Sue Reno is a fiber artist from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Sue Reno is a fiber artist from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Rich and intricate art quilts reflect her local environment and incorporate imagery drawn from her studies of botany, wildlife, historic architecture, and the Susquehanna River.
She employs surface design techniques including cyanotype, mono printing, digital image transfer, and needle felting as the basis for works that also incorporate hand painted fabrics, hand and machine stitching, and beadwork.
She was one of the first group of artists involved in the fiber art postcard phenomenon and was interviewed about this topic for the "Quilters' S.O.S. - Save Our Stories" project for The Alliance For American Quilts. [1] The transcription and photographs are archived by the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, which is referred to here on page 66.
Best in Show 2012 "Art Quilts XVII: Integrating a Paradox", [2] award at the Chandler Center for the Arts for "Squirrel and Locust".
United States Department of State display in the U.S. embassy in Laos from 2011-2013 [3] of "The Organic Garden".
Winner of the 2013 "Art of the State" Pennsylvania Museum Purchase Award and part of the Permanent Collection of the State Museum of Pennsylvania [4] for "Silk Mill #3". Her piece "In Dreams I Learned to Swim" was juried into the 2015 Art of the State show.
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope - In 2016, Sue was chosen by NASA as one of a few artists to visit the Goddard Space Flight Center to view and be inspired by the telescope, and to produce a unique piece of art. [5] It was displayed at the Goddard Space Flight Center for three months in 2017. Details on this Art Quilt "Luminosity" are documented in her blog and can be viewed here.
2nd Place for Craft at the 2020 "Art of the State" Pennsylvania Museum exhibit [6] - Her piece, "In Dreams I Saw the Rift" can be viewed on her website or on the museum's Virtual 360 exhibit tour in Area 9.
Unfolding the Universe : A James Webb Space Telescope VR Experience - In 2022, Sue was live in the Earth Gallery of this NASA event; presenting her four artworks (First Light, Galaxy Assembly, Stellar Nurseries, Luminosity) about the James Webb Space Telescope . Metaverse participants were able to virtually view Sue's artwork as they strolled the Earth Gallery and interacted with her. The event was also live streamed on YouTube. Sue is introduced here.
Quilting Arts Workshop: Surface Design Essentials for the Printed Quilt - Released in the Fall of 2014, this instructional course by Sue is dedicated to teaching how to create unique fabric using four distinct surface design techniques: Thermofax, cyanotype, collagraph, and heliographic sun printing.
PBS Quilting Arts TV [7] - Sue is featured in three episodes (1404, 1408, 1410) of this show, which began airing nationwide in 2014. A full description of this TV series is available here. A preview of Sue on episode 1404 can be viewed here.
HGTV Home and Garden Television - A sampling of Sue's techniques are demonstrated in a Simply Quilts [8] show in the episode "Abstract Quilts from Nature". It can be viewed here.
YouTube - Extensive interview of Sue by Amber Kane. Includes a discussion of her techniques and early influences. It can be viewed here.
SAQA Studio Art Quilt Associates - Detailed interview of Sue by Clairan Ferrono. It can be read here.
The piece "Tall Blue Lettuce" was on the cover of Professional Quilter Magazine. [9] Other publications have showcased her work including Machine Quilting Unlimited, [10] Quilters Newsletter [11] and the book Beginner's Guide to Art Quilts [12]
She was featured in the March 2014 issue of American Quilter Magazine with an extensive interview “The Hand of the Maker” by Marjorie L. Russell and the article “Cognitive Textile Artist Process", written by Sue, which breaks her cognitive process down into steps that other artists and aspiring artists could find useful, regardless of their subject matter or preferred techniques.
