Gee's Bend Quilts at the PMA

Published by The Bulletin September 17, 2008.

The Architecture of a Community
By: Melinda Steffy, for The Bulletin


Art rarely feels so personal. Few artists walk through galleries singing softly to their creations. Few collectors share gentle hugs and familial affection with their protégées. But when the artwork currently hanging on museum walls previously kept bodies warm on cold nights, when the vibrant colors and textures used to be someone’s everyday clothing, the personal element becomes unavoidable. Although most viewers won’t have the opportunity to meet the quilters themselves or hear their heartfelt spirituals echo through the gallery rooms, the Gee’s Bend quilts currently on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art “speak for themselves,” as quilter Louisiana Bendolph put it.

Gee’s Bend, a small rural town (population 750) in Alabama, remained relatively isolated through the 20th century, thanks in part to geography and partly to politics. Many of the residents trace their ancestry to slaves who worked the cotton fields and became sharecroppers after the Civil War, eventually acquiring land through Roosevelt’s New Deal programs in the 1930s. In the 1960s, Martin Luther King, Jr., arrived in Gee’s Bend, inspiring voting rights activism which led to the arrests of a number of protestors, losses of jobs and bank loans, and the cancellation of the town’s most direct access to the outside world – a ferry that crossed the Alabama River. Confined to a river-bound peninsula with only three cars to traverse the long, unpaved road, Gee’s Bend’s isolation increased the community’s need to share the burden and make do with what was available. In the midst of political turmoil and subsistence living, quilt-making traditions thrived.

Mary Lee Bendolph says, “We didn’t know we was [sic] doing artwork; only thing we was doing was making quilts to stay warm and keep our families warm.” Although women made “pretty quilts” to sell, using popular quilt patterns, and entered into business deals with major department stores to provide fashionable patchwork quilts and corduroy pillows, they continued expressing their creativity in the unique quilts they made for their own families. When art collectors began seeking out the “everyday” quilts, many quilters couldn’t believe that their private visions would attract such universal acclaim. Mary Lee didn’t accept that her quilts were artwork until she first saw them on display in the landmark 2002 exhibition The Quilts of Gee’s Bend at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. In Gee’s Bend, neighbors would visit each other when they had quilts hanging outside to air – quilters enjoyed seeing what others were creating – but it took seeing her own quilts hanging on gallery walls rather than fencerows to convince her that they were indeed impressive visual expressions. Since the 2002 show, younger quilters have joined in the art-making, crafting a new wave of quilts that continue to push and expand the Gee’s Bend tradition.

The PMA’s show Gee’s Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt covers a range of Gee’s Bend quilt-making, combining antique quilts with contemporary ones, looking at visual relationships across generations and highlighting the oeuvres of several important quilters. Although individual working styles emerge, the communal vision of the quilts stands out as the close-knit, often related, quilters share ideas and materials. As a whole, the quilts demonstrate a love of organic geometry, with many “Blocks and Strips,” “Housetops,” and “Bricklayers” expressed through irregular edges and un-square corners. The quilters favor asymmetry and unusual juxtapositions of shapes, so that an otherwise rectangular layout of blocks often contains a striking lone triangle out or an irregular pattern variation. They use color with the vivacity of an abstract expressionist painter, with accent colors that slice through monochromatic fields and layers of unrelated tones that blend into complex harmonies. Drawing inspiration from the world around them, many of the quilters abstract landscapes and architectural structures, resulting in quilts that share affinities with paintings by Mondrian, Klee and Diebenkorn.

In an art culture that routinely revisits the discussion about the relationship (or lack thereof) between crafts and fine arts, the quilts erase those theoretical boundaries, managing to marry craftsmanship with concept, community with individuality, materiality with essence, functionality with transcendence. The quilts are stunning, exuberant, the strong voices of a vibrant community.

(Image: Irene Williams (American, born 1920), Blocks and Strips, 2003. Polyester double-knit, 100x72 inches. Collection of the Tinwood Alliance. Photo: Steven Pitkin, Pitkin Studio, Rockford, IL.)

20th Century Kimono at the PMA

Published by The Bulletin on April 29, 2008.

Beauty From a Bygone Era
By: Melinda Steffy, for The Bulletin

Vibrant colors, intricate handiwork and stunning patterns all characterize the collection of early-20th-century Japanese kimono on display the PMA’s Perelman Building, as do historical references, shifting culture and the global exchange of ideas. The 80-some kimono reflect the final era of kimono-wearing, when the kimono still existed as a functional, everyday garment, just before the proliferation of Western wear. Although the exhibition contains a variety of kimono, from formal dress pieces to traditional men’s wear to children’s ensembles, the majority are casual women’s kimono that reveal the dramatic changes in culture and technology that made kimono both affordable and very modern.

