thelmasmith

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.

Pictured above are Sonji Hunt and Rhonda Blasingame. Do go to Sonji Says for a much more complete description of the class. Rhonda, please contact me; I’m unable to find how to email you.

Among the things I firmly believe is the idea that textile art is not well served by being kept to itself. We use the words art quilt and wonder why no other artists are interested in our work.

I went to the Tougaloo Art Colony in Jackson, Mississippi, last week because the words said art colony. I have never spent a week so joyously.

Ceramicists, painters, enamelers, textile workers, all noted and acclaimed instructors, most who were professors at other institutions came together for a week of very intense study. Very intense study was combined with very intense discussions, meals, trips out here and there.

Adding to the mix of intelligent conversation and hard work was the multi cultural aspect of Tougaloo. Above are Debbie, Sonji half hidden, and Annie from Chicago. Sonji will have much better pictures and more details.

I think this was about the point when we had all painted yards and yards of fabric and were beginning the next step in Sonji’s process.

It was quite interesting; each of us immediately had a recognizable painting style. We were creating layer after layer of painted fabric. Each layer from the big stack related to the painting before it.

Rosalind, our teaching assistant, is backed by Rhonda’s rust dyed works just behind Rosalind and on the left. The bright multi colors to the right are all Sonji’s brought to give us some idea of what and how the process goes along.

Do not be fooled by Rosalind’s seemingly plain pink fabric; when done it was a gorgeous blue fabric with pink underlays.

I’ll be more on my game tomorrow and the next few days. In the last eight weeks I have made fourteen separate flights. The airlines are fourteen for fourteen. Every flight was either delayed, double booked, canceled, delayed for mechanical problems, delayed for lack of crew, or delayed by weather. In spite of the cost of fuel I think next time I will drive.

That means I plan to go back to Tougaloo next Art Colony. It will be an entirely different group of professors. I have no idea what I will sign up for. I do know that I wanted to get my hands in to every medium that was taught next week. I’m hoping they will extend the Art Colony beyond one week

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.

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.

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.

Valarie James is both an artist and an activist. She takes no verbal stand. She just shows you, with her art, what she sees.

Her work is progressing far beyond this La Madre, which was shown in 2006 in the exhibition Changing the World One Thread at a Time. She speaks of secrets we will never know. She collects precious, heirloom quality, hand work on textiles in the Spanish language.

A documentary, called The Trail of Thread is in process.

“Growth is only possible as a product of history. Without memory, innovation is merely novelty. History gives growth a direction. But a memory is never perfect. Every memory is a degraded or composite image of a previous moment or event. That’s what makes us aware of its quality as a past and not a present. It means that every memory is new, a partial construct different from its source, and, as such, a potential for growth itself.”  © Bruce Mau Design

I have subscribed to the announcements provided by ArtScene. They appear in my email several times a day. Almost always they are accompanied by images that provoke thinking. Again, another source of images and information that are geographically inaccessible. I tend to think of the work of artists as work belonging to a very broad universe. ArtScene and magazines help me keep in touch with all sorts of things that are not within arm’s reach.

Recently, they have invented a radio - I don’t know whether to call it a station or a system as I think it is internet only - ArtScene Visual Radio.

The image is copyright ArtScene Visual Radio and is provided here for educational purposes under the fair use clause of the copyright law.

PS, my server has been acting up.  I have lost the thumbnail setting on my WordPress.  It will be fixed in the next few days.  Thank you for your forbearance.

The textile arts are a varied lot. They show up in the most unexpected places. The image below is copyright by two entities and the artist; it is published here according to the fair use for educational purposes section of that law.

Notice that Untitled, by Joyce Melander-Dayton, is of acrylic, cotton, wool and beads on linen. The very definition of textile art. This advertizing popped up on page nine, more or less, of the May 2007 issue of art & antiques. Copyrights are held by Melander-Dayton, the June Kelly Gallery in New York City, and by arts & antiques.

I like the fact that textiles are popping up in unexpected places. These places that are geographically removed. Those of us who practice the textile arts should be an encouraged.

I read arts & antiques monthly; quite honestly it’s more wallowing in the luscious glossy printing of high quality photographs. This magazine gives me a window on all sorts of visual art from many centuries. I find it is a very pleasant way to add to my knowledge. I see things I would never see in a venue restricted to textiles. I think that is important.