thelmasmith

Twenty Second Street is one of the arterial boulevards that runs east/west across Tucson. I saw this sign the other day. The next day I circled back, stopped, put the four way blinkers on the little red roadster. I got a decent image. What’s more is that I got it without being mowed down by dump trucks and semi tractors.

What is wrong with a society that kills off it’s children generation after generation? ? ? It’s nothing new; look at history. Am I stupid or something? I just don’t “get” it.

The bumper sticker on the Toyota says “Amy Goodman for President.” She’s the anchor for Democracy Now. Here’s the link for information on the Karl Rove resignation.

We wonder why the whole teenaged society has adopted the “don’t snitch” policy that was mentioned on 60 Minutes last night. In my opinion, CBS got one thing wrong. This distrust of authority has been fostered by our society. It is not just a phenomenon of the poor or the immigrant societies. The biggest contributor to this fear was summed up in a bumper sticker I saw weeks ago. It addresses the political tripe of “family values.”

Family Values Is Having Your Brother Steal the Election for You.

Uh, huh. Take a look at the Virtual Iraq War Protest. Gerrie, lift these images to add to your collection there.

The image, is one of the Las Madres with artist, Valarie James, as it was being unpacked at the Tubac Center of the Arts in February, 2006.  It was a portion of the exhibition Changing the World one Thread at a Time.

Still, people are dying. Valarie James has produced one of the most professional and lyrical laments and memorials to this sad process. Las Madres, No Mas Lagrimas YouTube is well used and the subject matter is well served in this short film.

The back story on the journey of Las Madres is on Valarie’s blog.  Fortunately, the monsoon has come to the Sonoran Desert. It brings vicious squall lines, torrents of water, thunder, lightening, and flash floods. It also brings us much needed water, humidity, and a cooling of the intense heats of June and early July. A thunder storm can lower the temperature thirty degrees in a matter of minutes.

One of the things seen at the Tougaloo Artists’ Colony.

At least I do. I was questioned as to why I was backed up to the water fountain in the hallway with my camera. I said, “Look down the hall.” “Duh? Oh, well. I thought what I saw was beautiful in a strangely surreal, industrial, functional sort of way.

The hallway was really two different hallways. One with the lights and backlighting gave one image.

The image taken with no ceiling lights on is completely different. I brought the levels up in Photoshop to let you see the detail.

I suspect the lighting at the far end of the hall is a single ceiling fixture. We were working in a huge room in a daylight basement that is the print workroom during the school year.

I spent an afternoon the other day doing a lot of research on the Gees Bend women and quilts. Many of my references (below) require membership in the QuiltArt list. Some of the messages I wrote I will reprint here.

“October 6, 2002, please pick up or check the library for the November issue of Conde Nast’s House and Garden. Page 98 is titled Stitches in Time by Barbar Pollack. Shown in four color are Annie Mae Young an her indigo quilt. Also shown is a quilt by Mary Lee Bendolph. A Rachel Carey George quilt, 1938, that is the most subtle and lovely of them all. Netti Young’s Milky Way quilt, and the late Lillie Mae Pettway’s 6′x5′ quilt made in 1965. And last, but certainly not least, Loretta Pettway’s quilt made in 1960.”

My statement, seriously edited to placate the demographics of the QuiltArt list says in part, “Those purchases - - - gave the curators a wealth of opportunity - - - That body of work is unlikely to be reproduced by women in their seventies and eighties so the preservation is a mixed blessing.”

Gwen Magee countered, ” - - - gave the curators “a wealth of opportunity” to take incredibly unfair advantage of extremely poor people who had no idea that they were being “ripped off” and of what their work was worth.”

Naturally, the nature of the QuiltArt list created great uproar. Gwen’s integrity and credentials were despicably questioned. All I could do was give this response, “I want to commend her (Gwen) for the courage I lacked. I deleted a lot of sentences about my own feelings about the article I read.

My strongest emotions were those of anger, shame, and theft;”

Now, with the lawsuits beginning, those emotions of anger, shame, and theft are here again. They are tempered with hope. My wishes are to see the theft of copyright from these women for avarice and monetary gain righted. I certainly hope the attorneys for the women of Gees Bend see too it that punitive damages are requested in very high numbers.

Kyra Hicks blog, Black Threads, clearly examines the current situation. Please, go, read, scroll down, absorb all the unsavory details. Kyra writes of today’s news with dependable accuracy.

