Kirsty

Robertson. “Quilts for the Twenty-First Century: Activism in the Expanded Field of
Quilting” In Handbook of Textiles, eds. Janis Jefferies, Hazel Clark and Diana Wood
Conroy. London: Bloomsbury Press, 2014, pp. 197-210.

Quilts for the Twenty-First Century:

Activism in the Expanded Field of Quilting

Kirsty Robertson

Introduction

Sue Pritchard (2010: 9) opens the introductory essay of the catalogue for

the exhibition Quilts, 1700-2010 with the following statement: “Quilts stimulate

memories of warmth, security and comfort. They are also inexorably linked with

the feminine.”1 One could add to this list another theme, focused on what Janis

Jefferies (2011: 127) calls “the subversive power of the needle.” Quilts, quilting

and quilt scholarship have long been tied to activism, ranging from abolitionist

causes in the nineteenth century to feminist reclamation of an undervalued

pastime in the twentieth, and incorporating economic, pacifist, environmental,

labor and numerous other issues.2 Activist quilts are found across the globe, and

their making crosses lines of age, race and class (though less often of gender).

In this chapter, I begin by exploring the rich history of activist quilting and

activist quilt scholarship. I then turn to what I call the expanded field of quilting,

following Rosalind Krauss’s (1979: 30-44) term “the expanded field.”

Specifically, I analyze the extension of quilting practice in to different contexts

and examine the work of a series of artists who do not create traditional quilts but

who use the processes of quilting (such as patching, suturing and appliqué) to

draw together knowledge, facts, images and artifacts into quilted wholes, often

1
with activist or political intent. I ask whether such works can be read as akin to

twenty-first century activist quilts?

To patch or piece together suggests collecting information or things, an act

of investigation. A patch can be a scrap or a remnant: a piece of material, a

computer key, a torn item of clothing. Patching can also mean to mend, join

together, or connect.3 Thus I look to the work of artists Jarod Charzewski and

Derick Melander who build sculptural forms from piles of colourful clothing,

asking whether these structures can be read as twenty-first century politicized

crazy quilts, and I turn to the work of Mishka Henner and Jenny Odell, finding in

their collection, organization and stitching together of thousands of tiny digital

images, examples of digital quilt-making.

In short, I look at art works that use piecing or patchwork as political

strategy, whether those politics are part of community efforts to resist

individualism or attempts to draw attention to important issues such as

surveillance, sustainability and over-consumption. Often it is the familiarity of

materials (digital images, textiles, clothing) that make the quilt’s message

accessible. Such material activism blurs the boundary between art and craft and

suggests a new framework for the analysis of a certain kind of gently politicized

art making.4

The Expanded Field of Quilting

Why quilting? In short, there is history here. In the 1970s and 1980s,

feminist scholars began to research quilting as an emancipatory act (Mainardi

1973; Maines 1974; Orlofsky 1974; McMorris 1984; Parker 1989; Gunn 1993;

2
Keller 1993; Pershing 1993; Garrard and Broude 1996; Berlo and Crews 2003).

Patricia Mainardi, writing in 1973, noted,

Because quilt making is so indisputably women’s art, many of the

issues women artists are attempting to clarify now—questions of
feminine sensibility, of originality and tradition, of individuality
vs. collectivity, of content and values in art—can be illuminated by
a study of this art form, its relation to the lives of the artists, and
how it has been dealt with in art history (Mainardi 1973: 1).5

Judy Elsley wrote similarly in 1976 that “sewing is one way for women to

begin the process of self-reclamation because it represents, more than other

activities traditionally associated with women, a powerful and elemental symbol

of connection” (Elsley 1976: 74). More recently, Janis Jefferies reminds us that:

It is now generally acknowledged that many women have inscribed

in quilts and stitch work the stories of their lives as a source of
pleasure and painful recollection, using the medium as a weapon
against the constraints of femininity and as a potential means of
challenging masculine meanings and dominance in the visual arts
and society (Jefferies 2010: 126).