Her piece "Jack in the Pulpit" is featured on the cover of the September 2015 issue of Machine Quilting Unlimited, along with a feature article written by her titled "Environmental Explorations"
Her article, "Working with Wet Cyanotype" is featured in the January/February 2018 issue of Machine Quilting Unlimited. It's a detailed exploration of this uncommon technique. [13]
Her fiber art has been hung in many juried shows including the International Quilt Festival, [14] Quilts=Arts=Quilts at Schweinfurth Art Center, [15] Art Quilts XIII: Lucky Break at the Chandler Center for the Arts, [16] and in museums including the State Museum of Pennsylvania, [4] the Museum of Fine Arts in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, [17] the International Museum of Collage, Assemblage and Construction, [18] the Bellefonte Museum, [19] the Robeson Gallery of Pennsylvania State University [20] and Materials Hard and Soft. [21] In 2010, her solo exhibit, "Transformation: The Watt & Shand Series", [22] received critical acclaim for the chronicling of the transformation of an historic department store into the Lancaster County Convention Center. In 2010, she unveiled a series titled "Flora and Fauna". 2012 brought new pieces titled "Ginger" and "Bamboo Emerging" into "The Garden" series and additional work in "The Structures" series of various pieces featuring the Columbia, PA Silk Mill. Best in Show was awarded for "Squirrel and Locust" in November, 2012 at Integrating a Paradox: Art Quilts XVII [2] at Chandler Center for the Arts. 2013-2017 featured many additional exhibits. For example in 2016, her work was displayed in Tainan City, Taiwan; in 2017, at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD and in 2022, at NASA's Unfolding the Universe : A James Webb Space Telescope VR Experience.
A complete list of her past and upcoming exhibits are linked here:
Sue attended Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, PA, pursuing a degree in Religious Studies.
Sue is a Professional Artist Member of Studio Art Quilt Associates (SAQA), [23] which features her work.. She is a Master Artisan in the Pennsylvania Guild of Craftsmen. She was an active member of the PA Arts Experience for 10 years until its dissolution in 2017.
Sue was born in Pennsylvania and is married to Wayne Reno. They have two daughters; Stella Sexton and Alice Petrovich. She is an avid gardener, hiker, biker and photographer.
A quilt is a multi-layered textile, traditionally composed of two or more layers of fabric or fiber. Commonly three layers are used with a filler material. These layers traditionally include a woven cloth top, a layer of batting or wadding, and a woven back combined using the techniques of quilting. This is the process of sewing on the face of the fabric, and not just the edges, to combine the three layers together to reinforce the material. Stitching patterns can be a decorative element. A single piece of fabric can be used for the top of a quilt, but in many cases the top is created from smaller fabric pieces joined, or patchwork. The pattern and color of these pieces creates the design.
The cyanotype is a slow-reacting, economical photographic printing formulation sensitive to a limited near ultraviolet and blue light spectrum, the range 300 nm to 400 nm known as UVA radiation. It produces a cyan-blue print used for art as monochrome imagery applicable on a range of supports, and for reprography in the form of blueprints. For any purpose, the process usually uses two chemicals: ferric ammonium citrate or ferric ammonium oxalate, and potassium ferricyanide, and only water to develop and fix. Announced in 1842, it is still in use.
Marion M. Bass, known as Pinky Bass or Pinky/MM Bass, is an American photographer, known for her work in pinhole photography.
Quilt art, sometimes known as art quilting, mixed media art quilts or fiber art quilts, is an art form that uses both modern and traditional quilting techniques to create art objects. Practitioners of quilt art create it based on their experiences, imagery, and ideas, rather than traditional patterns. Quilt art generally has more in common with the fine arts than it does with traditional quilting. Quilt art is typically hung or mounted.
The San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles is an art museum in Downtown San Jose, California, USA. Founded in 1977, the museum is the first in the United States devoted solely to quilts and textiles as an art form. Holdings include a permanent collection of over 1,000 quilts, garments and ethnic textiles, emphasizing artists of the 20th- and 21st-century, and a research library with over 500 books concerning the history and techniques of the craft.
Bettye Kimbrell is a master folk artist for quilting, and one of the charter members of the North Jefferson Quilter's Guild in Mount Olive, Alabama.
Margaret Webb Dreyer was an American painter, muralist, mosaic artist, educator, gallery owner, and political activist who spent most of her career in Houston, Texas. Though she worked in a number of styles and media over the years, she was best known as an abstract expressionist painter. Her work won numerous awards in major juried shows and was exhibited widely in museums and galleries.
Joyce J. Scott is an African-American artist, sculptor, quilter, performance artist, installation artist, print-maker, lecturer and educator. Named a MacArthur Fellow in 2016, and a Smithsonian Visionary Artist in 2019, Scott is best known for her figurative sculptures and jewelry using free form, off-loom beadweaving techniques, similar to a peyote stitch. Each piece is often constructed using thousands of glass seed beads or pony beads, and sometimes other found objects or materials such as glass, quilting and leather. In 2018, she was hailed for working in new medium — a mixture of soil, clay, straw, and cement — for a sculpture meant to disintegrate and return to the earth. Scott is influenced by a variety of diverse cultures, including Native American and African traditions, Mexican, Czech, and Russian beadwork, illustration and comic books, and pop culture.
