Last weekend Fiberart International 2010 opened in Pittsburgh at two venues – the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts and the Society for Contemporary Craft. The show will be on exhibit April 17 – August 22, 2010, then travel to the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester and the San Francisco Museum of Craft + Design.

I really wanted to go to the opening weekend – the exhibition features best in contemporary fiber art worldwide — jurors Mary Ruth Smith an art professor from Baylor University in Waco, Texas, Rebecca A.T. Stevens, a consulting curator for contemporary textiles at the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C., and Danish textile designer Vibeke Riisberg, an associate professor at the Designskolen Kolding — selected 87 works from over 1.685 entries submitted from 30 countries around the world.

From articles in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and postings on Twitter and Facebook, I know that many of the artists, even one from South America, traveled to Pittsburgh for the opening and fiberart forum that was hosted the next day. Another Chinese artist tried to bring his work, but was denied a visa, so he had to ship the work instead.

My quilt “St. Louis – Wish You Were Hair” is part of the current exhibition. In 2007, “The Vintage Purse” was part of Fiberart International 2007, but I wasn’t able to make it that exhibition either.

The Fiberarts Guild of Pittsburgh does a terrific job of organizing the shows, publicity, and printed exhibition catalogs, but it’s not the same as being there. Someday I hope to make it back to Pittsburgh to see one of these shows!

The show will be in the Artspace at Untitled gallery until August 29. The gallery is currently checking into the possibility of traveling the show, so hopefully you’ll have the opportunity to see it in another city.

Art Quilts Lowell 2009 opened at the Brush Art Gallery in Lowell, MA last week as part of the big Lowell Quilt Festival. Maxine sent me word that my quilt Traffic Jam that is part of the exhibit was mentioned in this article in The Sun, and also that the festival and shows had great attendance.That exhibit will be up until September 19, 2009.

Both of these show articles were sub-lined somewhere with “Not your Grandmother’s Patchwork.” I can’t tell you how many articles that I’ve seen across the country with that headline or something similar. It used to bother me, but I’ve come to realize that it’s original in each situation, because the writer or reviewer in that region is trying to dispel a common misconception that a quilt art show will look like a bunch of quilts. And if their headlines get more new attendance at these exhibits and venues, more power to them!

Last weekend at the opening of Modern Materials: The Art of the Quilt was a real treat. The [Artspace] at Untitled gallery was my kind of space — mix of old and new and art galore. Flavored largely by the art collection of eye of [Artspace] Founder Laura Warriner, the gallery sits on the edge of hopping Bricktown and only three blocks from the Oklahoma City National Memorial.

The show has brilliant piece by top artists working in the quilt medium today, people who are really pushing the boundaries and taking changes. Curator Jill Rumoshosky Werner who did the humongous “Knitted” piece above did a great job of curating the show. Love looking at PaMdora throught the knitting weave….hmm, maybe I could talk Jill into doing some kind of installation collaboration someday!

Jill and the gallery staff all treated the visiting artists like royalty — they published a snazzy catalog of the show (and free! through a grant), let us have the run of the second floor for things like cooking up Elia Woods’ home-grown eggs into huge omelets, organized an artists’ panel discussion, and mud-painting on cloth demo.

My talk went pretty well. Instead of going up on the Oklahoma Memorial and local art studios tour (which I was really sorry to miss), I sat at this crazy long table, tweaking my talk and keynote presentation. Actually I had a blast sorting through 20+ years of photos, organizing some 400 into a talk I mentally titled “RuBert Studios: Creativity, Art, and Building Artists’ Communities through Volunteerism and the Internet.”

The images alternated between my husband Russ RuBert‘s work, my work and our studio, and showed how they all influence each other. I flip through images pretty quick, some like how my quilts come together are almost like animations. But still, I ran over the allotted hour by 15 minutes. No one seemed to mind too much though.

The best part was meeting and getting to know the other artists and the cool people in Oklahoma City who are doing some really exciting art collaborations. The gallery videotaped my talk, panel discussions and workshop, and did pod-cast recordings interviews with all the artists. So we’re looking forward to see that on their new website, I’ll let you know when that’s online.

