, it covered the table where soup misted savor, it covered the bed where the body knit to self and other and the dark wool of dreams The love of the ordinary blazes out: the backyard Miracle: Ohio Sunflower, Snail’s Track, Sweet Gum Leaf, Moon over the Mountain. In the pattern Tulip and Peony the sense Of design masters the essence of what sprawled In the afternoon: called conventionalized To render out the intelligence, the graphic wit. Some have a wistful faded posy yearning: Star of the Four Winds, Star of the West, Queen Charlotte’s Crown. In a crabbed humor as far from pompous As a rolling pin, you can trace wrinkles From smiling under a scorching grasshopper sun: Monkey Wrench, The Drunkard’s Path, Fool’s Puzzle, Puss in the Corner, Robbing Peter to Pay Paul, and the deflating Hearts and Gizzards. Pieced quilts, patchwork from best gowns, winter woolens, linens, blankets, worked jigsaw of the memories of braided lives, precious scraps: women were buried but their clothing wore on. Out of death from childbirth at sixteen, hard work at forty, out of love for the trumpet vine and the melon, they issue to us: Rocky Road to Kansas, Job’s Troubles, Crazy Ann, The Double Irish Chain, The Tree of Life: this quilt might be the only perfect artifact a woman would ever see, yet she did not doubt what we had forgotten, that out of her potatoes and colic, sawdust and blood she could create; together, alone, she seized her time and made new. Marge Piercy (1976) Living in the Open (New York: Knopf). [11] The Sears quilt has a truly interesting history, as each block contains the signature of a famous person. The Sunburst Quilt is reproduced in Patsy & Myron Orlovsky (1992) Quilts in America (New York: Abbeville Press). [12] Laura Fisher (1988) Quilts of Illusion (Pittstown, NJ: The Main Street Press), pp. 10–11. [13] Schwender’s comments are quoted on the Quilt History discussion list (www.quilthistory.com). They are also presented anonymously in the extremely informative and useful (though unpaginated), Design Dynamics of Log Cabin Quilts: selections from the Jonathan Holstein collection (of the International Quilt Study Center, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Nebraska), available for download at www.quiltstudy.org/includes/downloads/galleryguide.pdf. The gallery guide reminds us that the pattern itself is ‘a universal design construct’ found in works dating back to Egypt and Rome, and also that ‘as early as 1863, Log Cabin quilts received commendations at the Ohio State Fair’. It should also be noted that the Log Cabin quilt, and its hearth‐like center, play an important part in Susan Glaspell’s story, ‘A Jury of Her Peers’ (1927), available on line at: www.learner.org/exhibits/literature/story/fulltext.html. The play version Trifles (first performed in 1916) is in Macheski, Quilt Stories, pp. 194–206. This story illustrates how understanding the nature of the pattern and of needlework techniques provided a coded language through which women could speak directly to each other. [14] See Design Dynamics of Log Cabin Quilts for a complete gallery of visual examples of these variations, and how they are constructed. [15] For an African American Log Cabin quilt see Berlo & Cox Crews (Eds) Wild by Design, pp. 122–123, the Lix: Log Cabin, by Anna Williams. Numerous Amish Log Cabin quilts can be seen in Rachel Pellman & Kenneth Pellman (1984) The World of Amish Quilts (Intercourse, PA: Good Books), pp.46–50. [16] ‘Eliza Calvert Hall’ was the pen name of Mrs Eliza (Lida) Calvert Obenchain (1856–1935), a native of Bowling Green, Kentucky. She wrote Aunt Jane of Kentucky in 1907. She continues: ‘You can give the same kind o’ pieces to two persons, and one’ll make a “nine‐patch”, and one’ll make a “wild‐goose‐chase”, and there’ll be two quilts made out o’ the same kind o’ pieces, and jest as different as they can be. And that is jest the way with livin’. The Lord sends