If you wish further information I’m adding a long list of hotlinks. Those from his.com are QuiltArt proprietals; you must be a member to access those hotlinks in their archives.
Gee’s Bend Quilters Claim Big Rip-Off
http://www.al.com/news/press-register/index.ssf?/base/news/1181035097167800.xml&coll=3

Tiny URL: http://tinyurl.com/2fho5j

And would you believe, Matt Arnett now has a blog (only one posting):
http://tinwood.blogspot.com/2007/06/attorneys-for-arnett-family-respond-to.html

July 3, 2007, addition:  Matt Arnett now has two postings to his blog (the most recent one is about their press conference the other day. http://tinwood.blogspot.com/

This is an interesting book review:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa4081/is_200603/ai_n17184448

> Gee’s Bend: A Fight for Rights - Ben Raines - June 15, 2007
> http://bama.live.advance.net/news/press-register/index.ssf?/base/news/1181899233121920.xml&coll=3&thispage=1
>
> Tiny URL: http://tinyurl.com/39f3kx

http://www.al.com/news/mobileregister/index.ssf?/base/news/1183022217278890.xml&coll=3&thispage=1#continue

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdpOkLdtM50

<http://bama.live.advance.net/news/press-register/index.ssf?/base/news/1181899233121920.xml&coll=3&thispage=1>

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/features/home/orl-homesquiltart092902sep29,0,5340885.story?coll=orl-shoppinghg-headlinesforthe

http://www.ajc.com/search/content/news/stories/2007/06/17/geesbend0617a.html

http://lists103.his.com/mailman/private/quiltart/2002-December/047382.html

http://lists103.his.com/mailman/private/quiltart/2002-October/043681.html

http://lists103.his.com/mailman/private/quiltart/2002-October/043724.html

http://lists103.his.com/mailman/private/quiltart/2002-October/043776.html

http://lists103.his.com/mailman/private/quiltart/2002-October/043836.html

http://lists103.his.com/mailman/private/quiltart/2002-October/043700.html

http://lists103.his.com/mailman/private/quiltart/2002-October/043702.html

http://lists103.his.com/mailman/private/quiltart/2002-October/043687.html

http://lists103.his.com/mailman/private/quiltart/2002-October/043710.html

As a postscript to this long post, consider the differences between using an image under the fair use clause of the United States Copyright Laws for the purpose of informing and educating the public and the fact that a judge and a court will be examining the use of the copyrighted images of the works of the women of Gees Bend for manufacturing items for the profit of others.

Several things today. Do go and see this YouTube video.

This one called Elektro.

This image is compliments of Google.

The following is a request from the National Museum for Women in the Arts. Please take time, make time, to continue each day by voting for this project with the American Express Member’s Project.
URGENT REQUEST to help NMWA:
June 17th is the DEADLINE to RATE our project!
NMWA / American Express Members Project : ID: 04062

WOMEN ARTISTS: NOT IN THE BOOKS? PUT THEM ON-LINE!

The winning American Express Members Project will receive up to $5 million in funding and visibility with millions of people and the media.

Please go to www.membersproject.com for complete details and clear, simple instructions on how to REGISTER and RATE our project (it takes less than ten minutes).

Please register ASAP and give a FIVE STAR RATING to:

Project # 04062: WOMEN ARTISTS: NOT IN THE BOOKS? PUT THEM ON-LINE!
Help us attract funding and gain UNPRECEDENTED visibility for NMWA through a program that American Express estimates could attract 5 million of their cardholders and countless more through media coverage.

The DEADLINE is June 17th, but please REGISTER and RATE us with 5 STARS TODAY, so we stay high on the list, have a greater chance to become known by more people, attract their support and rank in the top 50 project finalists. The Top 50 Projects will be announced July 3rd, the VOTING begins then, and the winning project will be announced August 7th. Please forward this to your friends! Thank you.

Contact:
Howard White, hwhite@nmwa.org 202.783.7983

National Museum of Women in the Arts
1250 New York Ave., NW
Washington, DC 20005
202.783.5000

The Mothers - No More Tears

Make some time and take some time to watch this YouTube introduction to a film in progress. The complete documentary will be called A Trail of Thread.

The haunting music in the film clip is called Water in the Desert.

I live in the Sonoran Desert. I know many of the immigrants. I learned long ago that I cared little what language was spoken as I saw good people who worked hard for a living and loved and disciplined their children.

It is so pleasant to come home and review all the posts on Planet.textilethreads. So much is going on. The synergy is building. I am really enjoying all the images.  Many thanks to all the artists who are building such an exciting community.
I had planned on using my vacation to be more disciplined about posting. However, life gets in the way. Here’s a late nineteenth century advertising sign; apparently thelma is a southern name.

A southern first name, and an uncommon one, at that, is okay, now that I’ve lived with it for more than sixty years. My great great grandparents left Virginia in the early nineteenth century. They anticipated the need for the Emancipation Proclamation.

