“Piecework” Exhibition

Pavel Zoubok Gallery

[Image: Donna Sharrett "41° 10’ 8” N 73° 49’ 15” W" (2018) clothing, jewelry, guitar-strings, guitar-string ball-ends, fabric and thread, 18 1/2 x 24 1/2 in.]

This event has ended.

Pavel Zoubok Gallery invites you to Piecework, a group exhibition in our side gallery featuring quilt-like collages by artists Vanessa German, Joe Lewis, Diane Samuels, Donna Sharrett and Stephen Sollins. Often adapting traditional techniques, the exhibition showcases works inspired by the history of quilt making. By using unexpected materials and addressing social and political realities, these works go beyond the cannon, dissolving the line between art and craft and re-centering the quilt as a symbol of American culture.

In a new series titled A Tailored Herbaria of At-Risk Forest Denizens, Donna Sharrett collects fallen leaves to record the existence of trees imperiled by accelerated temperature, rainfall shifts, disease, insect introductions and landscaping trends. The resulting objects of sewn and quilted leaves are arranged to illuminate the uniqueness of each leaf and identified with the tree’s GPS location. Similarly intricate is Diane Samuels’ Poetry Quilt, a personal anthology of the artist’s favorite poems, precisely 198 of them, hand-transcribed in micro-script on collaged strips of painted paper.

Delia Quilts by Vanessa German pays homage to the artist’s mother, a fiber artist, and to Delia, an African slave whose daguerreotype was taken in 1850 in Columbia S.C. Her haunting image emerges from the tops of old quilts like a defiant, proud spirit. In a multi-part series of paper sculptures (three of which are on view), Stephen Sollins studies the odd shapes that makes up a 19th century Crazy quilt in the collection of the American Folk Art Museum. Part homage and part representation, these unusual pieces, made from envelopes and Tyvek, isolate each shape in a series of shifting arrangements. Joe Lewis’ Juvenile Body Bags made from Kente cloth, a royal and sacred West African woven textile, confronts the violence against black bodies/lives head on. Lewis writes that after death, no matter the circumstances, we should “wrap our loved ones in the cloth of Kings as they set out on their next journey.”