Ragged Cloth Cafe, serving Art and Textiles

Lei Yixin at work on scale model of Martin Luther King

There must be thousands of public art installations in the United States, and every once in a while there is a major brouhaha over one of them.

Right now, controversy is swirling around a memorial to Martin Luther King. It would be placed in the heart of Washington, DC, along the Tidal Basin, not far from memorials to four American presidents. The entire memorial will cover four acres and has a number of architectural elements (visit the website linked at the bottom of this post), but the one disputed piece is the statue representing King. It is based on a photograph showing a contemplative, philosophical King, rather than his more well-known oratorical persona.

Continue reading ‘MLK Brouhaha (Eileen D.)’

I got my members’ magazine from the Portland Art Museum last week and was intrigued by the photographs of work by Australian glass artist Klaus Moje. His work, including a four-panel work created especially for the exhibition will be at PAM starting May 31 and running to September 7.

The thing that caught my eye was the similarities I saw to fiber works. Moje seems to be interested in pattern and juxtaposing one pattern against another.

This is a detail from one of the Portland Panels.

These works really seem to work with the concept of “piecing” . It suddenly occurred to me that there are other kinds of art that use many of the conventions and constructions that quilters and fiber artists use, including glass apparently and, of course, mosaic and collage work. Duh—obvious, I guess. I just hadn’t thought of it in that way before.

Continue reading ‘Klaus Moje, by Terry Grant’

This weekend I was fortunate enough to visit the Farmington Valley Arts Center (FVAC) in Avon, Connecticut. A friend of mine had some pieces in FVAC’s show “Art on the Line”. After viewing the artwork in the Fisher Gallery, we walked around the campus and visited open studios.

The grounds are beautiful and utterly inspiring; trees, wild flowers and nature trails surround several red brick buildings, and all the studios have large windows; a covered walkway connects them.

There was no organized tour, but people were encouraged to visit any or all of the 20 working studios. Each artist was there to personally answer questions or speak with visitors. The caliber of work is incredible - everything from traditional oil paintings to something that I can only describe as “dynamic particled sculpture suspended from the ceiling” (check out Robin Mobiles studio 3B if you ever get a chance).

Continue reading ‘An Artist’s Community in Connecticut - Kate Themel’

Most of us, Cafe regulars, are artists. We make art, we think about art, we sell art, we may even obsess about art and we definitely enjoy our time discussing art with our friends at the Ragged Cloth Cafe.

Now, I have a question for you, my friend: do you live with art? I mean, physically, do you share your living space with art? Do you make space for art in your living room, your bedroom, your office, your garden?

Do you like to live surrounded by your own work, or the work of others? Originals or reproductions? Folk, contemporary, or old masters? In your medium or in unrelated mediums? Are you building an art collection or do you prefer to focus on the art making and leave the collecting to others?

My living room in 2002: folk textiles from around the world, ceramics and on the mantel a serigraph by the Spanish abstract painter Manuel H. Mompo. On the very right of the image a piece of mine: “Calligraphy 7″.

The art I choose to live with is a small part of the art that interests me intellectually or emotionally. I like to surround myself with objects created to serve a practical function, and sometimes I use them, sometimes I only display them. I tend to display the work of others rather than mine, since I get to see enough of my work in my studio. I do enjoy prints, I actually do a lot of printing in my work, so I have a few serigraphs, woodcuts and etchings. Mostly though, it is textiles and ceramics: I just love how I can integrate them in my everyday actions.

What about you? How do you live with art?

You may notice that things look a bit different on Ragged Cloth Cafe today. We are in the middle of various adjustments.

15 months ago, a group of dedicated textile artists set out to put together a blog that would look at art — in all its forms — from our own cloth-draped eyes, with our own particular and sometimes persnickety textile perspectives. In the last year, we have posted 125 different entries on artists, art ideas, art queries, art history, art phenomena, and textile art. We have had 157,990 total views, which makes about 1,263 views, on average, per individual post. Not bad for our tiny niche in a (mixed metaphor alert!) small pond.

And now it’s time to make some changes. The challenge of once-a-month posts by each contributor (really, once a month essays, heavily researched and carefully written) has caused us to need to pull back a bit. Moreover, new tools, such as the ability to send a note to your email address directly, have become readily available. You might have seen that we now have an email subscription form as well as an rss feed on the Home page of Ragged Cloth.

This means that we can publish less frequently and less regularly, but still know that our readers will be current on our postings. We are suspending our regular Sunday/Wednesday posting but promising to return at nice intervals, to continue our conversations.

At the same time, we are adding information to the sidebar of each Home page, so you can circle back through older posts and refresh your memory of what was spoken to or just re-enjoy the images that have been deposited there.

So Shiva, the Destroyer and Regenerator, is at work here today. Within the week we hope to have settled on a pleasant and informative format. And then we’ll go about our posting work, finding and bringing to you, our dedicated readers, the thoughts of myriad and fascinating minds, brought to bear on the world that is art.

Subscribe to the email service or set your rss feed and come back as we find new materials to chew on (alas, yet another mixing of metaphors to make a great stew)

And here is an old pal, Mrs. Willard, Dicing with the Devil. Destroyer and Regenerator, Mrs. Willard hides her extra arms and has put on a bit of (camouflage) weight, but she’s still formidable — Shiva in modern dress.

[Editor's Note: the writer of this post insists on designating herself as the responsable,  taken from the Spanish, which she says means "the facilitator of the project, a temporary post, held by a humble soul who knows that in responsibility lies change and hope but who declines to be 'in charge'." In other words, she disavows responsibility as  "Someone Who Knows Anything." She also claims not to have been able to put responsable in italics in the title, which she should have done, according to well-acknowledged copy editing procedures. The Editor has decided to allow the unorthodox form to stand, while refusing to take the role of responsable in this particular instance.]