Here’s Elia Woods holding her home-grown eggs standing by her quilt “All Paths Lead to Home.” One of my favorites in the show, but challenged even my open defination of a quilt. Doesn’t matter though, it’s also sculpture which is a great achievement. Wish I could say more now about the show — I also spoke about some of my impressions and explorations of the Modern Materials show on Saturday night. But since we’re already knee-deep installing Russ’s show that opens this Friday, I’ll have to save that for some other time.

In the meantime, check out all the photos I posted on Flickr about the show, gallery, artists and weekend activities.

Pictured above, left to right: Angela Moll, Elia Woods, [Artspace] at Untitled Founder Laura Warriner, Pam RuBert, Susan Else, Theresa M. Heaton, and curator Jill Rumoshosky Werner.

Who? That woman I told you about, the one with a big nose and Eiffel-Tower hair.

I first got wind of the article in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal from folks on the SAQA yahoo list. Those of us who aren’t at the conference and Quilt National opening last night are feeling left out and checking the internet for show gossip.

So that’s a good excuse to go out for a Green Tea Latte, right? And I found the print version on the news rack at B&N. The photo is really tiny and oddly cropped, but looks pretty swell in the website article and slide show here.

Thanks to Meg Cox, for the nice mention in her article and more info about other quilt shows this summer. I’d never heard about the populist Sisters Oregon one-day outdoor show — that sounds like a crazy fun affair!

I’ll tell you a little secret about my quilt that’s going to be in the upcoming Quilt National — I call it a Franken-quilt (as in Frankenstein).

I was trimming it to prepare for the binding (at about four in the morning — a ghastly time to do such a critical task) and I trimmed too much. When I pinned the binding on, I found it would hit the edge of the flower shop at a bad place – yikes!

So I dug the edge out the trash, zig-zagged it back on, and re-trimmed slightly wider. Enough that I could move the binding over a bit and the zig-zagging doesn’t show. So no one knows about the mistake except me, and now you.

Quilt National groups A, B, and C

Dale Anne asked about the coding of the artists listed on the Quilt National 2009 website. The whole show will be on exhibit at the Dairy Barn from May 23 – September 7, 2009. After that, it will travel to The Foundry Art Centre in St. Charles, Missouri — the only other venue that will exhibit the entire show.

After that, the quilts are sorted into three groups called A, B and C.  This way smaller segments of the show can travel to museums and other venues that can’t accomodate the whole show, which is quite large when taken together.

The entire collection will be on exhibit at The Foundry Art Centre from September 25 – October 29, 2009, and I’ve been asked to do an artist’s luncheon talk and then walk the audience through the exhibition on Thursday, October 8.

So if you can’t make to the Dairy Barn in Ohio, come visit the show at the Foundry in Missouri! After that, I think the schedule for the smaller group exhibits is still being planned.

Here I am with my installation pants on — one side pocket holds my spy camera and the other my phone. Although I was dressed for it, I didn’t really do much of the work because I had so much help! And the good photos were taken by Russ. (Photo by Russ RuBert of course.)

The last few days have seemed like, a fast-moving blur! I didn’t have a lot of notice for this show because of a schedule mix-up last November. But seeing as it was my alma mater, I was excited to hustle up what work I could (end count – 30 quilts, 7 drawings.) Actually, I was an English communications major at this school, but my art classes and art profs made a much more lasting impression on my life.

This art center and beautiful gallery didn’t exist when I was a student — our old art building burned down (I had nothing to do with that!) So I wasn’t really sure what that the new gallery looked like in real life. When we first walked in, the bottom dropped out of my stomach. The gallery looked huge, and I thought, there’s no way I was going to be able to fill the space. But soon it became apparent, that actually we needed more walls. Well…..like magic, walls appeared.

Although the show still has to be lit properly before it opens tomorrow, I wanted to show you these cool sliding panels that come out of a closet and move on tracks built in the ceiling. Once you arrange the sections or walls that you like, you anchor them to the floor, and just hammer nails though the neutral-colored carpet covering the walls. Easy to hang stuff! The hard part is deciding where to hang it.

But here’s the one who deserves the real credit — my own Superman! He’s the guy who is always working quietly behind the scenes – organizing space and structure, amazing with tools, and making everything I do work and look better! It sure is nice being married to a sculptor.

