Why cry over spilt quilts? Or: another day, another cancelled grant

Every day in my newsfeed I see something that makes me want to shout or scream or cry, but instead I turn my head away and go back to my work feeling helpless. This story, though, stopped me in my tracks: "Canceled federal grant may mean 1,500 historic quilts won't be preserved," by Chloe Veltman on NPR. Of all the horrors filling the airwaves, why cry over quilts?

Quilts are utilitarian: Scraps of fabric are recycled, pieced together, and sandwiched into layers to keep a family warm at night. 

Quilts are history: Fragments of worn-out clothes get preserved in the pieced-together quilt top. In Alice Walker's short story "Everyday Use," treasured family quilts contain "scraps of dresses Grandma Dee had worn fifty or more years ago. Bits and pieces of Grandpa Jarrell's paisley shirts. And one teeny faded blue piece, about the size of a penny matchbox, that was from Great Grandpa Ezra's uniform that he wore in the Civil War."

Quilts are art: Over the centuries thousands of quilters--mostly women--devoted precious time and skill to bringing a measure of beauty and color into their households. A well-pieced an intricately stitched Lone Star pattern doesn't warm the body any better than would a mishmash of scraps, but its beauty warms the heart.

Quilting is democratic: Anyone with access to fabric scraps, needle, thread, and patience can put a quilt together, although having a quilt frame and a group of friends to help with the hard parts can be a boon. Quilting thrives within a community where the elders pass their acquired knowledge down to the rising generation.

In "Everyday Use" Walker introduces a mother of two daughters with very different attitudes toward the family's quilts. The educated, sophisticated daughter, Dee, wants to nab the family's quilts and hang them on her walls to bolster her authenticity and impress her friends, but her damaged and backward sister, Maggie, wants the quilts to keep her and her future husband warm at night. However, Maggie is willing to surrender the quilts because, as she says, "I can 'member Grandma Dee without the quilts"--and besides, she knows how to quilt. She can always make more.

Walker allows Maggie to win the argument, keeping the quilts for everyday use. This may feel like a travesty, because, as Dee reminds us, using the quilts will only destroy them, and they would be far more valuable hanging on a museum's wall. But throughout the story Walker distinguishes between the outsiders, who plunder a community's items of worth and beauty, and the insiders who keep folk-art practices alive by passing their skills down to the next generation. Walker's sympathies lie with the quilters more than the quilts.

But those quilts! What happens to old quilts when the quilters have died off?

"Because quilts are for everyday use and stored in people's homes," writes NPR's Veltman, "they're easily exposed to mold, insects and other destructive elements that cause the fabric to degrade over time."

To counter this degradation, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) is putting its stellar collection of historic quilts through a complex and expensive process. Many of the 3000 irreplaceable quilts created by African American quilters, some dating back to the 1860s, must be carefully cleaned, disinfected, and stored or displayed, a preservation process involving "treating them with carbon dioxide gas for about a five to seven week period" 

This process will cost $1.6 million, but it will safely preserve the quilts for future study and display. BAMPFA received federal grants totaling $460,000 and had already treated about half of the quilts before the grant was terminated. The Institute of Museum and Library Services, which administers the grant and has been gutted by recent government cuts, wrote that "your grant is unfortunately no longer consistent with the agency's priorities and no longer serves the interest of the United States and IMLS programs." 

And what are those interests? I'll let Veltman explain:

An IMLS statement said the agency is redirecting funding toward programs that "serve as a symbol to their communities of American greatness, ones that spark the imagination of children and provide an outlet for younger generations to immerse themselves in the inspirational story of our founding, ones that impart a renewed sense of pride and inspire the virtues of patriotic citizenship..."

I don't know about you, but a collection of beautiful quilts attesting to the tireless efforts and skills of often unknown and marginalized quilters would serve well as a symbol of American greatness, and perhaps it would even spark children to imagine how they could use their own skills and resources to beautify their communities. 

But that kind of inspiration no longer "serves the interest of the United States," apparently. What does? More statues? More exaltation of loud and powerful men while other quiet contributions to culture go unremarked?

I am reminded of the collection of embroidered shawls stashed away in a trunk in Salman Rushdie's novel Shame. While powerful men in the novel take violent action cement their power in the new nation of Pakistan--or Peccavistan, as it sometimes appears in the novel--one marginalized woman sits silently embroidering the stories of the men's perfidy on fifteen shawls. No one fears or respects a powerless woman who simply sits embroidering shawls, but she observes the men and records their deeds in a history that remains hidden at the end of the book.

But what if someday someone were to open the trunk? The shawls are still there waiting to reveal another side of the nation's story.

And that's how I view these historic quilts. They tell stories too long overlooked of hard-working people who pulled together scraps and fragments to surround all of us with warmth, truth, and beauty. If that's not a foundational American virtue, what is? 

Like square clouds in a round sky

It's the first day of class and instructions are simple: look at the work of art on the screen, describe what you see in some detail, and then speculate about what it suggests about the relationship between people and nature. "There's no right answer," I tell my students; "I just want you to give me an idea of your writing and analytical skills," but when I read their responses, I am dismayed. Is there a farmer in the class? How about an artist? Not even one?

