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International Quilt Exhibition 2017
June 15, 2017 – August 31, 2017
There’s a French flair to the Brigham City Museum’s International Art Quilt Invitational Exhibition set for June 16 through Aug. 31, 2017. Beatrice Bueche of Alsace, France, is the exhibit’s Featured Art Quilter. The crème de la crème or best of the best in her portfolio is presented in the exhibition, including her interpretation of the deadliest foreign attack on American soil on Sept. 11, 2001. The quilt is titled “Why?”
Also “piecing the world together” are quilters from Israel, Japan, Australia, Canada and the United States.
The exhibition is generously supported by Village Dry Goods. Funds to support this exhibition have also been provided by the Box Elder County Tourism Tax Advisory Board.
For a number of years the museum has been the global center for elite art quilters such as Colorado’s Lea McComas who is sharing “Bike Boys,” which won two awards at the 2014 International Quilt Association’s show in Houston, Texas. The quilt depicts six men cycling on one bike in the late 1800s.
Jennifer Day’s prize-winning quilt “Cuban Ballerina” is a vivid description of two dancers from the renown Cuban National Ballet rehearsing in a building in downtown Old Havana. The building, which was once a grand structure with marble floors, elegant arches, gilt ironwork, and statuary, is now in disrepair. Day is from New Mexico.
Ann Horton, who lives in California, uses her vibrant palette to replicate in fabric the striking colors, peculiar perspective, and familiar subject matter of Vincent van Gogh’s famous painting “La Chambre a Coucher,” also known as “The Bedroom,” created in Arles, France. Horton’s version has a quilt draped over one of van Gogh’s chairs.
Quilts on view that express a concern for the problems and injustices of society – both past and present – are “Shadows of Conscience ll” by Do Palma of Wyoming, “Eager to Learn” by Gillian Shearer of Australia and “Isolation” by Allison Wilbur of Rhode Island. Palma’s quilt is a lasting memorial to the four million black slaves that toiled in the American South before the Civil War. Shearer’s piece brings attention to female education in Afghanistan where girls are poisoned, beaten and kidnapped for attending school. Wilbur’s artwork brings into sharp perspective the need for gender equality worldwide.
Less serious themes are Sue Bleiweiss’s whimsical quilts “Tutti Fruitti Main Street” and “The Hummingbird” that vibrate with color, and Karen Eckmeier’s“Turquoise Turtles & Friends” that was inspired by the hues and shapes used in Mola designs and motifs by South, Central and North American Indians. “Critters” such as lizards, beetles and leafhoppers appear in Jane Sassaman’s and Suzanne Marshall’s quilts. Bleiweiss is from Massachusetts; Eckmeier, Connecticut; Sassaman, Illinois; and Marshall, Missouri.
Depictions of fruit in art date back 3,000 years to Ancient Egypt. Fruit still flourishes in works today as seen in Shani Leser’s painterly quilt “All Roads Lead to Jerusalem.” Pomegranate trees are the centerpiece of this landscape. Leser is from Israel. Images of fruit are also sewn into the quilts “Visions of Apple Pie” by Laura Fogg of California and “Watermelon Wine” by Ruth Powers of Kansas.
Catalog
The museum published a catalog of the quilts in the exhibition. A few are still available – contact the museum if you are interested in purchasing one. 435-226-1439.