The kimono are clustered around the gallery in thematic groupings, highlighting visual trends and design motifs rather than chronology or production technique, a wise curatorial decision that allows the kimono to be in conversation with one another throughout the room. It keeps the exhibit from feeling like a historical display and allows the kimono to exist in all their artistic glory. Beginning with the most traditional imagery of realistically depicted cranes and flora, temples and landscapes, the exhibit explores the diversity of popular motifs that range from organic arrangements of swallows, bamboo and chrysanthemums to abstractions of water; geometric stripes, pinwheels and blocks; polka dots and expressionistic color fields; and newly prevalent modes of transportation. Although many of the pieces in the exhibition might functionally have been the “blue jeans” of kimono, the potential for individual aesthetic expression in the most casual of garments is astounding. One can imagine the stunning visual effect of a room full of kimono-wearers as the distinctive colors and patterns would interweave in the midst of a social gathering, making everyday life perpetually beautiful.

Japanese textile production in the early 20th century benefited from new technologies, as new types of silk, simpler weaving processes and commercial dyes made kimono easier to mass produce and thus more affordable. Designers transformed traditional motifs into large, striking patterns that appealed to modern women, who could now shop for kimono at department stores. Kimono design from this time period reflects a cyclical relationship with Western design, particularly Art Deco and Art Nouveau movements – As North American and European artists and designers drew inspiration from historic Japanese sensibilities, Japanese artisans borrowed back the decorative rhythmic geometry of Art Deco and stylized naturalism of Art Nouveau. Kimono throughout the exhibition point to this international transfer of information, including one piece covered with abstracted Empire State Buildings.

Additionally, several of the kimono seem reminiscent of traditional textiles from other parts of the world, with patterns similar to the brightly dyed boubous of western Africa or geometric Navajo weavings. Clearly globalization and the growing spread of information allowed kimono-makers to pull from a wide range of design possibilities and adapt non-Japanese imagery to their own context.

The striking stylistic differences among the different kinds of kimono (particularly women’s, men’s and boys’ – girls’ kimono look very similar to the women’s kimono, pattern-wise) suggest the gender stratification of society. While the women’s kimono consist of bright colors and decorative patterns, clearly social wear, the men’s kimono are very plain and austere, usually entirely black on the outside, the equivalent of a Western business suit. However, the lining of men’s kimono frequently contains hand-painted mythological scenes or depictions of famous monks, and so in the exhibition the men’s kimono are displayed inside-out to allow the viewer to appreciate the hidden beauty of these functional garments. The boys’ kimono on display suggest a global male fascination with transportation, with several pieces portraying airplanes, automobiles, battleships and tanks in astounding detail (apparently, one kimono is detailed enough to identify the specific models of the depicted airplanes). They also reveal the growing military-industrial might of Japan in the advent of World War II and point to the Japanese patriotism of the time.

Although representing a particular country’s fashion from a specific time-period, the exhibition remains accessible to contemporary North American viewers, who will appreciate the exquisite craft of these textiles (be sure to look as closely as you can at the fabric itself) and who might experience a pervasive nostalgia for bygone eras and vanishing traditions. The method of display removes the human figure from the kimono and flattens them into abstracted fields of color and form, a vibrant tableau of gorgeous design that invites inspection, appreciation and awe.

(Image: Woman's Kimono, 1920s-30s (late Taisho-early Showa periods). Machine-spun silk plain weave with stencil-printed warp and weft threads (meisen). 61.26x43.25 inches (155.5x110cm). The Montgomery Collection, Lugano, Switzerland. [Cat. no. 90])

The Puppet Show at ICA

Published by The Bulletin on March 5, 2008.

Puppets, In All Their Glory
By: Melinda Steffy, for The Bulletin

“What can puppets do that humans can’t?” queries the stuffed-cat-with-movable-arms moderator of “Puppet Conference,” a film by Christian Jankowski, on display at the Institute of Contemporary Art. “The Puppet Show,” ICA’s current first-floor group exhibition, explores the range of puppet imagery and ability through puppet-inspired artwork, films of various forms of puppetry, and of course, actual puppets. It’s a quirky mesh of limbs and armature, sculpted heads and exaggerated expressions, which together take on a life of their own.

“Puppet Storage” opens the show, a backstage closet of historical and contemporary puppets, props and images. From traditional Indonesian shadow puppets used to enact epic Hindu stories to Andy Warhol’s hand-puppet models of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, the selection of items points to a diverse world of puppetry, full of sarcasm and social commentary as well as careful handicraft and attention to detail. The collection of puppet paraphernalia sits on innocuous wooden shelves, inanimate objects so full of latent personalities that a viewer can’t help feeling watched. Many of the objects relate to the artwork in the main gallery, with artists providing preliminary sketches or actual props used to create their artwork. This self-reflective background information reveals the ubiquitous human behind every puppet and enhances the theatricality of the performances.

The main gallery space hosts a mix of video works and sculptural installations with occasional photographs and drawings. The various pieces embody both the movement and narrative of theater and the still abstraction of an art gallery, so that puppetry emerges as a mixed-up blend of visual and dramatic arts, a combination of the abstract and the representational. By using constructed, artificial characters, the stories remove themselves slightly from the realm of reality and yet, from that distance, comment so pointedly on human experience. Although Lambchop and the Muppets make occasional appearances, the exhibition has a decidedly adult spin, removing puppetry from mere childhood entertainment and using the medium to explore complex concepts.