Extending such interpretations, many feminist scholars began to use

quilting as a metaphor, suggesting that patchwork and piecework could be used to

analyze women’s subjectivity, women’s literature, women’s careers and space in

the world (Parker and Pollock 1981; Showalter 1991). The patchwork quilt

represented an undermining of linearity, which was associated with masculine

paradigms of writing. In her seminal article “Piecing and Writing,” Elaine

Showalter wrote:

In literary theories of a Female Aesthetic, the metaphor of piecing

has been used as a model for the organization of language in the
wild zone of the woman’s text…. In the ‘verbal quilt’ of the
feminist text, there is ‘no subordination, no ranking’ (Showalter
1986: 226-27).

3
 Approaching from a slightly different angle, Alice Walker describes how

important quilting and stitching were to her as she meditatively worked through

the plot and characters of the novel The Color Purple (a book in which quilting

figures centrally) (Walker 1983: 361-83). This kind of writing, much of it

reclamatory, continues through to the present day (Goggin and Tobin 2009; Elsley

2009, 2010). In 2001, for example, Maura C. Flannery contended that quilting

could be used as a metaphor for scientific inquiry. Her argument suggested that

too many male-centric metaphors were used in the sciences (such as exploring,

hunting and penetrating the unknown). Quilting together a patchwork of

information into a hypothesis presented for Flannery a different and less

aggressive approach to the sciences.6

Feminist analyses of quilting focused on the material objects of quilts,

reclaimed histories, literature, and quilting itself. Many writers looked to the

communal nature of quilt-making, seeing in it a proto-feminist community, or at

least a community of women that existed fleetingly outside of traditional

patriarchal regimes (Przybysz 1994). Quilting bees, which were often organized

out of necessity and to pool resources, were oft-cited examples of “community

spirit” and frugality (Ice and Shumlinson 1974; Roach 1985).

Perhaps this was particularly true for African American women. Quilt

making—for income generation, political organization, story telling, and

advocacy—was used by African American slaves, emancipated slaves, maids and

working women, from the eighteenth century through to the late twentieth (Cash

1995: 32). The economic collective of the Freedom Quilting Bee, founded in

4
Alabama in 1966 as part of the Civil Rights movement, offers an important

example (Callahan 1987; Allen 2001; Hood 2001). Additionally, though heavily

disputed, stories abound that quilts may even have provided coded maps for the

Underground Railroad, the secret route of roads, paths and safe houses that

allowed numerous slaves of African-descent to escape from the American south

in the nineteenth century.7 For example, quilts with specific patterns, known to

runaways, might have been hung outside of safe houses, and quilts with coded

directions (such as triangles cut to point towards the top of the quilt, or north),

may have been passed around. Quilts thus provided comfort and succor, income,

and community, they are seen as important historical documents, as text/iles

recording lives, kinships and relationships (Fox-Genovese 1988; Brown 1989; Fry

1990). A combination of labor and leisure, “[Quilts] provide a record of the

cultural and political past [of African American women],” writes Floris Barnett

Cash (1995: 30).8

In short, across lines of age, class and race, quilting has been interpreted

by many scholars, writers and quilters as emancipatory, creating important

opportunities and spaces for women and the marginalized. This is true both of the

historical material documents and of the metaphorical interpretations, which tend

to focus on suturing, patching and the creation of women’s space. In these cases it

is not just the content of the quilt patterns that is political, but the very act of

quilting.

However, it should also be noted that these texts and interpretations,

dating from the 1970s through to the present, are not wholly representative and

5
present a re-working or re-purposing of some quilt history. A quite different

scenario is suggested by the following poem, originally published in 1893:

The day is set, the ladies met,

And at the frame are seated,
In order plac’d, they work in haste,
To get the quilt completed.
While fingers fly, their tongues they play,
And animate their labors,
By counting beaux, discussing cloths,
Or talking of their neighbors (Anonymous 1839).

This poem suggests that it was light gossip rather than in-depth

conversation that characterized quilting bees. Such readings are supported by a

number of nineteenth and twentieth century literary depictions of quilting. In the

famous Anne of Green Gables series, for example, quilting bees appear often, and

are regularly sites where normative, heterosexist, mono-racial, mono-religious

and mono-class expectations are voiced and affirmed (Montgomery 1908-21).