The class is Concepts of Nature and the painting is Grant Wood's Spring Turning, painted in 1936 (see it here). I've used this painting before so I'm accustomed to seeing students struggle to figure out what's going on: What are those brown squares on the hills? Baseball diamonds? An arena for horse-racing? Or just an attempt to impose symmetry on the face of nature?

They notice the grass, the intense green of the rolling hills, and I encourage them to walk up close and look at details, but maybe they're shy or maybe they're in a hurry to finish so they keep their seats and fail to notice so many small things: the tiny farmer and his team of horses tilling the ground, the road and farmhouse and fence-line tucked between the hills, and the phalanx of clouds rolling along the top of the painting.

Most of all I want them to notice the clouds. So much depends upon a white cloud rolling over a square field, and a few students pay lip service to the clouds, mostly to note that the clouds are white and fluffy. Not a single student notices that the clouds are also square.

Clouds are not supposed to be square! Why would Grant Wood have painted something so unnatural in a painting immersing the viewer in the natural world?

I'll ask that question on Monday when we look at the painting again, and I'll nudge students to notice the contrasting shapes: the hills are rounded and rolling, while the only straight lines and right angles are imposed by human beings, inviting us to associate roundness with nature and squares with culture. But then why the square clouds?

In fact the clouds perfectly mimic the shapes of the farmer's fields, providing a visual metaphor for the nineteenth-century belief that Rain Follows the Plow. Wood, painting in 1936, could look back at the Dust Bowl, the disastrous result of plowing without regard to the contours of the land, but he was clearly also looking back even further to the time in the late nineteenth century when farmers were enticed to settle in too-dry areas by the promise that cultivating parched land would change the weather--that plowing dry land would cause rain to fall on it.

Wood's painting mocks that concept by taking it literally, which ought to cause viewers to step back and question other assumptions. Yes, the peaceful setting evokes nostalgia for a pastoral lifestyle, and yes, the massiveness of nature dwarfs the tiny farmer with his tiny team, but step back and look at the painting as a whole and suddenly the whole landscape looks like a human body covered with a quilt of verdant green, perhaps a sexy pun on planting seeds or fertilization or perhaps a reminder that we see nature always through human eyes and shape it in our own image. 

None of my students saw that today, or if they did they lacked the confidence to write about it. If I accomplish nothing else in this class, I hope that by the end of the semester every one of my students will notice the little details that stand out like square clouds in a round sky, and I hope they will start asking questions and keep asking until they find some answers.

 

Going in circles, from Vessel to LaGuardia

At midnight, the food court at LaGuardia airport is surprisingly (and annoyingly) noisy. I'd really like to curl up somewhere and sleep, but these hard cafe chairs don't encourage comfort, and even if they did, the noise would put the kibosh on and slumber. Aside from frequent public announcements warning of the dangers of leaving baggage unattended or parking empty cars outside the terminal, we're subjected to urgent chatter in a mixture of languages plus an intermittent squeal produced by a nearby escalator. My husband wadded his jacket into a sort of pillow and put his head down on the table in front of him, but I don't know whether he's actually asleep or just pretending. Either way, a crick in the neck is inevitable.

We would both be asleep in our own beds if our flight had left on schedule, but it was delayed one then two then three hours and then we finally boarded in cold, wet, windy fog and then taxied out on the tarmac to get the plane de-iced, where we sat for nearly an hour with poor ventilation. The heat and fumes made me woozy, but that wasn't the worst of our problems: de-icing fluid leaked inside the plane, and while the Powers That Be were deciding how to deal with that problem, the pilot reached his maximum quota of hours for the day and another pilot was not available. So they took us back to the terminal, gave us a bag of free pretzels and a new flight for tomorrow morning, and bid us farewell with a wimpy "Sorry!"

You'll notice that no lodging was included in the deal, nor any food vouchers, which didn't really matter since all the restaurants were closed by that time. Sorry doesn't quite cut it at this point, and I suspect that Sorry will feel even less adequate when we reach the wee hours of the morning. 

It's funny: we started the day walking in circles, and now we're being kept awake by an escalator that keeps circling and squealing and reminding us that we're going nowhere. This morning we walked over to Hudson Yards, where, despite more cold, rain, sleet, snow, wind, and fog, we walked to the top of the Vessel, Thomas Heatherwick's walkable outdoor sculpture. I suppose the views are spectacular when the city isn't socked in with fog, but even under such adverse conditions, it was a fun and fascinating installation. Each flight of steps or turn produces new angles and views; we were alternately walking inside a beehive, a giant erector set, or an Escher print.

We made it out of that experience feeling refreshed and invigorated, but our circular journey in the aiport resulted in less pleasant feelings. I know I'll be a wreck in the morning if I don't sleep, but I also have a pile of freshman drafts I need to read and if I can't sleep, I may as well make myself useful. And I really ought to get back to campus tomorrow, but let's see if our flight actually takes off tomorrow morning. If not, I'm going looking for something more significant than a mere Sorry. I just wish the airline could deliver a good night's sleep.

