Mid-Atlantic Quilt Festival - Part 1: The Quilt

The Quilt and the Controversy:

Let me start by saying I am writing this after being up and moving from 4am on Tuesday, 2/22 through 3:30am today with a few 5 hour naps thrown in between teaching, judging, presenting a lecture, viewing quilts and a little retail therapy. That said, here is my opinion of the events related to The Quilt:

The SAQA exhibit was powerful in ways that made me examine my social awareness. That is not a comfortable feeling, but art evokes feelings and some of them my not be the ones we want, but face them nonetheless.

The hoopla created a roar that went through that show like butter off hot grits. I was teaching and several students came back from lunch breathless and asking had I seen That Quilt? Me, what quilt and what’s happening? Stories ran the gamut from “…, there's a naked lady quilt downstairs and somebody got arrested for making a lot of noise…”, to “…show manage had to call the cops ‘cause some woman demanded that a quilt be removed from the show…” The truth was somewhere in between.

This SAQA exhibit did what is had challenged itself to do, raise social awareness to the indignities that countless people live with on a daily basis….it did that powerfully.

The fact that this quilt was singled out, brought added attention to the SAQA exhibit and brought hoards of folks to the quilt show. This alone was priceless. The vendors were doing the happy dance due to the increase in foot traffic.

I watched, during one of my mad dashes around the show, as one quilter would lead her group to see That Quilt and then they would continue to view the entire exhibit. You could not buy that kind of advertising for a show.

During lunch breaks there was continued discussion of the exhibit. How cool is that? People sitting around talking about social issues and their feelings, art quilts and artist was refreshing. It was amazing to see.

Again, this is from my perspective only and I am sleep deprived, but I needed to get my impressions down on paper (you know what I mean). I also think that it brought a new perspective to a lot of viewers that had never paid more than a glancing nod to Art Quilts and broadened a few horizons. I say “Bravo SAQA” and thanks for the controversy.

Now I have to go back to sleep before I fall over. Come back during the week as my brain starts to normalize again for more comments and photos from the Mid Atlantic quilt show. Ta Dahlings!