‘ACTIVIST QUILTERS’ TAKE ON GUN DEBATE
Gun exhibit provides forum for growing movement of ‘activist quilters’ taking on hard issues with soft textiles
SAN JOSE » This is not your grandmother’s quilt show.
You won’t find the traditional patterns of Sunbonnet Sue and Prairie Star Patchwork at the newest exhibits of the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles. Instead, with quilted images of Trayvon Martin, the Las Vegas massacre and police shootings, artists from
Oakland and Berkeley to New York City are confronting the gun violence debate one cross stitch at a time. With the politically-charged exhibits, the museum is providing a forum for a growing movement of “activist quilters” taking on hard issues with soft textiles.
“One of the challenges is the perception that we are an old fuddy-duddy museum with old quilts,” museum director Nancy Bavor said. “Museums have an opportunity and an obligation to go beyond their walls, to educate the public, provide a place for civil discourse about controversial and difficult topics.”
Indeed, the craft of quilting has a long history of community-inspired political speech, from supporting prohibition to women’s suffrage. But the messages were often more subtle, including the “Drunkard’s Path” pattern in blue and white which gained popularity during the women’s temperance movement. More recently, memorial quilts were made and exhibited to pay tribute to those who died in the Oklahoma City and Boston terrorist bombings. And at Northern Illinois University’s Pick Museum, a programming series on the history of “Quilting and Human Rights” runs through mid-May.
The San Jose museum’s forays into activism have been bold. Last year, as part of the Women’s March in the wake of Donald Trump’s presidential election, staff members and volunteers crafted 200 felt uteruses — with bright pink fallopian tubes — to symbolize the power of women and compliment the ubiquitous pink “pussy hats.”
Later this year, the museum and its network of quilters will work with city leaders and join a December gun buyback program, offering quilts and cash for guns. “They’ll be new, attractive quilts you want to snuggle under,” Bavor said.
The juxtaposition of images — soft quilts for hard guns — is a theme embraced by Berkeley artist Modesto Covarrubias, an adjunct professor at California College of the Arts in Oakland. In his contribution to the San Jose exhibit, he crocheted a grey yarn “cozy” around a handgun that both symbolizes the muzzling of firepower, but also the “cuddling” of the firearms by gun lovers.
“When you’re talking of the guns and the metal of the bullets, the hardness of it, the coldness of it and the opposite of it — the textiles, the warmth and comfort of it,” Covarrubias said, “it’s fascinating.”
In the first exhibit, “Generation of Change: A Movement, not a Moment,” you’ll find hanging quilts representing the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting and images of Oscar Grant and others killed by police, crafted by teenagers from the East Bay’s Social Justice Sewing Academy, founded by Antioch native and Harvard grad Sara Trail, whose own work is also shown. In the exhibit, “Guns: Loaded Conversations,” the next gallery is adorned with some 30 quilt and textile pieces in wall hangings, sculpture and collage works, including one of the few representing the other side of the gun debate: a woman with a rifle in hand taking aim at deer and ducks.
The idea for the “Guns” exhibit came two years ago, shortly after the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando, said curator Amy DiPlacido. In a partnership with Studio Art Quilts Associates, they put out a call for works.
“Curators have a social responsibility to look at trends in contemporary artwork,” DiPlacido said.
The exhibits, which opened late last month at the museum on First Street, run through July 15. And no matter where a museum-goer might land on the gun debate, two things should be clear when they leave: quilts are not just for cuddling. They are works of art.