By Dorothy Shinn
Beacon Journal art and architecture critic
As much as I have harped in recent weeks about erasing the lines between the arts and the crafts, there is a critical difference between them that I didn’t really get until I saw Paula Nadelstern’s quilts.
Nadelstern is an internationally renowned quiltmaker, but one who will tell you right off the bat, ”I’m not really good at sewing.”
Kaleidoscope Quilts: The Art of Paula Nadelstern is on view at Akron Art Museum through Oct. 2.
Yet, she makes her living giving workshops all over the world, and while she was in Akron last week she gave two — both sold out — at the Akron Art Museum and in Medina.
She was here because her exhibit, Kaleidoscope Quilts: The Art of Paula Nadelstern, is at the museum through Oct. 2.
Akron is the only Midwest venue for this utterly flabbergasting show, which puts Nadelstern’s quilts in historical context for the first time.
The show, originally organized by the American Folk Art Museum, New York, in 2009, makes seamless the threads that link Nadelstern’s quilts to both art and science.
When you first walk into the show, you may think that what you see on the wall is not pieced fabric, but dazzlingly fine embroidery, so luscious and luminous are Nadelstern’s choices of fabric and methods for piecing them together.
Only when you get close do you see that what seemed almost three-dimensional across the room is actually flat fabric, but
fabric that is so vibrant and beautifully placed next to other fabrics that, like brilliant brushwork, it sets off its neighbors to best advantage.
But that’s not what revealed to me the difference between a work of art and one of craft. That revelation came in the final gallery of this exhibit where Nadelstern has framed in reverse one of her quilt squares to show the viewer just what she means when she says her work wouldn’t pass muster with most quilters.
There you can see the imprecision of the cut fabric and other niggling bits that would be seen as ”errors” in the traditional quilting world.
But as revealing as that is, it’s the work next to it, the one with the tiny pieced butterfly wings outlined in gold, that brought it home for me.
Not one pair of those wings is absolutely symmetrical nor is one wing identically placed beside its mate. Rather, each pair is a bit off-kilter, a ”fault” that would have many quilters reaching for their thread nippers.
”In the quilting world that would be a definite no-no,” said Barbara Tannenbaum, the museum’s director of curatorial affairs, who went on to explain how many traditional quilters are obsessed with precision, almost to the exclusion of everything else.
That is where art and craft part ways. Precision, perfection, consistency and refinement of technique above all else is not in the artist’s handbook.
It’s the imprecision, inconsistency and imperfection of the placement of those wings that give them life, that add to the movement and shimmering quality of the work as a whole.
Nadelstern also commits other quilt-world no-nos, such as using the ”wrong” side of a fabric and hiding her seams so that the viewer isn’t distracted by the stitches.
But her biggest faux pas is that ”in the quilting culture they think I do very little quilting.
”There’s so much piecing in my work that there are places where there’s very little quilting and then there are places where there’s a lot,” Nadelstern explained in a telephone interview.
”There is quilting on each one, but very rarely is the quilting stitch where I would like the eye to go,” she said.
”I like the piecing and the color and the piecework to be where the eye should go. I camouflage my seams. I don’t want the eye to go there, and I don’t use high contrast, as most quilters do.
Despite all her nonconformist ways, in the quilt world, said Tannenbaum, ”she is a goddess. She’s never sold her quilts because she wanted to save them for a museum show. She gives workshops — that’s how she makes her living — and they’re always sold out.”
Nadelstern said she loves to shop for fabric. ”I use commercial fabric with very complex patterns, and I never make excuses for the size of my stashes of fabrics, because they are my palette.
”I want the audience to see it from far away and then I want to induce them to come up to the surface of the quilt to hunt for the seams and the stitches. The fact that I camouflage the seams makes it look more like a kaleidoscope. I don’t want it to look contrived, but very spontaneous.”
Born in 1951 in the Bronx, N.Y., Nadelstern still lives in a two-bedroom apartment just a few blocks from where she grew up.
Until recently she did all her work at the kitchen table, so she learned by necessity to work not only compactly, but conceptually.
”I don’t know what they are going to look like until they are finished,” she admitted. ”Someone recently told me that I actually collage the fabric.”
She uses a technique called stripping, she explained. She teaches it in her classes, and there’s a book at the museum’s gift shop that shows the technique.
”I used the structure of the kaleidoscope to inspire me and sometimes that will lead me to another idea.
”I don’t feel every quilt looks kaleidoscopic. . . . I work on a wedge, dividing a circle into eight to 16 wedges. I play with that idea of a wedge, building it out and building it out, but not everything is a kaleidoscope shape,” Nadelstern pointed out.
Her quilts are beautiful combinations of a variety of fabrics, mixed the way a painter would mix and apply pigments to canvas.
When she uses silk, it’s for the effect, the light-changing quality that a particular type of silk brings to the composition as a whole.
She often uses dupioni silk because of its iridescent, shimmering quality. Produced by weaving together two different colors of finished threads, dupioni silk gives the illusion of changing color as the light changes.
And even though silk is notoriously difficult to handle, especially when cut into small pieces, Nadelstern has found a way.
”I interface the silk with a very light interfacing so I’m basically turning the silk into cotton. In The Great Round Up the background is all silk. It’s very fluid. Creating that background was very difficult.
”When I use dupioni silk,” she explained, ”I interface it before I cut it, then I determine which way the color I want is going and I mark that direction so when I piece it, I can decide if I want all the pieces to be lined up the same direction or not. . . .
”I love to put different fabrics together,” she said. ”I love the relationships between complex fabrics. I put this next to that, next to this, next to that, until it looks right.”
Kaleidoscope Quilts joins 19 of Nadelstern’s quilts and 12 of her quilt blocks with a historical 19th-century quilt pieced in a variant of the Star of Bethlehem pattern; three historical kaleidoscopes made by the Scottish inventor Sir David Brewster (1781-1868), and American refiner Charles G. Bush (1825-1900); and five contemporary kaleidoscopes by premier makers from around the country.
Nadelstern said she loves the look of the show at the Akron Art Museum.
”This museum is so big by New York standards,” she said happily. ”The quilts look great. I love the way they are able to be by themselves on one wall.”
Talks on quilts and quiltmaking will be given in conjunction with this exhibit during the museum’s Downtown@Dusk events on Thursday, July 7, Aug. 4 and Aug. 11. A complete description of each talk can be found at http://www.akronartmuseum.org/.
Dorothy Shinn writes about art and architecture for the Akron Beacon Journal. Send information to her at the Akron Beacon Journal, P.O. Box 640, Akron, OH 44309-0640 or dtgshinn@neo.rr.com.
