Behind Our Quilts

“Lyin’ Thru His Nose” is a fabric art quilt featuring an original image of a grizzled man drawn on leather using a pyrography method of burning the leather with an iron. The leather has an opening at the right nostril and is surrounded by images of escaping fish in water. The man is telling a long string of animated tales of how many fish he almost caught. $500

“Many Churning Rivers Still To Cross” is a fabric art quilt featuring an original image of a elderly woman clutching her blouse and lamenting the long journey of forging the rivers of social strife. She is surrounded by the images of storm clouds in the fabric and along the quilt’s right edge. Beneath her is a square of ringed fabric that symbolizes the age rings found in felled trees. The rings are representative of how long the social and racial ills have been around. $500

“Thru The Window Screen” is a framed, fabric art piece featuring an original image drawn on leather using the pyrography method of burning the leather with an iron. The child in the drawing has pressed herself against the window screen and broken thru it to see what her friends are doing. Below her is a fabric art recreation of a tomato garden that used to be more common in neighborhoods, especially for those migrating out of the rural countryside into the larger city.  $500

“Coon Creek Party Line” is a fabric art narrative quilt featuring images printed on the fabric, coinage, vintage linens and thread painting in recounting the story of an accident. The original narration is printed on the course, yellow fabric and recounts the story coming on a series of phone calls to the “party line”. Astride the narration is a series of images that further unfold the story of those dead assigned bound coins and closed-loop threads. At the top of the ascending story panels is the final telling of the accident being told by the last call on the party line and a disposition of the injured, critical and the lives still in the balance signified by strings, strands and tufts of thread and yarn. The story is quilted on an heirloom, cutwork curtain to symbolize those families watching at the window of the house with the telephone to move, indicating the owner moving toward the ringing telephone.  $800

“Col. Charles Young” is a round quilted fabric art celebration of the third African American to graduate from West Point Military Academy and his heroic narrative from enslaved child to U.S. Army Colonel and the Congressional Medal of Army.   $300

“Leaning Into My Religion”  is a framed fabric art piece featuring an original image from Jas Marids series, “Just A Crown: 40 Crowns Worn By Black Women in Their Lifetime”. The image is leaning forward toward a fabric art crucifix and above her head are three fabric art moons representative of the Holy Trinity.  $1,200

“Putting My Sorrows in Pots”  is a fabric art piece featuring an original portrait drawn in the pyrography method on leather of an elderly woman in a hat above a vessel with yarn and thread painting. The strands of thread and yarn behind the image swirls and flow above her head and thru her toward the vessel below. The background is a storm laced fabric recreation with quilting that traces the bursts of color. $600

“My Remembers: The Hounds” is a framed fabric art piece with an original drawing in the pyrography method on leather of an animated storytelling woman smoking a corn cob pipe. The woman is glancing into her memory of a pack of hounds racing thru the fields in pursuit of a bounty or escaping friend. The corners of the piece are two images combined to give the escaping friend strength and nourishment in his flight: the Pende circle upon circles from Congo-Kinshasa and the bird from drinking vessels in Dahomey. $800

“Grandma In Winter” A glass enclosed framed fabric art piece featuring quilt squares from 1970’s sewing by Jas Mardis learning to quilt with his Grandmother and a leather silhouette of her against a white fabric with thread painting. $300

“Flood Water Is Never Blue” A large fabric art narrative quilt telling a story of the 1937 flood across the Southern states that sent people to temporary camp. The narrative is about two girls finding friendship amidst the chaos and finding delight in discovering that flood water and river water carry two tasks but eventually become the same. Images featured on the piece are from crowd photographs taken in the Pulaski County camp. $1,500

“Him Say: Making Haint Blue Paint” This fabric art piece features a rare image of a “Slave Horn” that was used during the time of chattel slavery to call the people out and from the fields. The narrative is a recounting of how the man who blew the horn was also responsible for new arrivals and took great pains to create a dye from natural and supernatural components found and forced from the environment. The “Haint (Haunt) Blue dye was used to ward away evil spirits and keeps insects from building nests.  NFS