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Nancy Crow's latest work, the 'Markings' series, shows she's kicked it up a notch
By Dorothy Shinn
Beacon Journal art and architecture critic
Published on Sunday, Nov 08, 2009
In the past, I've had difficulty writing about the work of Nancy Crow.
It's not her fault. She's seen as a leader in her field.
In Kate Lenkowsky's Contemporary Quilt Art, she's called ''one of the foremost studio quiltmakers in the country'' and ''a master colorist.''
The problem is all my own. I have trouble reconciling the acceptable rules and practices of studio work with those that use different criteria.
I've come to accept, for instance, that a jeweler is perfectly free to use a motif from a painting by, say, Picasso, without understanding a single thing about that motif's meaning.
So when I look at a quilt show where the imagery being used aren't traditional quilting motifs, but imagery borrowed from high art, I'm in a quandary.
I recognize that this is work normally seen as utilitarian being raised to the level of art by simply changing the motifs. But the borrowing of these motifs crosses some unwritten boundaries.
This has been my problem writing about work by Nancy Crow, at least until now.
A selection of Crow's work is on view through Jan. 10 at the Butler Institute of Art Trumbull Branch in Howland, in Nancy Crow Quilts: New and Recent Works, curated by Mary Lou Alexander.
Some 30 pieces are spread throughout the spacious modern gallery, giving her work the breadth it needs and deserves.
Crow, who has an MFA from Ohio State University, has always considered herself an artist, not a hobby quilter, and in a video made of her gallery talk given Oct. 24, one can see the flash of anger and frustration that crosses her face when she says this, so you know she's had a hard slog to establish herself as a serious artist in a world that still regards quilts as craft.
Yet when I look at her work, I see not quilts, but paintings by Gene Davis, Joseph Albers, Kenneth Noland, Julian Stanzcak, Miriam Schapiro, even Frank Stella.
And if you thumb through the art history textbook American Art in the 20th Century, you'll see what I mean.
Her striped Constructions quilts are similar to Davis's striped paintings; her hard-edged abstractions look uncannily similar to work by Albers, Noland and Stella, and even her earlier, more organic work, such as Lady of Guadalupe (1987) bears such a striking similarity to some of Schapiro's Pattern Paintings that I had to pull out a catalog and look through it, certain I'd find just that image.
I didn't find it, but I did find Big OX, which does bear a striking similarity to her Constructions series with the big X's.
Even the Constructions with the overlapping diagonals seem to echo some of Stella's '70s reliefs.
What's going on? I asked myself. She's seen as a leader, yet we see her blatantly borrowing themes developed by other, mostly living artists.
That's not done in the art world. If you're working in the 1950s, you don't do targets like Jasper Johns. Similarly, if working in the 1960s, you simply don't do Campbell soup cans a la Andy Warhol, not even if you do them in an entirely different medium.
There's no law against a loose kind of borrowing of someone else's style or theme, but if you do so, it's an unwritten rule that you go back at least a couple of generations to do it; 100 years or more is better.
Borrowing, or ''appropriating'' as it's carefully phrased in the art world, from recent work can even get you in trouble, especially since the advent of the Internet, which caused everyone to copyright their images. Witness the legal battle between Shepard Fairey, who created the iconic Barack Obama ''Hope'' portrait, and the Associated Press, whose photographer shot the original image.
In the 1990s, Jeff Koons, known for his chrome sculptures of banal objects, borrowed a photographic image of someone holding an armload of puppies and turned it into the chrome sculpture String of Puppies.
Koons of course thought that if he appropriated the image, but used a different medium, he was in the clear. Not so. Koons had simply lifted the image and reproduced it without changing a thing except the medium. The folks who took the photograph sued him for copyright infringement and won.
Crow alters certain features of her work, so she can't be accused of out-and-out stealing.
One could argue that because the hard-edge painters of the 1960s and 1970s had themselves freely appropriated the geometric patterning of Amish quilts, that in a sense, Crow's reappropriating it back into the quilt medium is merely sauce for the gander. Still, to me this dipping back into the recent history of art is nettlesome.
So it was with a considerable relief that I saw her new Markings series, where she's silkscreened her own hatchmarked patterns onto her hand-dyed fabric.
True, this new work does owe a small debt to Aboriginal art — she was in Australia not too long ago — and at least one of the quilts is extremely closely quilted, as in concentric, form-following patterns about an eighth of an inch apart, similar to quilted fabrics by South Pacific islanders.
But the big change is that the imagery is now her own.
''I have to keep growing and changing and challenging myself,'' Crow told her Oct. 24 audience. ''It's only a personal struggle I have with myself. It has nothing to do with the outside world. These are goals that I have set for myself.
''I know this from teaching. Many artists plateau because once you get good at something and people like that work, it's easier to make that same work over and over and over.
''It's much harder to go on and break new territory for yourself. You are the only judge. If you like what you're doing and you want to go on, that's all that matters in the end.
''But I guess some artists need a lot of outside adulation,'' Crow smiled.
She's using her new imagery, the nervous, highly energized lines and hatchmarks found in the black-and-white quilts and the black-on-red and black-on-ochre ones, to work through philosophical issues, such as the powerful Markings #1: The Known and the Unknown (2006), which according to Alexander is about Crow's anger at the huge number of Iraq War dead, both ours and theirs.
Crow writes in her notebook about this quilt: ''My thoughts about this composition were that it would portray all those killed and still to be killed in Iraq (American Soldiers, Iraq Citizens, etc.), or in other words — Human Beings!!! Human Beings all killed because LIES ruled the world and our President Bush emphasized (Either Or). Were our lives worth the Lies?''
The people who come to look at Crow's work are mostly interested in quilting, but in a sense, this show should give those people pause, because she's moved beyond quilting.
As she told her audience on Oct. 24, ''I would love it that I would be recognized as an artist first and then as a quiltmaker.''
In fact, Crow does none of her own quilting — ''If I did all my own quilting, I'd never get my work done.''
For years she's hand-designed, pieced and machine-stitched her quilt tops and sent them off to Marla Hattabaugh to be hand-quilted.
Crow is still known for the tight control she exercises over her work. She hand-dyes her own fabrics, and in her Constructions series, she's still hand-piecing each one.
Overlapping elements aren't laid across the ones that seem to lie underneath; rather, they're hand-pieced to fit so precisely that even the tiniest triangle of color representing an underlying form is so carefully pieced in place that the illusion is maintained.
Color of the quilting thread is an important element in Crow's Constructions. One could almost argue that in these works thread color represents ground color, which if true means the quilting thread almost needs to be chosen first, because invariably its color acts as a foil to the fabric over which it's stitched.
These are the minutiae over which quilters obsess in a Crow show: stitching, intricacy of the quilting pattern, the beauty and variety of the colors, the precision of the piecing.
But in a sense, Crow has backed away from the one element that had characterized her work until now and kept it tied to the roots of quilts as utilitarian objects, and that's the hand-piecing.
In her new work, in particular the Markings series, she's almost abandoned piecing. In these, the only piecing done is in the large squares and rectangles of screenprinted cloth.
''I'm going to be doing more of what I call improvisational screenprinting,'' she told her audience.
That means that she's now beginning to treat her quilts almost as paintings. From a fine arts point of view, that's very good news.
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.
Details:
Show: Nancy Crow Quilts: New and Recent Works
When: Through Jan. 10, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesday-Sunday
Where: The Butler Trumbull Branch, 9350 E. Market St., Howland Township.
Information: 330-609-9900 or www.butlerart.com
In the past, I've had difficulty writing about the work of Nancy Crow.
Get the full article here.
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