"Quilting Men" Artists at the National Galleries of Art

Perhaps because I had just finished my post on the Obama Quilt exhibit the day before I continued to see images of quilts when I visited the National Gallery of Art (east wing) and the National Portrait Gallery on Saturday. For those who don't know -- and I didn't, but was pleasantly surprised to discover -- the East Wing of the NGA has most of the contemporary work, and the National Portrait Gallery contains exhibits that are decidedly not portraits.

While the quilters seemed to paint, and sometimes even sculpt, in fabric, in these works, the artists seemed to quilt in paint and other media.

This piece has an embedded explanation that I completely did not understand. I confess that I did not write down the artist or title (although I have seen his work before). You can see the manipulation of color in both the numbers and the squares for each section and across each section:

This one, by Lloyd Schermer, hangs in the conservation wing of the National Portrait Gallery. It is called "An American Puzzle." Those are all printer's blocks:

Jean Dubuffet, "Les Rondes des Images":

The patches in that painting seem to invoke different styles or schools of art (not that I would know, that just seems to be the case), much as a collaborative quilt or a crazy quilt will used different patterns and use different styles of quilting.

Korean artist Nam June Paik created this installation, which is a wall of television sets that create this ever changing collage of images, some repeated over and over in each screen, and some that use several screen to create a larger image. You have to sit in the room to get the full, overwhelming impact:

An ever changing quilt of televisions. This same artist also has a fascinating installation of televisions and neon, creating a map of the U.S.; but that is for another post.

I doubt that any of these artists, all male, would claim the quilt as an influence upon their work. They would probable point to the impressionists, or the abstract expressionists, or cubists, or, most likely collages as their visual language. The abstract expressionists, with their contemplation of fields of color, and the cubists, who collapsed three dimensions into two could fall into the same category. Nonetheless, I see the quilters as working in this same language, if a more feminine and folk art dialect.

That would, of course, lead us into a discussion of the representation of women in art museums as both subject (or would that be "object") and artist, a bigger and more infuriating subject. Meanwhile, I like to indulge in a bit of romanticism and think of all of the quilting women as cousins to the "scribbling women," pouring their creativity and skill into everyday items to bring something new and original -- and, in their cases, necessary to survival -- into being.