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Jul. 25th, 2010 07:31 pmDear Milwaukee Art Museum:
While I very much enjoyed your exhibit, American Quilts: Selections from the Winterthur Collectcion, and was impressed by the excellence of the quilts, there was one thing that gave me pause.
The quilts in the exhibit were from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (1760-1850), and they were, of course, made by women. I said to my husband, "This is the most women's names you will ever see in a museum exhibit," and that was something I particularly appreciated: seeing women's artwork taken seriously and presented as worthy of respect, even if it was evident that the curators were struggling to find the vocabulary to talk about the quilts as art rather than merely as social artifacts. That's okay; I understand how hard that can be, having encountered the same difficulty with science fiction and fantasy many times, and that did not detract from the quality of the exhibit. However, in the gift shop (the last room in the exhibit), there were three quilts on display by Bruce Seeds.
Let me be clear: I think that it is awesome that a twenty-first century man has chosen to take up quilting, and furthermore, I think that Mr. Seeds' quilts are indeed excellent and gorgeous and quite interesting in juxtaposition with the quilts in the exhibit. But by placing them at the end of this exhibit of early American quilts, without any acknowledgment of the fact that women continued to make quilts for the 150 years in between and are still making quilts, some of which are every bit as iconoclastic, if not more so, than Mr. Seeds', are you not perpetuating a particularly unpleasant canard: that women may be competent to make, in this case, quilts, but it takes a man to make real art out of them? In this context, I cannot help but feel that Mr. Seeds' slightly supercilious self-consciousness ("not your grandmother's quilts" indeed) is an unfortunate sidelight on the valuation of women's artwork--the very thing that I had found so striking and admirable in the rest of the exhibit. (Let me also add that I know that's being unfair to Mr. Seeds, since I wouldn't find that nearly as troublesome in a different context--and the context is not his fault.) And while I understand that the focus of the exhibit was on early American quilts, and thus it did not have the scope to explore the rich continuing tradition(s) of American quilting, if you could find space for one modern quilter in your gift shop, could you not either
(a.) have found space for two?
or
(b.) have made that single quilter1 a woman, so as to continue the celebration of women's arts that made the exhibit so moving?
It's not hard to find examples of contemporary women quilters doing fascinating work. Here's a fairly intellectualized example, but jeez. Just take a look at the Smoky Mountain Quilt Show 2009 and see the amazing and beautiful things contemporary women are doing in quilting.2
After a lovely, thought-provoking, and even inspiring exhibit, this sudden descent into patriarchalism left me feeling dissatisfied, and in fact a little bitter--as this blog post now attests.
Nevertheless, thank you for putting on this exhibit of early American women's quilts. It is far better to have a flawed exhibit than no exhibit at all.
---
1For that matter, I was puzzled by the degree to which the exhibit ignored the fact that quilting was a social art. The quilts were all attributed as much as possible to single quilters, even when those single quilters' names were unknown. I would have appreciated an acknowledgment that the paradigms of Western art did not apply comfortably here.
2When I was a kid, there was a woman who exhibited her quilts at the Children's Museum of Oak Ridge. Her quilts were astonishing in their combination of quilting, calligraphy, and feminism--obviously, since I remember them twenty-plus years later. I just wish I could remember her name.
While I very much enjoyed your exhibit, American Quilts: Selections from the Winterthur Collectcion, and was impressed by the excellence of the quilts, there was one thing that gave me pause.
The quilts in the exhibit were from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (1760-1850), and they were, of course, made by women. I said to my husband, "This is the most women's names you will ever see in a museum exhibit," and that was something I particularly appreciated: seeing women's artwork taken seriously and presented as worthy of respect, even if it was evident that the curators were struggling to find the vocabulary to talk about the quilts as art rather than merely as social artifacts. That's okay; I understand how hard that can be, having encountered the same difficulty with science fiction and fantasy many times, and that did not detract from the quality of the exhibit. However, in the gift shop (the last room in the exhibit), there were three quilts on display by Bruce Seeds.
Let me be clear: I think that it is awesome that a twenty-first century man has chosen to take up quilting, and furthermore, I think that Mr. Seeds' quilts are indeed excellent and gorgeous and quite interesting in juxtaposition with the quilts in the exhibit. But by placing them at the end of this exhibit of early American quilts, without any acknowledgment of the fact that women continued to make quilts for the 150 years in between and are still making quilts, some of which are every bit as iconoclastic, if not more so, than Mr. Seeds', are you not perpetuating a particularly unpleasant canard: that women may be competent to make, in this case, quilts, but it takes a man to make real art out of them? In this context, I cannot help but feel that Mr. Seeds' slightly supercilious self-consciousness ("not your grandmother's quilts" indeed) is an unfortunate sidelight on the valuation of women's artwork--the very thing that I had found so striking and admirable in the rest of the exhibit. (Let me also add that I know that's being unfair to Mr. Seeds, since I wouldn't find that nearly as troublesome in a different context--and the context is not his fault.) And while I understand that the focus of the exhibit was on early American quilts, and thus it did not have the scope to explore the rich continuing tradition(s) of American quilting, if you could find space for one modern quilter in your gift shop, could you not either
(a.) have found space for two?
or
(b.) have made that single quilter1 a woman, so as to continue the celebration of women's arts that made the exhibit so moving?
It's not hard to find examples of contemporary women quilters doing fascinating work. Here's a fairly intellectualized example, but jeez. Just take a look at the Smoky Mountain Quilt Show 2009 and see the amazing and beautiful things contemporary women are doing in quilting.2
After a lovely, thought-provoking, and even inspiring exhibit, this sudden descent into patriarchalism left me feeling dissatisfied, and in fact a little bitter--as this blog post now attests.
Nevertheless, thank you for putting on this exhibit of early American women's quilts. It is far better to have a flawed exhibit than no exhibit at all.
---
1For that matter, I was puzzled by the degree to which the exhibit ignored the fact that quilting was a social art. The quilts were all attributed as much as possible to single quilters, even when those single quilters' names were unknown. I would have appreciated an acknowledgment that the paradigms of Western art did not apply comfortably here.
2When I was a kid, there was a woman who exhibited her quilts at the Children's Museum of Oak Ridge. Her quilts were astonishing in their combination of quilting, calligraphy, and feminism--obviously, since I remember them twenty-plus years later. I just wish I could remember her name.
