2016 Exhibitions
ANYTHING GOES: AN EXHIBIT OF ART CLOTH NETWORK
NOVEMBER 30, 2016 - JANUARY 15, 2017
The Art Cloth Network is a group of professional artists who promote the medium of cloth as an art form. The cloth is a surface transformed. Color, line, shape, texture, value, or fiber is added or subtracted to create a compelling composition for deeply personal storytelling and life reflections. Limitless opportunities are explored: dyeing, painting, foiling, folding, photo manipulating, stitching, and layering. From afar, they are riveting abstract works. Up close the methods used are extraordinary in their diversity and experimentation. Emotions are worked out through holes burned into flannel, creative cutting and stitching, photo manipulation and layering, dyed fragments, and paint re-touching.
Her Tapestry, Mary Ellen Latino
HMONG STORY CLOTHS: STITCHING A HISTORY
OCTOBER 7, 2016 - JANUARY 15, 2017
Chronicling the lives of the Hmong people of Laos, Story Cloths are vibrant and intricate needlework that developed out of refugee camps following the Vietnam War. As an alternative to written language, village women would stitch cloth at night to document and communicate the story of their daily lives: collecting water, harvesting, transforming hemp into fabric- and also the highlights of their lives: escaping a great flood, New Year festivities, and marriage rituals. The story cloths offer an intimate view into the cultural legacy and resilience of the Hmong people.
Join Author Linda Gerdner on Sunday November 6 at 1pm to 2pm for a lecture, reading and book signing.
THE CALIFORNIA ART QUILT REVOLUTION: FROM THE SUMMER OF LOVE TO THE NEW MILLENNIUM
OCTOBER 7 - JANUARY 15, 2017
In the last decades of the 20th century, California quilt makers charted new territory in quilt making, leading the nation in creativity and innovation. During the 1970s and 1980s, California artists were among the first to embrace the quilt medium as their primary means of expression. More traditional quilt makers also expanded horizons, creating original designs based on traditional quilt patterns. This exhibition includes works by pioneers of the art quilt movement such as Jean Ray Laury, Yvonne Porcella, Joan Schulze and Therese May, who pushed the boundaries of what could be called a quilt, and highlights late 20th and 21st century artists working in the quilt medium.
Clear Palisades, 1987 Linda MacDonald 92x92"
LINES, ANGLES, AND SHAPES
JEAN RENLI JURGENSON, SUE SIEFKIN AND GERI PATTERSON-KUTRAS
OCTOBER 7, 2016 - NOVEMBER 27, 2016
In the exhibit “Lines, Angles, and Shapes,” at the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, three Northern California fiber artists explore architectural themes. Whether drawing inspiration from actual buildings or pure imagination, each artist reveals her way of expressing angle, perspective, line, and shape through her use of value, color, and scale. The quilts ask viewers to consider the visual strength of the masonry, wood and steel as they are depicted in the supple, fluid medium of cloth.
TRANSMORPHO: THE FUTURE OF TEXTILES AND FASHION DESIGN BY UC DAVIS-FT LAB
AUGUST 24, 2016 - OCTOBER 2, 2016
Developed in the UC Davis Fashion Design and Technology Lab, the collection presents textiles and fashion-driven interdisciplinary efforts that combine computer science, electrical engineering, and architecture to improve people's quality of life and wellness. This exhibition comprises smart textiles, wearable technology, and sustainable, transformable clothing; the mixing of low and high technologies can be converted into multiple colors, shapes, and designs by growing, changing and being reformed or restructured. The co-designers include Rong Ben, Tinsley Fok, Sean Huang, Megan Johnston, SueBin (Sally) Lee, Jason Lin, Katherine Ta, Dat Vo and 19 other students majoring in design or electrical and computer engineering. The exhibition also features work created from the Design and Wearable Technology class. Additional collaborators include San Francisco- based architects Jongsun Lee and Misun Lee as well as designers from the Medialab- Prado in Spain.
WEDDING DRESS: YESTERDAY, TODAY & TOMORROW
JULY 8, 2016 - OCTOBER 2, 2016
The San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles will provide a richly illustrated exhibition featuring over 50 wedding dress examples from cultures around the world, spanning the last 100 years. It will also include examples of today’s diverse wedding couture.
The white wedding dress has dominated the Western imagination since it was popularized by Queen Victoria in the 19th century. But the color, style and ceremonial importance of wedding apparel has often varied according to time period, as well as cultural and religious traditions. In eastern cultures, for instance, brides often choose red to symbolize auspiciousness.
Borrowing from: local cultural organizations, collectors, designers and History San Jose; this show will illuminate the evolution of the wedding dress, ethnic similarities and differences, and explore new questions raised by the legalization of same-sex marriage. Included in the collection will be a colorful 17’ Moroccan wedding belt, a dress worn by Josie Eldridge Crump in 1895 and a DIY dress designed around a bride’s tattoos. Traditions are clearly no longer limited to something borrowed and something blue.
The exhibition is guest curated by Kate Eilertsen who says: “Whether it is a traditional kimono, red sari or satin Flapper era dress, the wedding dress reveals much about the traditions and history of communities around the world.”