Quilting is used to specifically mark points of introduction into mainstream

society (marriage, coming of age, birth, etc.). Additionally, women were often

encouraged to develop needlework skills as signs of industriousness and

submissiveness (Przybysz 1994: 10). To this day, quilting remains in many cases

associated with conservatism, family values, and submissive femininity.

And yet, the later interpretation of quilts, quilting and quilting bees as

proto-political has been an important strategy for reclaiming the importance of

female conversation (who knows, after all, what was really said). In fact, it was

precisely the undervaluation of women’s history that led 1970s feminists to look

at quilts. And it is precisely because quilts are often passed down as detailed but

6
anonymous documents (only occasionally accompanied with written or oral

histories) that they are ripe for interpretation (and re-interpretation) (Pritchard

2010, 9). Perhaps activist quilting and activist quilt scholarship rely on quilting

being generally dismissed as a feminine, domestic pastime, unassociated with

political causes. For example, scholar, blogger, and quilter Potente Susurro takes

on those who dispute the stories of quilted Underground Railroad maps, noting

that while there may not have been topographical maps sewn directly into quilts,

the importance of such stories means that “they can be seen as reterritorialization

from a largely white imaginary of black quilting forms into one of African

American storytelling” (Susurro 2009, np). In other words, perhaps because of the

way that they are pieced and patched together, quilts elicit a wide range of

explanation and analysis, much of it dedicated to supporting progressive causes. I

suggest that understanding such paradoxical (as in, against received doxa)

approaches is key to understanding the past, present and future not just of quilting

but of quilt scholarship. For the sake of simplicity, I call such approaches

productive re-interpretation.

Productive re-interpretation often plays with or even relies on very

conservative or traditional stereotypes of quilting. Many of the feminist scholars

cited above suggest that the acceptability (the seemliness) of quilting and bees

made them spaces where community formation, organization, and self-awareness

could emerge. Over the years, such ideas have been put into action, and the years

since the 1970s have seen the production of thousands of quilts with activist

content. The legacy of feminist writing can be seen in the importance granted to

7
the community production of many of these quilts, and also in their occasionally

overtly feminist content. Importantly, activist quilts often draw heavily on the

nostalgic and feminine elements of quilting: they are productive re-interpretations

of the non-threatening history ascribed to quilt-making.

Famous examples of activist quilts include Chilean arpilleras, colourful,

patchworked, and appliquéd quilts and hangings that traditionally depicted scenes

of daily life in Chile, but, following the 1973 military coup and ousting of

President Allende, were repurposed to tell stories of arrest, torture, disappearance,

fear and loss under the Pinochet government. Many arpilleras were smuggled

across borders and used as documents to convey the situation in Chile to

potentially sympathetic audiences (Agosin 2007). Again, it was the seemliness of

the arpilleras that allowed them to (craftily) pass over borders. Other examples

include the now well-known Amazwi Abesifazane project in South Africa, which

encouraged women (often poor Black women from rural townships) overlooked

by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (1996-) to tell their own stories

using quilting, embroidery, and appliqué (Becker 2007). And towering above all

in the size of its contribution to activist quilting is the US-based NAMES AIDS

memorial quilt project. Begun in 1987, the NAMES project includes individually

made memorial panels remembering more than 48,000 people who have died

from AIDS (Morris 2011). The project drew (and draws) attention to the

devastating extent of the AIDS epidemic and has, according to the project’s

website “redefined the tradition of quilt-making in response to contemporary

circumstances” (The AIDS Memorial Quilt).