In Cindy Loehr’s video installation “The Colloquy,” the most basic of hand-puppets – bare fists with rhinestone eyes and a thumb jaw-line – carry on a subdued lovers’ quarrel, with one hand doing all of the talking while the other emotionally withdraws. Shown on such a large scale, these simple characters take on surprisingly human characteristics in their enactment of a plausible conversation.

Guy Ben-Ner’s film “Elia: The Story of an Ostrich Chick” bizarrely merges puppet and actor, as humans dressed in ostrich costumes act out a coming-of-age story about an adolescent ostrich and her ostrich family. The costumes only cover the lower halves of the actors’ bodies, with the ostrich heads moved by sticks held in the actors’ hands, so human torsos and heads overlap with ostrich bodies and legs. Since the costumes face backwards – the actors walk in reverse to make the ostriches appear to go forward – the distinction between bird and person becomes even more distorted. Often, the human facial expressions, especially on the younger children, mimic the actions of the ostrich characters, further blurring the boundary lines between real and artificial.

Kiki Smith turns human into puppet in “Nuit” by dissembling the human figure and suspending arms and legs from the ceiling, stopping inches from the floor. The white plaster casts are empty of pulse or energy, unable to move unless someone would tug on the ropes. Even then, in the absence of body or face, the limbs resist anthropomorphizing, remaining devoid of the personalities typical to puppets. The effect is both elegant and faintly disturbing.
From Dennis Oppenheim’s mechanical puppet clones in “Theme for a Major Hit” (the suited men periodically jitter around the floor) to Kara Walker’s paper silhouette film confronting the history of racism and its lingering violence, the range of puppet-imagery is engaging and challenging, drifting from whimsical to disconcerting, simple to astoundingly complex.

Tibetan Buddhist Mandala at Philadelphia Cathedral

Published by The Bulletin on January 29, 2008.

Tibetan Buddhist Mandala in Process at Cathedral
By: Melinda Steffy, For The Bulletin

It’s not a typical artwork. It doesn’t fit into contemporary models of abstraction, representation or self-expression, drawing instead on 2,500-year-old traditions and symbolism. It contains no paint, no paper, no clay, just careful layers of brightly colored sand. The highly trained artist did not attend a top-tier art school, but studied at a monastery in India. And no conservationist will ever worry about the artwork’s longevity; in another week it won’t exist.

The “Wheel of Life” Tibetan Buddhist mandala in process and on display at the Philadelphia Cathedral defies most modern Western notions of art-making, particularly ideas of permanence and personal attachment to one’s creation.

For two weeks, Losang Samten, a Tibetan Buddhist monk, has been rasping fine lines of sand out of a metal tube to create careful images that portray the frailty of the human condition and the consequences of giving in to the “poisons” of ignorance, greed and anger. Every image carries symbolism, from the trio of animals at the center (pig, pigeon and snake, corresponding to the three poisons) to the six surrounding landscapes to the evolving love story around the perimeter. The images cycle from infancy through death, tying together pain and joy, yin and yang, and showing the consequences of giving in to the three poisons. According to Buddhist beliefs, in order to cure suffering, one must train the mind to notice and eliminate the poisons, and so the “Wheel of Life” provides a tool for meditation and contemplation on this life-long journey.

The detailed workmanship is astounding. Using varying finenesses of sand, Samten outlines bricks, miniscule arrows and the decorative trim of a woman’s dress and sculpts buildings, mountains and rivers. He blends colors, so a band of yellow fades to green to meet the dominant blue of the largest circle. Although the overall effect is two-dimensional, Samten periodically turns off the overhead lights and uses a side-light to highlight the sand’s relief, and suddenly ocean waves and fruit trees come to life with depth and shadows.

The overall concept and symbolism of the “Wheel of Life” remain the same each time it is created, but individual artists add their own variations and interpretations. In this case, Samten whimsically includes a tiny dog that runs from scene to scene, appearing in the midst of a tale of human relationships. In other panels, Jesus and Buddha appear next to each other, a nod to the ecumenical relationship that brought this Buddhist mandala to an Episcopal cathedral, and a church building takes its place alongside a pagoda as diverse cultures intersect in Samten’s vision.

The profound awareness that an untimely gust of wind or a careless visitor could damage the mandala heightens its meaning and sense of value. The mandala embodies the very frailty it portrays, and so the active processes of creation and destruction become, in some ways, more important than the ancient symbols themselves. Since this particular mandala will soon be gone and no future incarnation will be exactly the same, viewing takes on a sense of pricelessness. After just two weeks of creation and one week on display, another monk will arrive to ritually sweep away the mandala, obscuring the image and returning the sand to the cosmos (via the Schuylkill River) in recognition of ultimate impermanence and natural cycles.

One visitor, clearly moved by the transient construction, asked, “Don’t you worry about it?” Samten paused for several seconds, observing his delicate creation, and smilingly shrugged his shoulders, “Not really.”