 

A cat may look on an author

Since I've been in New York I've seen some wonders, and I'm not just talking about the well-dressed woman carrying a Christmas tree down Fifth Avenue. I ran through a year's quota of "oohs" and "aahs" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art yesterday, but what most impressed me was a cat in a canoe.

In the American wing the crowds flock to see Emanuel Leutze's massive Washington Crossing the Delaware, but I was more drawn to a smaller painting: George Caleb Bingham's Fur Traders on the Missouri. I was first drawn to the light but I was held there by the stillness of the scene, the lively expressions on the figures' faces, and the cat. I read somewhere that scans of the painting suggest that Bingham had originally sketched a bear in the bow of the boat, but I think I prefer the cat, a black hole of ineffable stillness standing alone even when allowing itself to be accompanied.

I thoroughly wore out my legs with walking yesterday but still managed to see only a small fraction of the museum. I especially enjoyed a room full of portraits of women, including several by Mary Cassatt, and I sat and pondered a room full of landscapes by artists whose work I employ in my Concepts of Nature class: Asher Durand, Albert Bierstadt, and Thomas Cole. I enjoyed seeing some John Singer Sargent portraits, but none of them grabbed me as powerfully as a few of his charcoal portraits I'd seen at the Morgan on Friday. William Butler Yeats and Henry James hung side-by-side, Yeats holding himself aloof while James's eyes pierced the viewer's psyche. These are the eyes that peered deep into the heart of Isabel Archer and then put what he saw there on the page.

I'd like to put that portrait of Henry James face-to-face with Bingham's cat, although I don't know how James would manage the canoe. Both figures compel viewers' attention, looking straight into our souls while holding their own in reserve. Of all the wonders I've seen in the city, these are among the few that have held my gaze--and looked back. 

 

Of art and ruins

On Sunday I was writing about the great fire in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose that destroys the monastery and its labyrinthine library, reducing uncounted irreplaceable manuscripts to ash, and on Monday I was writing about the remarkable human ability, as illustrated in Colson Whitehead's Zone One, to rearrange the scattered debris of disaster to create art out of ruins, but then I heard that Notre-Dame Cathedral was burning and I thought we already have enough ruins--no need to make more.

Creating art from ruins inspires hope, but hardly enough to assuage the waves of grief that roll in when art is transformed into ruins.

On beautiful violence

When people ask me why I'm sitting in on an upper-level art history class called "Art and Violence" this semester, I generally don't say "Because I'm still trying to resolve an argument that's been bugging me since grad school." It's much easier to say something vague like "The topic interests me"; anything close to the truth requires a quick trip back to a time when a grad-school professor put a book on the syllabus without having first read it himself.

I'm not entirely sure why he did that. He was a brand-new professor teaching his first graduate-level course and a senior faculty member in his department strongly urged him to put this book on the syllabus so he may have thought he had no choice, but for whatever reason, there the book sat like a bomb timed to go off in the fourth or fifth week of the semester.

The week before the book was due, the professor made a sheepish announcement: he hadn't read the book before; he'd assigned it under duress; he apologized in advance if anyone found it offensive and he wouldn't penalize students for failing to finish the book since he (the professor!) hadn't made it past page 57.




Of the 12 or 15 students in the class, how many admitted to having read the whole book? Two. The rest pronounced it offensive and appalling and horrific and proudly proclaimed that they couldn't possibly read past page 57.

The book was Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. Page 57 is where you'll find the dead-baby bush--an admittedly gruesome scene in a book full of gruesome scenes.

The class had an impassioned discussion of the ethics of making violence beautiful, and I found myself in the awkward position of defending a book that the professor had declared unreadable. I admitted that the violence was gruesome but argued that it served a larger purpose in McCarthy's exploration of the human condition, but it's really hard to make an argument about a book when only one other person in the room has read it all the way through. 

I've re-read the book several times since then and I still find it compelling (and beautiful!) despite the ugly behavior it describes, but I've never assigned it to an undergraduate classroom. I've assigned other books containing equally disturbing scenes, like Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain and Jose Saramago's Blindness, and I would have no qualms about assigning McCarthy's novel The Road.

But not the movie. The movie gave me nightmares. In fact, I resist watching films portraying violence because they disturb my sleep and distress my soul--even when equally disturbing written portrayals of violence don't make me bat an eye.

I realize that there's something wrong with that attitude. If I have no ethical qualms about literature that makes beauty from violence, why do I shy away from visual portrayals of violence? If violence in literature can serve a larger purpose, why won't I allow violence in visual art to do the same thing? If I'm not horrified by the written description of the dead-baby bush, why would I refuse to watch it on film?

These are the topics I'd like to explore this semester, and I welcome the opportunity to do it in the company of people who know a whole lot more about art than I do. I want to learn things and think deeply about an interesting topic, and I hope it will enrich my teaching on those occasions when I introduce students to violent texts.

Like this morning, when my honors students begin discussing The Odyssey. Skewer those suitors, Odysseus! (Just don't ask me to watch the carnage on screen.)