Mangat at the Wright
Terrie Mangat’s outrageous creativity
QUILTED AND BEJEWELED fabric paintings are the stuff of Terrie Mangat’s incredible creativity. An embellishment pioneer and decadeslong Taos artist, her fabric pieces pop with beading, sequins, pearls, turquoise, hand-quilting, machine quilting, embroidery, sometimes acrylic accents, postcard imagery, brand names, icons of stage and screen — practically anything you can name, she’s celebrates it in mind and matter.
To experience it full blown, Mangat is hosting an artist talk on Sunday (Feb. 18) at 3 p.m. at The Wright Contemporary for her exhibit now on view through March 17. She and her works explode the banal and humdrum.
“I get inspired by the fabric as I go,” Mangat says, her voice growing more excited by the nature of her quilting adventures. “Landscape quilts made during the pandemic were made after plein-air painting on outings with hubby on his mountain bike, to get down the form,” she says, noting how embellishments all add a three-dimensional component that has so hounded early 20th century fine artists seeking new depths of expression — exactly what art quilts capitalize upon.
“I made my first quilt in 1974,” Mangat recalled last week, adding that quilting inspires her, building and altering initial ideas with sometimes radical departures.
Mangat started out as a painter after getting a bachelor of fine arts from the University of Kentucky. She also was a production potter for eight years and taught art in grades 1-9. Though she still paints occasionally, art quilts are where it’s at for her. “Quilts started documenting my life,” she says intently.
Mangat is often credited with “pioneering and popularizing embellishment on contemporary quilts,” according to author/curator Martha Sielman in “Masters: Art Quilts” (Lark Books, Sterling Publishing; 2008). “Nothing is ever calm in her evocations of Catholic iconography, flea markets, Mexican shrines and fireworks displays.”
Mangat’s “American Heritage Flea Market” piece was one of the first art quilts bought by noted art quilt collector John Walsh — as he says in Torch Magazine’s Fall 2023 edition — and how he was guided by art quilt curator Penny McMorris to build a collection documenting the full range of works being created in the art quilt medium with the best works of the best artists, ignoring any works falling below established greatness.
Ever since quilts were pulled off beds and put on gallery walls, the art quilt medium is now traditional fine art — and frequently considered abstract expressionism.
“My abstract quilts are made in the style of the Modern Quilt movement, mostly made from solid colors, some hand-quilted by me, others machinequilted by Debbie Shultz of Taos or Nicole Dunn of Albuquerque.”
Walking up to a quilted painting by Terrie Mangat is like walking into her mind — explosive, expanding and roiling with relationships that catch her creative spirit, becoming a vision wholly her own.
Made over a period of some 30 years, Mangat’s fireworks quilts are fabulous, typically composed of cotton, silk, acrylic paint and beads, all pieced, reverseappliquéd and hand-embroidered.
Her recent “Fireworks at the Border,” now on view at The Wright, is about the controversy “over whether to let these people into our country or not,”with some immigrant families imprisoned as illegal aliens, all highlighted by the fireworks streaking down into skeleton hands, finger prints, crosses, flowers, Our Lady of Guadalupe and little kids behind nets like chain link bars.
She loves to hand-stitch and sometimes paints over all the beautiful handwork with a little acrylic, and then maybe adding more embroidery to make the art line or imagery jump out.
Mangat’s “Trout Canyon,” also now on view at The Wright along with about 16 of her other art quilts, is a gorgeous Southwestern riverscape, including trout imagery, reeds, red canyon steppes and an exquisite blue sky and clouds so typical of the Southwest. She’s added baroque pearls to the clouds to emphasize the beauty of the white amid the blue against the red canyon rocked by the moving skies above and rolling river below.
Be sure to catch Terrie this Sunday — you deserve it.