8
 More recently, activist quilting has grown in popularity, particularly in the

United States and England. In the United States, one finds work such as

LaShawnda Crowe Storm’s community-based Lynch Quilts Project, which

explores the history of racial and ethnic violence in the United States through

research, quilting bees, and discussion (Storm 2013). A second example is

Kathryn Clark’s series of quilt maps, which use aerial views and contrasting

colours to trace house foreclosures in neighborhoods in the United States (Clark

2013). Clark notes that she chose the medium of quilting on purpose, because of

its connection to a history of thriftiness and the way that quilts were made from

scraps of fabric in hard times. In England, one finds projects like the Shoreditch

Sister’s contribution to a “Stop Violence Against Women” campaign. Here

women gathered to communally produce a quilt covered in embroidered vulvas

and designed to raise awareness of the practice of female genital mutilation

(Shoreditch Sisters 2011). The Fine Cell Project, also based in England, teaches

inmates to embroider and quilt. In 2010, inmates at Wandsworth Prison produced

a quilt based on the floorplans of the prison, using cottons and weave the same

colors as prisoners’ uniforms. The quilt was accessioned by the Victoria and

Albert Museum, and a description of it notes that

many of the hexagons demonstrate a clear conversation with both

the history of the British prison system and contemporary
discourses on authority. In one, a fingerprint is surrounded by
borders of DNA, suggesting issues relating to the identification of
criminals and the control of personal freedom (V&A 2014).

Other blocks focus on the boredom of prison life, the power of the probation

board, wrongful conviction, and religion.

9
 There are hundreds of other examples of activist quilts, including memory

quilts, anti-war quilts, healing quilts, and so on (Gildart 2007). Quilting is used to

teach community spirit (and occasionally math and drafting skills) at the school

level and thousands of quilts are produced each year for charity. There are also

pro-war quilts, anti-abortion quilts, and thousands of patriotic quilts. Projects

come from across the political spectrum. Quilting, as noted above, can be both a

conservative and also a radical act. Nevertheless, in each, quilting is used to draw

attention to issues, often to promote healing through the methodical act of

repetitive stitching, and occasionally, as in the Chilean examples, to speak in code

to audiences in the know. What all of these projects and strategies have in

common is a belief that textiles, and specifically, a very traditional form of textile

creation, can be used to convey messages of social, political or cultural import

(Powell 2000). Where else might we find such strategies in use?

In the following section, I attempt to draw together the threads of the

paper thus far: the expanded field of quilting, the legacy of feminist scholarship,

productive re-interpretation, and activist quilting. While the examples discussed

are not typical quilts, I turn to artworks that use quilting techniques such as

patching, stitching, and appliqué, as well as community participation that can be

likened to quilting bees. Ranging from “crazy quilts” made from the detritus of a

consumerist society where the overconsumption of clothing is the norm to art

works that use the grid-like form of quilting and patchwork to compile

information, I seek to understand the act of piecing together textiles and images to

convey a specific meaning, often critical of the world in which we live.

10
 Patching: A Twenty-First Century Crazy Quilt

What might an activist crazy quilt for the twenty-first century look like?

The original crazy quilt “craze” reached its height in the late nineteenth century.

The quilts used scraps of fabric of different patterns, colors, and sizes, sewn

together in a manner that looked haphazard (though they were usually carefully

planned). Numerous influences on crazy quilts have been cited, among them the

Arts and Crafts movement, the American Aesthetic Movement, commedia

dell’arte, asymmetrical Japanese ceramics, and clothing designs shown at the

1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition.9 But what the quilts made of tiny

patches in odd shapes required most was excess textiles, either the ends of worn

clothing, or scraps that were bought purposely to make the quilts. In other words,

sometimes the quilts were born of need––plain quilts that were patched so often

with whatever spare cloth there was that they became crazy quilts. But by the late

Victorian era, kits could be purchased of fine velvet, silk, and brocade fabrics,

specialty embroidery threads, ribbons, and other embellishments, such that the

crazy quilt was less about thrift and more about conspicuous consumption. This

was true even for women of lesser income, who traded with friends and family

and purchased collections of inexpensive scraps sold specifically for the crazy

quilt making trend that took place at the turn of the twentieth century (Breneman

2009). The crazy quilts are the offspring of the Industrial Revolution and the

result of more easily accessible textiles for sewing. They are equally examples of

excess and thrift, the decorative and necessity.10 Such quilting was also often a

demonstration of skill––many crazy quilts were used to demonstrate exquisite

11
needlework with patches sewn in a variety of intricate stitches. The artificial silks

used in the quilts were weighted with mineral salts and gall, which made them

appear heavier and gave them more rustle (Nebraska State Historical Society

2009). Over time, the silks have badly deteriorated, and museums and collections

are full of disintegrating crazy quilts, each disaggregating into the pieces from

which it was made.

