Adventures in Quilt Appraisal

I feel like I’m having a very writerly summer. Not that I’m actually putting a whole lot of words on the page this summer (my productivity, compared to the past four summers, is actually at an all time low), but there’s something that seems vaguely but powerfully literary about my schedule. I get up early in the morning, spend eight hours navigating the byzantine social structures of second graders, come home starving and make myself too much pasta, and spend the evening reading and phoning my girlfriend and wasting time on Minecraft and trying to write. It seems like the kind of summer a successful novelist would reflect on years later in a long and rambling memoir, or the groundwork for a novel that’s bound to turn interesting once my character discovers a dead body or finds a portal to another world or something. I’m not sure what exactly is writerly about it; maybe the work, or the independence, or the loneliness. At any rate, a key element of my writerly summer seems to be that I do a lot of wandering, and last week that wandering brought me to investigate the Faulkner Art Gallery, where I found that some consortium of Midwest quilters were having their annual exhibition. That seemed like the natural place for a writer-type to have a wandering, so I went in and looked around.

Writerly pretensions aside, I’ve honestly really wanted to go to a quilt exhibit ever since my Art History professor made the case that quilters found beauty in abstraction centuries before the official art scene experimented with new kinds of representation, though the art of quilting wasn’t recognized by scholars until very recently for the obvious sexist reasons. I’ve also been interested in visual arts for a while, ever since my girlfriend told me how her composing figures on a background in a painting gave her the idea for a beautiful short story.

Wandering around a museum and assessing art is harder than it looks, though. I’d only ever really tried it for a couple Art History assignments, and then I had the terms and tools for analysis laid out ahead of time. Focusing on the quilts beyond a glance felt unnatural, like forcing magnets together at matching poles. It makes sense, I guess; I’ve spent basically my whole life paying attention to whatever visual stimulus is immediately interesting or useful and discarding the rest. Looking at the quilts mounted around the gallery, I couldn’t help but wonder what I was supposed to be thinking about these things that I’d hardly glance at if they were laid out on a bedspread. 

So, as a frustrated college student is wont to do, I jumped through a half dozen academic frameworks and arrived at no conclusion. I got some decent Feminist-Marxist analysis out of a quilt full of half-naked women, cut off at odd angles and spiraling in floral patterns, as something about the commodification of bodies, in line with Hannah Höch’s work in the early twentieth century. But then I read the artist’s statement on the side of the quilt, which read something like, “When I saw all the pretty girls on this fabric, I just knew I had to make a quilt out of it!” So, unless the artist was going for some deep death-of-the-author type crap, my analysis was bust. Next I tried looking at the quilts as the creators would, but it was clear from the start that it was a world unto itself: every artists’ statement referenced different teachers and styles and schools that I had never heard of. Assessing the quality as something objective was impossible too (I had no idea why the quilts that won awards were better than any others), as was simply appreciating the time and effort that went into the art (because I just had no clue what it took to make them). 

The best I could come away with were a couple personal feelings, no more than whim and memory: a collection of brown and grey patches that reminded me of a snowless and cloudy winter day in Minnesota, an elegant pattern of warm colors on a black background like fire at night, a collage of rose designs that faded from black to red to pink to white. But there was no epiphany, nothing but a couple quilts I thought were pretty.

Which scares me, sometimes. I don’t like the idea that there’s a whole world of richness and beauty that I could only ever unearth if I spent the next five years studying quilts. I’ve always imagined that the beauty of visual art is available to anyone willing to lend their eyes to a picture for a little while. Which is reductive, I realize; people study art for a reason, and for many of the same reasons why I study literature. Probably all this wasted thought comes from my impulse to make myself writerly, to be the kind of mustache-stroking intellectual who can stare at a painting and recognize its worth, even if I also think those kinds of people are insufferable a lot of time. I found some beauty in something I’d never seen before. Maybe that should be enough.