us the pieces, but we can cut ‘em out and put ‘em together pretty much to suit ourselves, and there’s a heap more in the cuttin’ out and the sewin’ than there is in the caliker’. [17] Marguerite Ickis (1960) The Standard Book of Quilt‐Making and Collecting (New York: Dover Publications), p. 34, quoted in K. Dewhurst, Betty MacDowell & Marsha MacDowell (1979) Artists in Aprons: folk art by American women (New York: E. P. Dutton), p. 53. She continues: ‘They are all in that quilt, my hopes and fears, my joys and sorrows, my loves and hates. I tremble sometimes when I remember what that quilt knows about me’. [18] Louisa May Alcott (1872) Patty’s Patchwork, in Aunt Jo’s Scrapbag (Boston, MA: Roberts), cited in Elaine Showalter (1991) Common Threads, Sister’s Choice: traditions and change in American women’s writing (Oxford: Clarendon Press), p. 155. [19] From Lucy Larcom (1889) A New England Girlhood, quoted in Mirra Banks (1979) Anonymous Was a Woman (New York: St Martin’s Press), p. 20. [20] ‘Annette’ [probably Harriet Farley] (1845) ‘The Patchwork Quilt’, Lowell Offering, Series 5, No. 9 (September), pp. 200–203, reprinted in Macheski (Ed.) Quilt Stories, pp. 11–15. [21] Pellman & Pellman, The World of Amish Quilts, p. 12. [22] Cited in Berlo, ‘Acts of Pride, Desperation, and Necessity’, pp. 10–11. [23] Ibid., p. 10, citing Linda O. Lipsett (1991) Pieced from Ellen’s Quilt: Ellen Spaulding Reed’s letters and story (Dayton, OH: Halstead & Meadows), p. 68. [24] Cited in Elaine Hedges, Pat Ferrero & Julie Silber (1987) Hearts and Hands: women, quilts, and American society (Nashville: Rutledge Hill Press), p. 55. [25] Radka Donnell (1990) Quilts as Women’s Art: a quilt poetics (North Vancouver: Gallerie Publications), pp. 23 and 20. Donnell’s book is a an interesting amalgamation of images and poetry, positing quilt making as a ‘primal’ activity, built on the connection between cloth and body, Of course this article argues that the act of quilt making is also an aesthetic talent. [26] Dewhurst et al., Artists in Aprons, p. 51; also Mainardi, ‘Quilts’: pp. 338–339. [27] Lipsett, Remember Me, discusses a quilt top made for Reverend David D. Graves by his female congregants (p. 25) and the quilt made for Ellen Spaulding by her sister Leonora, on the occasion of Ellen’s impending marriage to Willard Reed and their move to Burke, Wisconsin (pp. 74–83). The Engagement quilt is discussed in the next paragraph. See note 6 for discussion of the ‘social sphere’. [28] See the website for the Henry Luce III Center for American Art at the New York State Historical Society at: http://emuseum.nyhistory.org/code/emuseum./ [29] Hedges et al., Hearts and Hands, p. 32. [30] Showalter, ‘Common Threads’, p. 151. [31] ‘Adeline Harris Sears: Signature quilt’ (2000–9) Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art). http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/amqc/ho_1996.4.htm. [32] Hedges et al., Hearts and Hands, p. 52; Lipsett, Remember Me, p. 19. [33] This quilt is currently located at the International Quilt Study Center at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Nebraska. It is reproduced and described in Patricia Cox Crews (Ed.) (2001) A Flowering of Quilts (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press), pp. 36–39. All references below come from that book. [34] The quilt is the subject of an entire book by Linda O. Lipsett (1995) Elizabeth Roseberry Mitchell’s Graveyard Quilt (Dayton, OH: Halstead & Meadows). It is discussed at length by Berlo & Cox Crews (Eds), Wild by Design (pp. 16–17 and 137–138), as well as in Dennis Duke & Deborah Harding (Eds) (1987) America’s Glorious Quilts (New York: Park Lane), p. 74. Apparently, Mitchell’s daughter, Sarah Mitchell Stallcup, continued the tradition and placed her mother’s coffin in the central area, and added her husband’s and babies’ names to the quilt, although after Stallcup’s additions it ceased