Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, September 26, 1993 TAG: 9404140003
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SUSAN BRENNA NEWSDAY
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Long
As Peggie Hartwell spoke, she had half a mind on her words and half a mind on the color wheel. She was wondering, even as she talked, what color fabric would make a person think of swaying trees, like the trees whose tiny new leaves were just beginning to bud in Central Park beyond her apartment window.
Conversations with members of a tight little group that goes by the unwieldy title of the New York Women of Color Quilters Network always seem to go like this. Talking to some of these needle wizards, a person suspects that there's a sound track playing behind the conversation that only one party can hear, and it's not you.
Hartwell says that for her, and she believes for many others, there are numerous quilts within her struggling to be born, and they have to make noise if they're going to get a life. So even while she's conversing, part of her is listening for their tunes.
The members of this quilting subculture, 13 African-American women and one man who meet monthly at the National Black Theater in Harlem, all have full and busy lives apart from their needlework. Hartwell is assistant to the vice president of a brokerage. Valarie Bailey is a community liaison for the city. Yvette Walton is a yarn entrepreneur feverishly stocking her new shop, Crafts and Talk, on 14th Street. Marie Wilson, the chairwoman of the group, is studying literature and art history at Hunter College, and turning 70.
Various members of the group have backgrounds in stage design, pen and ink drawing, doll-making, sculpture, fashion design. And their personalities are as varied as their artistic interests - Hartwell lyric and restrained, Bailey assured and argumentative, Wilson the wise but impatient grandmother-on-the-go.
Yet, they give the impression they all live most intensely when they are most still: sitting among rainbow piles of scraps, pushing needles through soft cloth, channeling their memories and fantasies into clouds of cotton and batting.
``My quilts keep getting bigger and bigger, because I get so revved up that I just can't stop,'' said Wilson.
``Quilting is always there for me, because I have a very active mind. If I didn't quilt, I think I would go crazy,'' Hartwell said. ``There's a point in every quilt when you know exactly what color it wants, and you reach for it and it comes to life. And then you even start to talk to it. That's why many quilters find it so hard to part with them when they're done.''
Hartwell's quilts, often made of rich and exotic fabrics, spin out the twin histories of her childhood in a Brooklyn tenement and on her grandparents' South Carolina farm, where she spent summers. Currently she's working on a portrait of the extended family huddling together in the farmhouse hallway during a violent storm, baby Peggie in her grandmother's lap. She is on the hunt for the perfect burnt orange shade to represent lightning in the window.
Wilson specializes in narrative quilts that tell heavily researched stories, including one summarizing the history of pioneering women in black appliqued silhouettes on a huge fabric canvas. She plots, cuts and pieces them on the dining room table of her compact Williamsburg apartment and then loses them to a series of quilt exhibitions that seem to be on permanent revolving tours across America.
Because at the moment, quilts are the ticket in American folk art.
Among the 14 million quilters and collectors in America, the 14 members of this year-old New York group react to the current quilting frenzy with both enthusiasm and a caustic distance. They are enthusiastic, because they are quiltaholics. ``I can walk into a fabric store and spend a hundred dollars looking for one perfect shade of fabric,'' Hartwell confessed.
But they are caustic because of the way quilts made by blacks have been so narrowly classified in museum and gallery circles. Quilt scholars have praised them for their exuberance and vibrancy. They ascribe to them a look that features asymmetrical pieces, improvisational design, blazing colors and large uneven stitches, supposedly inspired by a ``cultural memory'' of native African textiles - ``something like the yen for Camelot,'' Wilson says.
For Wilson and other members of her network, such scholarly classifications apply only to a selected group of quilts produced in a rural Southern tradition. Nonetheless, they feel as if they and every other quilter with a dark skin tone has been walled into a confining little quilt ghetto, just at a time when quilts are the hot emerging folk art form. ``It's a school of thought which I just detest,'' says Wilson. ``It's like, as African-Americans we have some residual memory of hearing the tom-toms, and these memories are in our quilts. That certainly doesn't describe the quilts I make.''
Stacy Hollander, curator of the Museum of American Folk Art, says that while the ``cultural memory'' school has dominated discussions of African-American quilt-making for 20 years, there is an emerging argument that says these quilts ``take many shapes and forms and are as diverse as the people who make them.''
Wilson says that although there is a long history of quilting among African-American women - ``a history of practice, not style'' - the network's mission goes deeper than just passing along a tradition. They want to teach children that if you put heart and work into a project, reward comes at the end.
by CNB