old quilts

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Janie Spigener's Quilt

Above are three views of a quilt made in the 1940's or 1950's by Michael Stevens' grandmother, Janie Spigener. She lived her life in rural Louisiana and died in her late sixties in 1973.

This is a traditional nine patch quilt; this one is made from men's shirts and flour sacks. Flour sacks were made in patterns -- the cloth could be reused for all sorts of projects, and it made the flour sell better. The back of the quilt (the right picture above shows a detail) is made from four complete flour sacks that were opened at the seam and then pieced together.

The nine patch pattern is infinitely flexible -- the three by three squares allow the artist to substitute larger pieces of cloth wherever one likes, and colors require less restraint than more geometric patterns.

Here she is in the late 1940's. She owned several Singer treadle machines, and spent a lot of time knitting as well as sewing. She was hopelessly habituated to soap opera and Garrett snuff -- and devoted to gardening, and her grandchildren. She could read a little bit. Her religion was fundamental, but she had also been indoctrinated with Cherokee thinking by her mother. Her isolation from contemporary art movements must have been nearly complete, which is why this quilt amazes me. Surely she could have had little exposure to Mondrian. Compare the top left picture of the quilt to the Mondrian (left below).

Or, compare the Hoffmann (above right) to the center top picture of the quilt. The Hoffmann was painted more than ten years after the quilt was made! Janie saw and thought with the freedom of a non-objective painter.

This brings us to the disservice that the critical establishment (coming out of Paris and New York City) did to thousands of quilters and other craftspeople by ignoring or marginalizing their work. Around the late 1960's and early 1970's artists like Judy Chicago began to insist that these works be taken seriously. Much art criticism has been more political than rational. It draws a distinction between craft and fine art based, variously, on intention, influence, scale, use, audience appealed-to, growth from precedent, and as function within system.

All these distinctions are real, and can resonate with the physical confrontation with the object. But the arts are conducted in many languages and systems that take similar distinctions into account. If one does not understand a language , s/he is not entitled to criticize the quality of its words. That a system has been more thoroughly described than another system does not entail its superiority. Nor is importance synonymous with quality -- for we can always ask "important to whom?"