Quilts are not only personal records, but are also documents of the

changing global trade in textiles, visible in eighteenth century quilts as silks gave

way to cottons, and in the nineteenth century crazy quilts in the variety, colors and

availability of textiles (Browne 2010: 45; Parry 2010: 58; Pritchard 2010: 14). As

such, the crazy quilts tell the story of a particular moment in time. This begs the

question: what might a crazy quilt look like in an era of extreme excess and

overconsumption? If the original crazy quilt craze came from, on the one hand, a

need for thrift in the face of the high cost of textiles, and, on the other, from a love

of sumptuous fabrics and the decorative, what might that look like in an era when

clothing rarely makes it to the scrap bin, when clothing is so cheaply accessible

that the average US American buys 64 new items each year, and discards 8.5

million tons of textile waste annually? (MacBride 2011: 25).

I suggest that the dual impulse of thrift and excess behind crazy quilts can

be found in the work of a number of primarily US-based artists who use carefully

arranged items of clothing to create large-scale three-dimensional patchworks.

While traditional crazy quilts continue to be made, even, occasionally, as

commentary on excessive consumption,11 I argue that a crazy quilt for the twenty-

12
first century is one in which the patchwork has exploded from its boundaries,

disintegrating the two-dimensionality of the traditional quilt. There is, in fact, no

need to use scraps because whole items of clothing are so easily available. A

twenty-first century crazy quilt comments inevitably on excess and accumulation,

on over-consumption and on the glut of exhausted commodities and the growing

latent waste of surplus clothing.12

Take, for example, Jarod Charzewski’s Scarp (2008) (fig. 1) a three-

dimensional landscape made from carefully piled clothing. The clothes, arranged

in hills and valleys through the gallery space, are also organized into a vertical

color spectrum. Like an escarpment or a cross section of the earth, the clothing

scarp takes the idea of the natural geological layering of earth and the story it tells

about the history of the planet, and replaces it with “a [fabricated] history with its

own synthetic and fleeting artifacts as the medium” (Charzewski 2014). Each of

the levels in Charzewski’s Scarp refers to a level of consumption: “competitive

purchasing” (grey); “compulsive purchasing” (blue); “commercial intimidation”

(purple); “planned obsolescence” (red); “actual wear and tear” (green); “lost or

misplaced items (yellow); “self esteem purchasing” (purple); fashion trends (pink)

(Charzewski 2014).

In a similar vein, New York-based artist Derick Melander piles t-shirts

into carefully organized pillars, walls and circles. Like Charzewski, Melander

comments on excess consumption. One of his well-known sculptures, 3,615

pounds (2009), refers to the amount of textile waste created by New Yorkers

every five minutes. Also like Charzewski, Melander sources the used clothing that

13
makes up his projects through donation from local Goodwill Industry stores. Both

artists comment on the memories implicit in their works. “As clothing wears,

fades, stains and stretches, it becomes an intimate record of our physical presence.

It traces the edge of the body, defining the boundary between the self and the

outside world,” writes Melander, who refers to his works as “collective portraits”

(Melander 2014). Where Melander’s work differs from Charzewski’s is in its

process. Melander effectively stages quilting bees. Each sculpture draws together

large numbers of people who work to sort, fold, and pile clothing. The process,

Melander states, is as important as the final product, and through the act of

folding, organizing and piling, conversations take place that often focus on the

underlying premise of the work––the excess consumption that leads to the

discarding of otherwise usable clothing.

In both cases, there are obvious differences from the crazy quilts of the

1890s, the most pertinent being that the works are not two dimensional, and that

they are not sewn together. But nevertheless, reading these art works as in

keeping with a history of crazy quilting on the one hand, and a history of activist

quilting on the other, leads to a productive re-interpretation that draws in a history

of making and labor that is often missing from the art world. With these “quilts,”

one might also look to their impetus to mobilize the nostalgia and memories

inscribed in used clothing to unsettle accepted practices of buying and discarding

used textiles. Quilts for the twenty-first century are not necessarily about comfort.

