Diana Goulston Robinson has been quilting and teaching the art of quilting for more than 20 years. During the summer of 2003, she collaborated with Empire State Partnerships (ESP) during their Summer Seminar event to lead a workshop where she taught the participants design and quilting methods. After each had created their own square, Robinson sewed them together to form a unified piece, which was exhibited as part of ESP’s Quilting Kaleidoscopes exhibition. Robinson’s work can be seen in TimeSquared, a Manhattan Quilters Guild exhibition at the Virginia Quilt Museum in Harrisonburg, VA, until June 28 and at www.quiltart.com. In this interview with Chalkboard, conducted via email, Robinson comments on The Quilts of Gees Bend exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, her own work as a quilter and teacher, and Quilting Kaleidoscopes.
Chalkboard: How did you begin quilting?
Diana Goulston Robinson: I have always been fascinated by lines, marks, patterns, color, textures, and shapes. My earliest memories of making art are sculpting mud pies in the back garden, drawing all over the walls of the house with pencils, and making a bag in kindergarten by drawing horizontal threads from a coarse fabric then weaving in red ribbon.
After coming to New York City in 1974, making my own quilts and collecting fabric soon became a passion, inspired by the beauty, artistry, and intense colors of the early Amish quilts seen in nearby Lancaster and those in the Esprit Collection of quilts. As a textile print designer, it was a joy to be designing with fabric in a similar yet different way. It was a joy I wanted to share with others.
The idea for creating innovative quiltmaking workshops for children in my studio came from watching the skills of my own four kids. I realized that by the tender age of six, children can do everything it takes to make a quilt: hand sewing, printing, and stamping fabric. Sixty-five of my students’ quilts formed an exhibit titled Curious Things from Small Beginnings Grow at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in 1996.
I have taught quilt design workshops at many museums and schools, including the Museum of American Folk Art Institute and the Museums at Stony Brook. As a teaching artist with ArtsConnection, I currently teach visual arts/quiltmaking to children, teachers, and parents in public school programs.
CH: Briefly describe the premise of the Quilting Kaleidoscopes exhibition.
DGR: The Quilting Kaleidoscopes quilts are comprised of individual blocks made by teachers, principals, teaching artists, and administrators attending ESP’s Summer Seminar in 2003. Most gratifying to me is not the result, but the process of helping students get in touch with their own creativity. My goal for the workshops was primarily to encourage this journey of individual discovery through a quilt-designing process: working in paper, fabric, and printmaking.
Many of the 300 attendees signed up to spend either a few minutes or many hours making art. The quiltmaking project was organized to suit all skill levels—from beginner to advanced—and was offered in three separate parts.
Firstly, participants were challenged to begin by inventing designs on four-patch or nine-patch grids using dark and light paper shapes. I see working and playing with paper as an exciting entryway into designing quilts. Students are so inspired by using a variety of papers in different tones and sizes, creating serendipitous combinations of surface patterns, textures, colors, and shapes, and becoming aware of small details and accidental spaces occurring in between. A traditional grid structure is a safe starting point in quilt block design for beginners, yet it provides for unlimited creativity for those who want to work “out of the box,” creating imaginative, original work on paper, which in turn gives scope for interpretation in fabric.
In the second part, participants interpreted the paper plan in fabric, working in piecing or collage techniques. Printing and painting strips of muslin for borders was the third component of the project.
CH: How difficult was it to patch together what must have been very disparate pieces into one quilt?
DGR: A creative experience for each participant took precedence over making a finished product. In order for students to learn all the steps in assembling a quilt, they pieced, tied, and bound individual blocks during the workshop. As these quilt blocks were completed, they were pinned onto one large piece of canvas hung on a wall that had been marked in a grid with strips of ribbon. The project resulted in two large and two smaller quilts titled Quilting Kaleidoscopes, which are touring schools within New York State.
CH: In the visual arts there have been numerous proclamations issued over the last 30 years that painting is dead. While painting has obviously survived, do you ever worry about the gradual extinction of quilting as a craft?
DGR: I don’t worry for a minute about a demise of quiltmaking or that artists might be disappearing anytime soon. I see making quilts as making art. Quiltmaking is constantly evolving, and the craft has experienced a great popularity in the past two and a half decades. One of the reasons for quiltmaking’s ongoing appeal might be the gratification fabrics provide. We have a need to feel fabric, see patterns and colors, recycle it, decorate and sew with it, and share the memories it conjures up.
The recent quilt revival is fed by a huge industry worldwide. There are unlimited possibilities for the fiber artist/quiltmaker who now experiments with new materials, threads, fusibles, and fibers such as metallics, plastics, tire rubber, and paper. Quilt artists are taking advantage of improved technology: designing by computer, digital photography, printing photographs on fabric on the home printer, making heat transfers, and utilizing surface design techniques such as cyanotypes, silkscreen printing, and painting.
Contemporary quilts are increasingly being exhibited on the walls of art galleries. In small, isolated American communities such as the one at Gee’s Bend, AL, there is concern that their traditional quiltmaking skills are not being passed down to the next generation, but the show of their work at the Whitney in 2002-3 touched a chord and I am sure will have inspired many young people to want to express themselves by using fabric this way.
I think it’s crucial that the arts become a priority in the school curriculum and that all children have an opportunity for self-expression in an art form. I have seen them gain a great sense of accomplishment and self-esteem through the quiltmaking process and in mastering the sewing skills step by step. Children show increased concentration, self-discipline, and perseverance. Sewing together encourages conversation, yet there is calmness. Children are quieter and focused during the process of quiltmaking. They enjoy working with fabric, threads, color, and paint, and gain confidence in trusting their own instincts as artists.
CH: Was it gratifying for you to see the Gees Bend quilts presented at a major New York City museum, or were you more of the opinion that the Whitney’s “high art/low art” conflation was ultimately an offense to the quilts on display?
DGR: I couldn’t wait to view The Quilts of Gees Bend at the Whitney. It was totally wonderful to see quilts given recognition and exhibited to great acclaim on the walls of this major art institution which showcases the best contemporary American art. The quilts were given a stunning reception with huge crowds each day. In my opinion, these quilts are each extraordinary, original, vibrant, and graphic works of art. As the curator of the exhibition—John Beardsley writes, “In Gees Bend, the goal is to break the pattern, the goal is to look at what other people are doing, improvise on it, change it, substitute materials, change colors, in some way, make it your own.” This echoes both my philosophy as a teaching artist and the premise for the Quilting Kaleidoscopes project.