We also had a wonderful helpful crew from the gallery. Vikky, the director brought in her whole family and Amanda, the student assistant was a better worker than me. Okay, now it’s time to go home and crash.

(for some more photos and explanation of how we setup the exhibition, go to my Facebook album here.)

You can see this show February 2-27, 2009
New Time: Artist talk and reception, Thursday, February 26, 2-4 p.m.

Mildred M. Cox Gallery
William Woods University
One University Avenue
Fulton, MO

9 a.m.-4 p.m. Monday – Friday
1-4 p.m. Saturday – Sunday.
Admission is free and open to the public.
For more information
call (573) 592-4245

Hey, there’s my quilt on page 58 of the January-February issue of American Style magazine. Yay, AmStyle did a big big section on “studio quilts” and artists, and Martha Sielman executive director of SAQA mentioned my work in her interview. Thanks Martha!

Yoga 101 - The Banana Split Pose by Pam RuBert - 45" x 53"

This quilt is called “Yoga 101: The Banana Split Pose,” one of my series of quilts featuring yoga poses inspired by food puns.

In the same article there’s also a great photo that Russ took of me working at my sewing machine a few pages later. The section features lots of great fiber artists (that’s Linda Gass’s gorgeous quilt beside mine) including Caryl Bryer Fallert, Susan Shie, John Lefelhocz, Gwendoyn Magee, and Katie Pasquine Masopust.

Quilting the ice is what I was most worried about. I finally decided that I that I wanted a swirly, skatey pattern, and was thinking about how ice skates leave those white scratches in the ice that get covered over and over.

What was that term that Jason Pollen used for layers and layers of drawing marks made on top of each other, like on an old chalkboard menu where yesterday’s image is ghosted behind? Can’t remember, oh well.

The skating marks slowly transform from swirly to crackly at the bottom, where PaMdora’s skate blade precariously balances. Not sure how successful that was, but it was an interesting experiment.

Here’s the finished quilt, Skating On Thin Ice — it’s 42″ x 61″. Today I have to ship it off to The Netherlands along with another winter-themed quilt for a November-March exhibition at the Fries Museum. For a couple of weeks now, I’ve been stressing about how to do the shipping, but this morning got it worked out with the museum register. She was very nice, and told me that some of the hundreds of quilts — both traditional and contemporary — were already arriving at the museum.

Usually I think that once the quilt top has been designed and cut out and pieced together, it’s all downhill. Not in a bad way, but a sort of you-did-the-work-and-climbed-the-hill-and-now-you’re-on-top-and-ready-to-sail-down-on-your-sled/bike/snowboard-squealing-weeee kind of downhill. Mostly it’s like that, mostly it’s easy, fun and satisfying. But there are usually a few places that require some tough choices, a bit of nail-biting, and a lot of faith.

For those, I make test swatches to try out new ideas or stitch designs and threads to see how they interact with the patterns and colors of the fabric. But then when it comes to the real deal, it’s still a performance that requires practice, attitude, and spontaneity.

When our studio flooded, a lot of framed art got ruined. Since the Creamery Arts Center has lots of odd spaces, I cleaned the old frames and designed some collages to fit into them for the show.

Here’s the finished quilts in the show, but for fun I included some framed pages from my sketchbooks to show where the ideas come from.

“Paris – wish you were Hair.” The old vintage postage from my collection is from 1904 and someone wrote their postcard message on the front of the image.

“Seattle, the Space Needle – wish you were Hair”. Haven’t done the quilt for this this idea yet.

Actually, I drew this idea for “Twin Bridge”, then happened to find the postcard that matched. ooohwaa!

We had this really huge frame, so I put my actual pattern for “Athens – wish you were Hair”, with alternations into it. There was a little extra room, so I added some sketches and graphic inspirations at the bottom.

This one I called “Elements of an Art Quilt” because I included a stitch test for “St. Louis – wish you were Hair” to try out the effects of different thread colors on fabrics (and left the edges unfinished so that the astute observer could see the top layer, batting and backing), some graphic research and inspiration images, a pastel pencil practice for stitch patterns, and a wad of thread I picked up off the floor of my studio.

The little drawing in the corner gives a clue what “King Tut” (a variegated quilting thread) is because I used the reference in the labels on the stitch test on the left.