Lowell Quilt Festival captures the fabric of our lives
The New England Quilt Museum is housed in a former Lowell bank, where the old vault's reinforced steel doors are still visible from the first-floor lobby. Now, in a locked upstairs room, treasures of a different kind are piling up on two long trestle tables.
These are quilts chosen for exhibition at the Tsongas Arena in a juried show, Images 2008, a highlight of the sixth citywide Lowell Quilt Festival.
On a recent weekday morning, festival codirectors Jacque Thompson and Jeanette Racine were at the museum, taking delivery of the day's influx of quilts for the show. Carol Durand of Dracut unrolled a small panel incorporating hand-printed Indonesian batik fabrics in a scene of elephants and jungle. A painter by training, she took up quilting after being "floored" by the artistry and variety of the work displayed at Images 2000.
This year's show has attracted a record number of entries, said Racine. The 180 quilts chosen, the work of 165 quilters, come from all over the United States, as well as Belgium and Canada.
Once confined to the home, quilts have entered the worlds of politics and art in recent decades. The AIDS Memorial Quilt, for example, generated worldwide publicity when displayed at the National Mall in Washington five times from 1987 to 1996. And the success of the Quilts of Gee's Bend at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art in 2002 and 2003 fostered recognition of the artistry of African-American women from a remote part of Alabama.
The renaissance of quilting over the last 25 years has "completely revitalized the home fabric industry," said quilt museum director Connie Collom, quoting trade estimates that there are 27 million quilters in the United States today, and that the quilting supplies industry totals $3.3 billion a year.
The average US household that includes a quilter or quilters spends more than $3,000 annually on supplies, said Collom, quite a statistic for a craft rooted in poverty and frugality.
During the festival, five exhibits, with additional shows in galleries all over town, will give a kaleidoscopic view of the evolution of quilting from Colonial times to the present.
At the Revolving Museum, just across the street from the quilt museum, two contrasting pieces show how different artists combine fabric, thread, memory, and imagination to produce unique results.
Laura Mayotte's "My Quilt Memory Game" is a dark blue cotton quilt about 10 feet square. One hundred small round pillows, each about 5 inches in diameter, are attached in neat rows and columns, 10 by 10, by short linen threads hanging from vintage buttons.
Each pillow has two faces: a plain dark blue one, like the quilt, and a patterned one. Some bear photographic images of the artist, her husband, and children; others are stamped or appliquéd. Each image has a twin, and the game is to turn over the pillows to find matching pairs.
"I love everything fiber and fiber-related," said Mayotte, 40, of Chelmsford, who has a master's degree in fine arts in artisan-made fibers and papermaking. The idea for the quilt evolved from childhood memories of the card matching games she played with her youngest sister, and she worked on it at night for five months, after her children, ages 3 and 1, were in bed.
The memory game quilt has fascinated gallery visitors of all ages. "I've had people stand here for hours," said gallery manager Elaina Bates. "It's a very successful piece in terms of getting people involved."
Also on display at the Revolving Museum is Vickie Hu Poirier's "Family Reunion, Mexico Style," a quilt in two, 6-foot-square panels that depicts a multigenerational, multiracial family party, with grandmothers gossiping, children playing, and couples dancing in many styles from traditional Mexican dances to the jitterbug.
"Quilts have always told stories. Quilts have always been used as memorial pieces," said Poirier, 61, a textile artist with a background in community economic development, who is the new executive director at the Revolving Museum. They also preserve traditions that would otherwise be lost. The Gee's Bend quilts, for instance "came from utility and poverty, but also from a rich cultural heritage from Africa," she said.
The importance of quilts as expressions of cultural identity - as well as a source of income for impoverished women - is highlighted by one group of quilts at the Tsongas Arena. These are 16 pieces made by a Haitian women's quilt-making co-operative, and brought to Lowell by Jeanne
Started in 2007 as an offshoot of the Martha's Vineyard Fish Farm for Haiti Project, Peacequilts helps Haitian girls and women make quilts using traditional imagery - native fruit, animals, and everyday scenes - to sell in the US.
In the project's early stages, said Staples, speaking from her home on Martha's Vineyard, Rhonda Galpern, outreach program manager at the quilt museum, gave invaluable advice and practical support in the form of donated needles, thread, and templates.
Galpern sees her involvement with Peacequilts as part of the museum's mission to preserve and promote the art of quilt making. "It's vital that this goes to the next generation," she said.