to serve as a family record. Women made Mourning Pictures to commemorate their departed family members from the beginning of the nineteenth century on. The earliest were embroidered, while the latest were painted. [35] The quilt is discussed in Cox Crews (Ed.), A Flowering of Quilts, pp. 132–133 and Hedges et al., Hearts and Hands, p. 90. Mrs Willard signed and dated the quilt. It is currently located at the International Quilt Study Center at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Nebraska. [36] Press release, January 10, 2002, International Quilt Study Center, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Nebraska. The quilt was donated by Robert and Ardis James, benefactors of the collection. [37] The work is discussed at length in Berlo & Cox Crews (Eds), Wild by Design, pp. 58–59. The image of the house and yard is reminiscent of images found on nineteenth‐century samplers, representing an idealized domesticity. [38] Harriet Powers’ quilts have been much discussed and the above paragraph only presents the briefest of summaries. The earlier one is in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, DC; the one under discussion is in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. They are both well reproduced in Regenia Perry (undated) Harriet Powers’s Bible Quilt (New York: Rizzoli Art Series), which also contains the text of Powers’ descriptions of the squares on each quilt. See also Gladys Marie Fry (1976) Harriet Powers: portrait of a black quilter, in Anna Wadsworth (Ed.) Missing Pieces: Georgia folk art, 1170–1976 (Atlanta: Georgia Council for the Arts and Humanities), pp. 16–23 and Marie Jeanne Adams (1970) The Harriet Powers Pictorial Quilts, Black Art: An International Quarterly, 3(4), pp. 12–28; Berlo also discusses the quilt in Berlo & Cox Crews (Eds), Wild by Design. [39] Susan Behuniak‐Long (1994) Preserving the Social Fabric: quilting in a technological world, in Cheryl B. Torsney & Judy Eisley (Eds) Quilt Culture: tracing the pattern (Columbia: University of Missouri Press), p. 167. [40] Henry Glassie (1986) The Idea of Folk Art, in John Michael Vlach & Simon J. Bronner (Eds) Folk Art and Art Worlds (Logan, UT: Utah State University Press), p. 273. [41] Sheila de Bretteville (1974) A Re‐Examination of Some Aspects of the Design Arts from the Perspective of a Woman Designer, Women and the Arts: Arts in Society, 11(1), pp. 117–118. It also should be pointed out that there are parallels between the quilt aesthetic and the practice of collage, at the heart of twentieth‐century modernism. [42] Susan Stewart (1984) On Longing: narratives of the miniature, the gigantic, the souvenir, the collection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), p. xii. [43] Cited in Hedges et al., Hearts & Hands, p. 26. [44] Showalter, ‘Common Threads’, pp. 150–151. [45] Both quotes come from Elaine Hedges (1991) The Needle or the Pen: the literary rediscovery of women’s textile work, in Florence Howe (Ed.) Tradition and the Talents of Women (Urbana: University of Illinois Press), pp. 343 and 345, respectively. Rozsika Parker, in The Subversive Stitch, discusses the oppressive nature of needlework in naturalizing restrictive gender roles for women. [46] Quoted in Hedges et al., Hearts and Hands, p. 91. Elaine Hedges uses the term ‘adversarial relationship’, ibid., p. 342, and says that ‘liberation was more often from, than by, the needle’. However, in ‘Quilts and Women’s Culture’, Hedges points out that Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton frequently used sewing gatherings to ‘advocate political action and change’, and that Sarah Grimke ‘encouraged women to embroider anti‐slavery slogans and images on domestic artifacts’, cited Elaine Hedges and Ingrid Wendt (Eds) (1980). In Her Own Image: women working in the arts (New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York). In the early twentieth century, English