They are not covers, metaphorically, but in fact do the opposite. In the case of

Charzewski and Melander’s work, they reveal, they question. This kind of

14
patchwork is about bringing together the detritus of a commodity society and

arranging it, carefully, into patterns that reveal a deeper blueprint of capitalism.

Such “crazy-quilt” formations are found in the work of a number of artists,

some, but not all of whom, use textiles. Guerra de la Paz’s clothing installations,

Christian Boltanski’s massive undertakings making use of vast stockpiles of used

clothing, Sidsel Palmstrom’s textile piles, are just some of the artists and works

using such techniques. Generally speaking, these works are analyzed in a lexicon

belonging to contemporary art. While this does not seem surprising for such work,

it does suggest a gendering of practice, where if the pieces of cloth used are whole

(sewn into clothes), or are arranged sculpturally, they are considered to be art

rather than craft. Reversing the typical direction of scholarship, moving art into

the world of craft, sculpture into quilting, suggests a vibrant connection to

histories of textile production, feminist scholarship, community, and

collaboration. Perhaps these are activist quilts hidden in plain view.13

The Digital Quilt

If a crazy quilt for the twenty-first century is a deconstructed entity, a

twenty-first century patchwork quilt might be the opposite––an aggregate of

elements built up into a recognizable whole. There is patchwork here, but it is a

working together of information and a search for answers rather than a suturing

together of cloth.

I begin, though, with a traditional quilt. Artist Leah Evans creates quilted

hangings that use both hand sewing and machine work. She uses techniques of

appliqué, reverse appliqué, piecing, dyeing (natural and synthetic), needle felting,

15
hand printing and embroidery. In short, she is an accomplished textile artist. Her

work makes use of photography, maps, and satellite imagery to create intricate

aerial, bird’s eye views of recognizable towns and cities. Evans is not the only

artist using textiles to create aerial images (see Walker’s Foreclosure project, for

example), and there seems to be a comfortable relationship here, noted by a

number of bloggers, photographers, and quilters.14 “The patchwork of adjacent

agricultural plots becomes especially colorful when the land is segmented into

strips,” writes Simone Pruesse on a blog that collects images of “agricultural

patchworks” (Pruesse nd). A patchwork of land, particularly of farmland is a

familiar way of describing vast landscapes of farms and fields, particularly when

seen from above. Evans’ quilts make this relationship literal, they make it

material. But where else might this relationship also be present?

The work of British photographer Mishka Henner offers an interesting

example. Henner’s photography series Feedlots focuses on aerial views of

feedlots and oil fields, the basis of the Texan economy. The works demonstrate an

“astonishing and terrible beauty” (Twilley 2013: np). At first it appears as though

Henner hired an aeroplane and flew over the sites taking photographs, but in fact,

each image is carefully composed of hundreds of available satellite images,

“knitted seamlessly together to create ultra-high definition images that, according

to those lucky enough to have seen them in person, look, at first glance, like

Abstract Expressionist paintings” (Twilley 2013: np). My own interpretation is, of

course, that they look nothing like Abstract Expressionist paintings15, but an

awful lot like Leah Evans’ quilts. Perhaps this should not be seen as surprising,

16
given that they use similar techniques, though Evans uses a needle and thread and

Henner uses computer software.

As a report on Henner’s images notes, “Ninety-seven per cent of the beef

consumed in the United States will have been ‘finished’ on a feedlot: a vast and

odoriferous empire of pens and troughs where up to 100,000 steers at a time

spend the last three to six months of their short (12 to 18-month) lives gaining up

to 4 pounds a day on a diet of corn, protein supplements, and antibiotics” (Twilley

2013: np). The presence of so many animals in such tight quarters produces huge

amounts of manure, which show up in Henner’s images in bilious green and red

pools of waste. Through stitching together each tiny pixellated image, a near

perfect bird’s eye view appears, even if it is one demonstrating a devastated (and

devastating) landscape.