MIKE MCNAMARA: WEDDING RING EXPLOSION
JULY 8, 2016 - OCTOBER 2, 2016
Over the past twenty years, Mike McNamara “Mac” has made twenty-one Double Wedding Ring quilts for his couple friends and family, gay and straight. Early on, he made his own version of these quilts. The first designs were started with two intersecting gold rings. Subsequent versions evolved into quilts with gold arcs and hints of rings. Long before gay marriage became the law of the land, his Double Wedding Rings quilts included gay friends and family members. Like the Wedding Dress clothing exhibit, Mac’s quilts look at how wedding quilt traditions have changed over the centuries and how 21st century quilt makers are celebrating today's marriages.
JAZZ IMPRESSIONS
JULY 2016 - SEPTEMBER 2016
Visit the Porcella Gallery to see how one American classic interprets another, JAZZ and Quilts. Members of the Santa Clara Valley Quilt Association will display guilts and other fiber arts based on Jazz music. Selected items of the 45 that are displayed will be available for purchase. This exhibition is in perfect accompaniment with the San Jose Jazz 27th Summer Fest August 12th through 14th.
INSPIRATIONS II
MAY 4, 2016 - JULY 3, 2016
What inspires artists? Is it their environment, the people in their lives, minute observation, grand passions, perhaps the act of artistic creation itself? Inspirations II, from the Northern California/Northern Nevada Region of Studio Art Quilt Associates (SAQA), an international organization supporting and promoting the art quilt, will show the result of twenty textile artist taking personal inspiration and, using a wide and inventive array of materials and techniques, turning it into a work of art that expresses their unique voice. This show is the successor to Northern California Inspirations, which was exhibited at FiberSpace in 2014.
BLANKET STATEMENTS: NEW QUILTS BY KAFFE FASSETT AND HISTORICAL QUILTS FROM THE QUILT MUSEUM AND GALLERY, YORK, ENGLAND
MARCH 12, 2016 – JULY 3, 2016
Blanket Statements: New Quilts by Kaffe Fassett and Historical Quilts from the Quilt Museum and Gallery, York, England features twenty new quilts designed and created by Kaffe Fassett in response to fifteen significant historic quilts, dating from 1780-1949, selected by the artist from the York Quilt Museum and Gallery. The traditional historic quilts provide contrast to Fassett’s bold fabric designs and explosion of color. San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles is one of only two American museum venues to host this spectacular exhibition.
Additional loans from Fassett’s family and a private collector represent over fifty years of the artist’s work in painting, knitwear, needlepoint design, and ceramics, illustrating the full range of Fassett’s prodigious talents. The additional material provides visitors with a rich experience and deeper understanding of Fassett’s lifelong creative journey.
Born and raised in Big Sur, California, Fassett studied art at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, but has made England his home since the mid 1960s. Fassett transformed the hand-knitting world in the 1970s with his bold use of color, incorporating an unprecedented twenty shades of yarn in one sweater! He continued to explore needlepoint, mosaics, rug making, tapestries, yarn and fabric design, costume and set design, and as this exhibition brilliantly illustrates, quilt making. His influence in the quilt world has been as profound as his effect on knitting, needlepoint and other fiber arts.
Now in his seventies, one of world’s foremost fiber artists and designers continues to be extraordinarily prolific and shows no signs of slowing down.
George-Ann Bowers, Pod Cluster 2, 2015
Photo credit: Dana Davis
BEYOND THE SURFACE
JANUARY 6, 2016 - FEBRUARY 28, 2016
This juried exhibition from the Northern California Surface Design Association (SDA) includes nineteen artworks that display a wide range of fiber art techniques, in both two and three-dimensions. Artists in this exhibition explore new variations of traditional techniques--felting, weaving, coiling, stitching, dyeing, painting, printing, quilting, and embroidery--using modern materials, often to express contemporary social or political ideas.
Lin Schiffner, Meditation on Earth
EARTH, WATER, AIR, FIRE
JANUARY 3, 2016 - FEBRUARY 28, 2016
Since ancient times, the four classical elements of Earth, Water, Air, and Fire have been used as a way to organize and understand the miraculous mystery of life's essence--the most basic, unchangeable fabrics of existence. The ARTful Women, Sandra Poteet, Gail Sims, Lin Schiffner and Ann Sanderson, have interpreted the classical elements in fiber art. Utilizing texture, color, cloth and thread each artist explored all four elements as a series, resulting in four distinct, artful interpretations.
Poetry Reading/Artists Reception: Sunday, February 7, 2 -4 pm.
Don't miss the chance to meet the four accomplished fiber artists in this exhibition and four exceptionally talented poets—Sally Ashton, Jennifer Swanton Brown, Pathenia M. Hicks, and Persis Karim. The artists have created sixteen works that are the roots of inspiration for sixteen ekphrastic poems created specially for this exhibition. The public is invited to meet these eight women, view the fiber pieces and hear the poets read their beautiful words.
Patty Hawkins, Forest Enigma
EARTH STORIES: 25TH ANNIVERSARY EXHIBITION FROM STUDIO ART QUILT ASSOCIATES
NOVEMBER 6, 2015 - FEBRUARY 28, 2016
There are many stories of hope across the globe. Both individuals and small groups are working on projects that, when added together, make a positive impact on improving the quality of life on this planet. Earth Stories celebrates the stories of people and projects that enhance the planet, make a significant difference in restoring and/or protecting the environment, increase sustainability and otherwise enhance the earth we all occupy. Juror Dr. Carolyn Mazloomi chose twenty-four artists from around the world to interpret a "story" of their choice and highlight the positive effects of individual and collective actions.