suffragists used a panoply of hand‐stitched banners to promote the cause, as discussed in V. Irene Cockcroft & Elizabeth Crawford (2005) New Dawn Women (Guildford: Watts Gallery) and Lisa Tickner (1988) The Spectacle of Women: imagery of the suffrage campaign 1907–14 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). [47] Showalter, ‘Common Threads’, p. 157, where she also cites Dunaway as describing bed‐quilts as ‘primary symbols of women’s unpaid subjection’. [48] Showalter, ‘Common Threads’, p. 161, citing Doris M. Bowman (1991) The Smithsonian Treasury of American Quilts (Washington, DC: The Smithsonian Press), p. 78. [49] Hedges et al., Hearts and Hands, p. 97. [50] Poke Out Her Eyes & Other Stories: the meaning of cloth. An Exhibition organized by the Textile Museuem of Canada (October 1992–January 1993), curated by Ingrid Bachman and Kai Chan; http://tmccelive.ecentricarts.com/index [51] Ibid., Donnell, Quilts as Women’s Art, p. 17. [52] Hedges, ‘The Needle or the Pen’, p. 350. [53] Ibid., p.354, cited in Adrienne Rich (1978) Transcendental Etude, Dream of a Common Language (New York: W. W. Norton & Company), p. 7. Marge Piercy’s poem ‘Looking at Quilts’, which provides a lens for the current discussion, is also an example of a literary work that ascribes redemptive powers to quilt making. [54] Cited in Hedges et al., Hearts and Hands, p. 64. [55] Quilt Voices, was an exhibition featuring the work of twenty‐five contemporary quilters from throughout the USA, on view between 9 September and 9 December 2005, at the University Gallery at the University of Delaware. According to the press release, ‘In 1999, recognizing the fragility of the bonds between quilt makers and their quilts, The Alliance for American Quilts, a nonprofit organization, in partnership with the Center for Material Culture Studies at the University of Delaware initiated Quilters’ S.O.S.—Save Our Stories (Q.S.O.S.). The mission of The Alliance is to be a catalyst for bringing together institutions and individuals from creative, scholarly and business aspects of quilts to advance the recognition of quilts in American culture using state of the art technology. Q.S.O.S’s mission is to record, preserve and share the stories of quilt makers and their quilts at the Center for the Quilt Online, www.centerforthequilt.org’. The exhibition website is: www.museums.udel.edu/current/quilt05/quilt-main.html [56] Cited in Quilt Voices, Q.S.O.S. Tape Number C0‐001, September 2000. www.museums.udel.edu/current/quilt05/sampler/sampler-pages/danforth.html [57] Mary Washington Clarke (1976) Kentucky Quilts and Their Makers (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press), p. 34. [58] In my years at the University of New Hampshire I have participated in the making of at least four or five such friendship quilts. The pastel quilt was a kaleidoscope pattern made by Cheryl Savageau for her mother; Amy Cass made the vegetative motif quilt for the writer. [59] Lee Lynch (2005) The Magic Quilt, The Amazon Trail, August. [60] Cited in Quilt Voices, Q.S.O.S. Tape Number AQSG‐005, October 4, 2002. www.museums.udel.edu/current/quilt05/sampler/sampler-pages/gasparik.html [61] Dan Cameron (organizer) (1998) Dancing at the Louvre: Faith Ringgold’s French collection and other story quilts (New York and Berkeley: New Museum of Contemporary Art and University of California Press), pp. 98–99 and 133–134 for reproduction of the quilt and the quilt story. See also Mara Witzling (1991–92) Voicing Our Visions: writings by women artists (New York and London: Universe and The Women’s Press) for Faith Ringgold. [62] See Melody Graulich & Mara Witzling (1994) The Freedom to Say What She Pleases: a conversation with Faith Ringgold, NWSA Journal, Spring, reprinted in Jacqueline Bobo (Ed.) Black Feminist Cultural Criticism (Oxford: Blackwell). [63] Hedges et al., Hearts and Hands, p. 97. [64] Donnell, Quilts as Women’s Art, p. 72.