An earlier series of Henner’s work is even more illustrative of the

potential power of patching together information to make a whole. In the Dutch

Landscapes series (fig. 2), Henner used satellite images of Dutch and US military

sites to patch together “off-limits” landscapes. The military sites, obscured from

Google Earth and other search systems, appear in Henner’s images as multi-

coloured polygons. Secrecy in the twenty-first century is literally a crazy quilt, if

a digital one. Sensitive sites on Google Earth are all obscured by pixellation, and

often those forms of pixellation are specific to the government and military bodies

that have made the request (the Dutch, for example, use multi-coloured polygons).

But, as is noted, “In direct opposition to their intended purpose, these

17
interventions act as signposts, revealing the location and importance of

ammunition depots, artillery ranges, and military bases” (Twilley 2013: np).

A slightly less dramatic example of what might be called digital

patchwork can be found in the work of Jenny Odell. Like Henner, Odell draws on

satellite imagery, but her method of patchwork is somewhat different. Using

Google Satellite View, Odell picks one item: airplanes, cargo trains, waterslides,

famous landmarks, silos, waste ponds. She cuts out huge numbers of each from

the images, and rearranges them into new appliqué-like patterns, drawing

attention to repetition in the human landscape. She writes of the work,

it is precisely from this inhuman point of view that we are able to

read our own humanity, in all of its tiny, repetitive marks upon the
face of the earth. From this view, the lines that make up basketball
courts and the scattered blue rectangles of swimming pools
become like hieroglyphs that say: people were here (Odell 2014:
np).

The cutting of patches takes place here digitally, Odell is not using

scissors, but the process is the same––her quilts use appliqué, but they are

recognizable in the same way as are Henner’s. While they might certainly be read

as photographs they are, I suggest, equally readable within a textile history.

These works, like those of Charzewski and Mellander, draw attention to

over-consumption, and to the mass amounts of debris (material and virtual),

created by late capitalism. These are just two artists among many, whose work

potentially points to a certain way of creating that is increasingly popular in both

the art and craft worlds, and as I’ve argued, in the space in between.

Textiles are a great connector. They are ubiquitous, so much so that it is

easy to forget the threads connecting a global textile industry with a woman

18
quilting in the American South in the nineteenth century, or a 1970s feminist

reading of women’s literature as patchwork with a 2014 analysis of piles of

clothing as latter day crazy quilts, or a Chilean arpillera with the work of digital

cut and paste artists. But those threads are there, sometimes loose, sometimes

pulled tight. What activist quilting––in textile, in clothing, in digital images––

does is to make issues intimate, understandable, but never solely comforting.

Notes
1
This exhibition was held at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK, in

2010.
2
The rise in quilting scholarship over the past few decades can in and of itself be

seen as a political action, as quilting was overlooked in the academy and almost

completely ignored in the art world prior to the 1970s. Jonathan Holstein and Gail

van der Hoof’s exhibition Abstract Design in American Quilts, held in 1971 at the

Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, and the subsequent book

The Pieced Quilt: An American Tradition (1973) played an extremely important

role in suggesting that quilts could be read as precursors to the modernist abstract

work of painters such as Piet Mondrian and Barnett Newman. From this

exhibition, quilting scholarship received an enormous boost (see further analysis

in note 5). See also Berlo (2011: np) and Berlo and Crews (2003).
3
Although I don’t discuss it, Suzanne Lacy’s Crystal Quilt (1985-87), a work in

which a “quilt” of people was created, could be seen as a precursor to the kinds of

art forms that I discuss (Lacy, 2012-13).

19
4
In the chapter I largely avoid adding to the debate over the relationship between

art and craft, that is, over how to define one or the other, or over how to keep

them separate or bring them together. I am nevertheless conscious that gender-

biased art-world hierarchies positioning craft as lesser underlie any discussion that

brings together traditional handcraft (quilting) with other forms typically defined

as art (namely, collage, installation, sculpture and graphic design). See Grant

2013 for an example of the subordination of craft to art, and Adamson 2007;

Buszek 2011; Jefferies 2011 for recent thoughtful and thought-provoking recent

responses to this topic. For earlier responses, see Lippard (1976; 1995), Parker

(1977; 1989), and Parker and Pollock (1981).

