Saturday, February 2, 2008

Jonathan Holstein Lecture at Memorial Art Gallery

Our first noticeable snow since we got back from Florida. It has been messy for the last two days.


Well, hopefully my friends took some pictures that I can share that shows some of the really cool quilts that people bought for Jonathan Holstein to talk about.

Jonathan Holstein was responsible for the first show which featured quilts as art back in the early 70's at the Whitney in NYC. He is basically credited with bringing women's quilts as art into the forefront. So it was great to see such an iconic person give a lecture!! He spoke completely extemporaneously using the quilts that had been brought as his visuals. He was so knowledgeable and so charming, it was a pleasure to spend two hours listening to him talk about the different quilts. There were a couple of really amazing quilts too which made it very interesting.




I brought in my great, great grandmother's crazy quilt as I figured it was a very typical crazy quilt and it is in good condition. This was made by my mother's great grandmother in 1889 and I believe her full name is Frances Elizabeth Currier Bowen Townsend Knapp as she was married three times which I figure is quite a bit for a woman who was born around 1836 and died in about 1917 while my mother was still a girl. She lived with my grandmother and her family. My grandmother was deeply bitter about her own mother (my mother's grandmother) and really never had much to do with her as an adult. She had made my grandmother quit school at age 11 and stay take care of her. She lived with my grandmother's brother's family and she does look like quite the stern woman in the only picture I have of her while her mother (the crazy quilter) looks like a lovely old woman (she must have been to get three men to marry her).

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