This is a sealing iron, probably 1930s to 1950s vintage. I bought it to go with the beeswax.   I haven’t tested it to see if it works.  It will come apart easily.  I can probably rebuild it if I need.  It’s a nice companion to my 1950s GE iron.

I have not had the time or self discipline to work yet. I have two more excursions this month.

Beeswax and collagraph are calling my name.  I’ve an embellisher that I want to spend time with.  I’m also going to do some more focused study on abstract design.  I think that being forced to commit to design principles in abstract will enhance my work all around.  Once I have the design principles I’ve been using for fifty years reinforced, refreshed, and updated, I hope to use that active information to jump start my work again..

I hope I will have found both the direction and the ability to close out more mundane reality and work.

How many of you remember your American history? I learned much of mine doing research on the material detritus of the nineteenth century. I found that handling dauguerrotypes
and old wallpaper, clothing and furniture let history fall into a real place rather than dry statistics and dates.   A grease bucket for a conestoga wagon made history tangible.

In the fifties, the fashion was Davey Crockett and his long rifle and coon skin cap. Today, after traveling a full 24 hours, I saw the state park where Davey Crockett was born.

I’m on the northern edge of the Smokey Mountains. It’s the heart of the Tennessee River Valley Authority.

I have just come past the sign pointing to the home of James Polk. Here’s the image of a stamp bearing Polk’s visage.

The cameras are here. Maybe tomorrow I’ll give you a glimpse of what the south calls mountains. The Smokies and the Appalachians are old, old, very worn down mountains when compared with the Catalinas and the Santa Ritas in the Sonoran Desert.

Maybe I’ll be a better role model about posting to blogs on a regular basis. I’m off to a week long birthday party. House sitters and puddy tat caregivers and mail collectors have all been arranged. My house will be more inhabited than when I’m at home.

I’m taking my camera and my laptop. Here’s hoping that I remember to take photos of the interesting things I see.

Last week I missed an albizia tree in full bloom. It was in a truckstop of all places. It’s a tree that grows happily in both the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts. Here’s an image borrowed from Google to show you what I missed.

I’m off on a red eye flight this evening, cheap woman that I am. I like to leave some pocket money. If I find a nice gallery or a used book store I really need to be prepared.

My friend, the Spider, has been working for months with me. He has created Planet Textile Threads. With his help and a lot of Google work and hot links followed, we have peopled PTT with some of the most fascinating people from around the world in the field of textile arts.

Planet.textilethreads is a privately owned, invitational restricted, RSS feed. The members are requested to post to their blogs a few times a week. It is limited to a total of twenty four artists.

Here are a few figures to help visualize the traffic. The figures are not exact for April as we had server crash last week of April. In January, 2007, we had 129 unique visitors and 990 hits. February had 241 unique visitors and 898 hits. March had 501 unique visitors and 5232 hits. April, in spite of some lost data has grown spectacularly: 1800 unique visitors and 15,400 hits. Bandwidth usage has grown from less than twenty mega bytes to more than 720 mega bytes.

All this growth has happened without any notices on the lists on the net. Word of mouth referrals tell us that this sort of growth will continue.

Since PTT is about at it’s limit we have created a more broad based blog aggregation service.

Quilt Voices is a new, subscription based, blog aggregation service. Various other textile artists and people who have businesses who support our work will be included. Both people who provide web based supplies and those who run brick and mortar stores are welcome to membership in Quilt Voices.

You can see the beginnings of Quilt Voices at the hotlink above. Selling directly on these blogs is not allowed. There are no restrictions on post content so long as they are in good taste. We expect quiltvoices to bring you the sort of interested volume, and growth of volume, to your own websites that we are experiencing on PTT.

Subscriptions will be $1US per month, payable annually via PayPal. Those people who have textile related web only businesses (less than $50,000 gross, annually) may subscribe at $7 per month, payable annually. Large volume businesses and those in physical locations may subscribe at $15 per month.

This notice on thelmasmith.com and on planet.textilethreads is the first public notice. I expect to develop Quilt Voices over the summer. When everyone is settled in by the time school starts in the northern hemisphere I will begin marketing Quilt Voices internationally.

Like Planet.textilethreads, now, with it’s increasing readership and volume, quiltvoices.com will become known as THE place to get your textile fix with one click with your morning coffee.

To get your blog featured on Quilt Voices please
send and email to Spider AT quiltvoices DOT com with the following information:
Name = ……….
Blog Address = http:// …….
Status = Hobbyist or Small Business or Business

Only Paypal is accepted as a method of annual pre-payment.