New England Quilt Museum: Fabric to Magic

 

 

THE NEW ENGLAND QUILT MUSEUM

18 Shattuck Street

Lowell, Massachusetts

(Closed Monday, Tuesday)

 

Poor Lowell. It tries hard, but fate has a habit of throwing it curves. It was Jack Kerouac’s stomping grounds, but his Lowell home is a down-on-its-heels double decker that’s still occupied. If you want to see a Kerouac “home” you have to go to Florida; Lowell got only his gravesite and a namesake canal-side park. Wang Computers brought good jobs to the city, but it folded in 1992. Next, Lowell spent a good chunk of money rehabbing LaLacheur Park for the New York-Penn Lowell Spinners franchise and drew well. Then Major League Baseball eliminated its short season affiliates.

 

Lowell still has its National Historical Park–the nation’s first urban national park–but money has been tight and Congress has been loath to honor the humble New England textile workers whose story it tells. When I visited in June, most of the NPS parking had been eliminated and the lots sold to developers. It’s now a challenge finding on-street parking, not to mention the need to pump coins into meters.

 

The Lowell National Historical Park is still very much worth visiting, but a different objective brought us the Spindle City: The New England Quilt Museum (NEQM). It’s located within the National Park Visitors Center complex and is the only museum in the Northeast devoted to quiltmakers. My wife Emily is a fine quilter in her own right and has educated me on some of the fine points of producing patchwork blankets, hangings, and coverlets. In her estimation, the NEQM takes things to a different level.

 

The NEQM is a small facility whose ground floor is largely given over to shop space. Exhibits are upstairs and confined to just a handful of galleries. The works within them change frequently, but if what we saw is any indication the NEQM is worth repeated visits.

 

 

 

The featured needlecrafter on display was Dominique Ehrmann, a French woman who certainly challenges traditional notions of quilting. Much of her work goes from 2-D to 3-D. She is at once a fabric wizard, a storyteller, and a spinner of fantasies. One piece is where quilting meets steampunk, a gigantic work that one shudders to imagine the amount of time it took to assemble. Others begin with flat surfaces but break the plane by spilling over the edges and into what we’d normally see as negative space. Cool stuff.

 

  

A few other things caught my eye. I love animals and always like to see how quilters who don’t sculpt like Erdmann does represents them on flat surfaces. Here’s a small sampling: a deer, a fox, and a wolf, the latter of which is stitched onto a Japanese-style jacket. 

 

 

  

I also quite enjoyed the textured surfaces of Marge Tucker and a shimmery strip pattern from Teresa Duryea Wong that put me in mind of what heralded Ghanaian artist El Anatsui does with gold foil he salvages from discarded liquor bottles. Wong uses material, but it creates a similar effect.

 

Marge Tucker

 

Teresa Wong

 

 

Whenever I can, I like to give a Western Mass plug. Ann Brauer of Shelburne Falls caught my eye with her vibrant reds and oranges slashed with blue, yellows, greens, and a tiny bit of white. The combo really makes the printed material stick out.

 

Ann Brauer

 

When you visit, these pieces will probably have been replaced with others, but I’m sure there will other things that captivate. Get up close to observe the stitching, the precision, and the passion that goes into each work. You simply cannot walk away and think of it as anything less than art.

 

Rob Weir