5
Mainardi was arguing for quilting in light of the backlash against domesticity

and domestic crafts that characterized some forms of second wave feminism.
6
It should be noted, however, that some of these writers, Mainardi among them,

wanted to keep quilts solely within a female discourse, separate from the

patriarchal art world (and one imagines the science world as well). They would

likely not have appreciated the direction of Flannery’s research, nor of this

chapter. See Berlo 2011 for a discussion of Mainardi’s position. Also see

Pritchard 2010: 140, where she describes how the important 1971 Abstract Design

in American Quilts exhibition (see note 1), was preceded in 1970 by a protest and

sit-in demanding equal representation for women at the Whitney, led by artist

(and quilter) Faith Ringgold and scholar Lucy Lippard. The Whitney responded in

1971 with the Abstract Design in American Quilts exhibition, a show of quilts

made by anonymous nineteenth-century sewers (likely women) but connected to

20
twentieth-century male-dominated Abstract Expressionism movement.

Contemporary female artists (even quilting artists) were left out. Pritchard makes

a similar point about the immensely popular exhibition The Quilts of Gee’s Bend,

which travelled from 2002-2006, and perhaps “attempted to create artists from

women who … had to sew to survive,” thereby “misrepresenting their makers”

and denying “the complexity surrounding their production” (Pritchard 2010: 140).
7
The main source on the Underground Railroad quilting code is the book Hidden

in Plain View (Tobin and Dobbard 1999). However, numerous writers, quilters

and scholars have suggested that the code is merely wishful thinking (Cummings

2005; Brackman 2006; Zegart 2008).

8
Fry (1990:6) also found that quilting traditions of African American women

were often undervalued in mainstream accounts (scholarly, popular and

otherwise). Fox-Genovese (1988) found similarly that the majority of sewing and

weaving done on plantations was done by slave women.

9
Rarely, it should be noted, were the scrap quilts made by slaves living in the

antebellum south cited as precursors of crazy quilts (Susuro, 2009).

10
See also Przybysz 1994: 9 on the rejection of such ornate work in the late 1880s

and the turn towards more streamlined design (particularly in the United States).
11
A quick search of Pintrest shows hundreds of pins with titles like “Recycled

Quilt” “Second Hand Clothes Quilt” and “Recycled Clothing Quilt.”

12
I’m adapting the term “exhausted commodities” from Will Straw (2000: np).
13
The wording in this sentence is a reference to Susan Glaspell’s well-known

short story "A Jury of Her Peers" (1917). In the story, a farmer is killed. The

21
police suspect his wife, but can find no clues. As two women (a friend and the

Sheriff’s wife) are asked to come over to pack some things, they see the evidence:

uneven stitches in her quilting, a canary, strangled by her husband, in the sewing

basket. The women quickly realize that the protagonist has murdered her abusive

husband. The clues are tidied away, the protagonist is protected. The evidence is

hidden in plain view, but is only decipherable to those who know the code.
14
See, for example, the work of Valerie S Goodwin, Jimmy McBride, Eszter

Bornemisza; Shizuko Ozaki; Ian Hundley; Alicia Merrett and others.

15
There is a nice corollary here to the Abstract Design in American Quilts (1971)

exhibition where quilts (rather than aerial photographs) were compared with

Abstract Expressionist painting.

Biography

Kirsty Robertson is an Associate Professor of Contemporary Art and Museum

Studies at Western University, Canada. Her research focuses on textiles, activism,

visual culture, museums and changing economies. She has published widely on

these topics and is currently finishing her book Tear Gas Epiphanies: Protest,

Museums and Culture. Her co-edited volume, Imagining Resistance: Visual

Culture, and Activism in Canada, was released in 2011, and her tri-authored

volume Putting IP in its Place: Rights Discourse, Creativity and the Everyday

was published in 2013.

22
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