The photo above is from the opening of the show BRAVE 100, in 2019 at the Eiland Arts Center in Merchantville, NJ 2019, the 100th Anniversary of the 19th Amendment, when Women Won the Right to Vote! The show was a celebration of that momentous event and I was so proud to be included and even more proud to win first prize for my entry which was entitled Pocketbooks.
The work was 5 quilt squares per piece, with an acrylic portrait on water color paper behind clear plastic sewn into the front of each square. Five 'pages' or squares were sewn together at the top and a hanging strap was attached. Each portrait was of a woman of accomplishement who was a hero of mine: Margaret Meade, anthropoliogist, Rachel Carson, environmentalist and author of a ground breaking book: Silent Spring, and Frances Moore Lappe, who wrote another ground breaking book Diet for a Small Planet about the impact of animal agriculture on our environment and our health. They were just three of the twenty women I featured in this work.
There were many inspirations for the format of this piece: my Grandmother Mabel who was a quilter and inspired my lifelong interest in quilting and women's lives, Judy Chicago who opened the Art World to Women's needlework and who also opened the Art World to the idea of collaborative work. Finally, my main inspiration was my daughter. When Lavinia was very little, I wanted to introduce her to books and I wanted them to be safe and relevant. Books were very expensive and in the beginning we wwere fairly poor, so I made the books. I wanted them to be safe so I made the pages out of fabric; at first, they were made from some of my own clothes, later, from things I bought at thrift shops to offer a variety of textures. It was the development of the same idea, a square of fabric with a pocket in the middle. In the first ones, I put photographs - City Animals (a photo of a police horse, a cat in an antique store window, a pigeon) and so on. The book had pages made of faux fur, satin, corduroy, muslin, denim, tweed wool, to offer a variety of textures for her to enjoy. I loved that book and so did she. I would put in the pockets, little toys like dollar store trinkets or things I had, a threat spool, a collection of buttons.
I always loved that idea and wanted to do something more with it, so when the show came up, I thought of putting portraits in the pockets.
Just this morning, in e-mail, I recieved a notice of a show coming up in February featuring historic women in Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics. I thought I should use my idea again and do a five page "Pocketbook" with one woman for each area: Rosalind Franklin (who took the electron-Microscopic photo of dna that Watson and Crick useed to figure out the 3-d model, and since today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I decided to add an African American woman of scientific merit in engineering, the first African American Woman to receive a medical degree in Opthalmology who invented laser technology to remove cataracts, Patricia Bath.
Just an hour ago, I went to Walmart and bought the fabrics and to make it a little different, I thought I might embroider the names on the squares so I bought embroidery thread and needles. Now I have my work cut out for me and only two weeks to get it done! Tomorrow I will et up my sewing machine in the back room. My materials today cost $100. My materials for the first Pocketbooks Art Piece cost about $400 because I had to spend $200 to get my sewing machine fixed and up and running - it was my mother's sewing machine, and I also have my great-grandmother's sewing machine in the attic. the quilting grandmother and her mother, Mabel Wright and Catherine Sandman, made a living with their sewing machines after they were widowed, and that was how they survived and raised their children.
Happy Trails - through the woods, the mind, the world! Jo Ann
to comment or discuss use my e-mail wrightj45@yahoo.com as 'comments' is polluted by robo spam.
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