Yvonne Porcella was an American art quilter.
Sabrina Gschwandtner is an American artist currently living in Los Angeles, California. She has held numerous showings of her work throughout the country and several pieces have been acquired by museums, including LACMA, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the RISD Museum.
Jean Ray Laury was an American artist and designer. She was one of the first fine artists to move to quilting as a medium of choice in the late 1950s. Her quilts followed neither traditional method nor pattern; they were bold, modern, colorful collages, often laced with humor and satire. Penning over twenty books and teaching over 2,000 workshops, Laury helped women see the creative possibilities in everyday objects and awake their sense of inspiration. Laury has been called a "foremother of a quilt revival", and "one of the pioneers" of non-traditional quilts.
Martha Neill Upton was a watercolorist, sculptor and studio quilt artist. Her quilted tapestries helped quilts become seen as fine art, rather than craft work, during the early 1970s. Her quilts were shown in the first major museum exhibition of non-traditional quilts, The New American Quilt at New York's Museum of Arts and Design, then called the Museum of Contemporary Craft, in 1976.
Tina Williams Brewer is an American quilting artist, recognized for story quilts about African American history. Brewer was born in Huntington, West Virginia. She graduated from the Columbus College of Art and Design. Brewer started in interior design and pottery, but moved to quilting in 1986, feeling it was more compatible with motherhood. She is currently based in Pittsburgh, PA and has served on the boards of the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh and Pittsburgh Filmmakers/Pittsburgh Center for the Arts.
Mary Lee Bendolph is an American quilt maker of the Gee's Bend Collective from Gee's Bend (Boykin), Alabama. Her work has been influential on subsequent quilters and artists and her quilts have been exhibited in museums and galleries around the country. Bendolph uses fabric from used clothing for quilting in appreciation of the "love and spirit" with old cloth. Bendolph has spent her life in Gee's Bend and has had work featured in the Philadelphia Museum of Art as well as the Minneapolis Institute of Art in Minnesota.
Sandra Sider is an American quilt artist, author, and curator. She holds a PhD in comparative literature from University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, specializing in Renaissance studies. She also holds an M.A. in art history from the New York University Institute of Fine Arts.
The Studio Art Quilt Associates, abbreviated as SAQA, is a leading non-profit advocacy group for art quilts based in Hebron, Connecticut, in the United States.
Yvonne Wells is an African-American folk artist and quilter from Tuscaloosa, Alabama. She is best known for her self-taught style and her story quilts depicting scenes from the Bible and the Civil Rights Movement. Her work has been exhibited at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture and at the International Quilt Museum.
Priscilla Kepner Sage is an American textile and fiber artist. She is an associate professor emeritus of art at Iowa State University. Sage's work can be found in the permanent collections of the National Quilt Museum, Brunnier Art Museum, Museum of Quilts and Textiles and the Yamanashi Prefecture International Center in Kofu, Japan. Sage's suspended sculpture, two dimensional, and bas relief work, can be found in permanent corporate, residential, and healthcare collections throughout the United States and abroad.
Joan Schulze is an American artist, lecturer, and poet. Schulze's career spans over five decades: she is best known for her work of contemporary quilts, fiberarts, and collage. Schulze has been named a “pioneer of the art quilt movement,” and her influence has been compared to that of Robert Rauschenberg’s. Her work is in galleries and private collections worldwide including the Renwick Gallery/Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, & the Oakland Museum of California.
Sharon Kerry-Harlan is an African-American artist active in Hollywood, Florida and Wauwatosa, Wisconsin who is known for her textile art. She was born in Miami, Florida in 1951. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree from Marquette University and studied at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design. She went on to work at Marquette University as an Academic Coordinator and to teach textile courses at University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee as an adjunct professor. From July to August 2019, Kerry-Harlan had a solo exhibition at the James Watrous Gallery at the Overture Center for the Arts. Throughout August 2019, her work was on display in the AndStill We Rise: Race Culture and Visual Conversations exhibit at the Mariposa Museum & World Cultural Center in Oak Bluff, Massachusetts. In early 2021, Kerry-Harlan participated in the Textile Center and Women of Color Quilters Network’s juried exhibit Racism: In the Face of Hate We Resist. Later that year, Kerry-Harlan's work was displayed in the Museum of Wisconsin Art's Claiming Space Exhibition. In 2022, her work, Portrait of Resilience, from the Flag Series, was acquired by the Smithsonian American Art Museum as part of the Renwick Gallery's 50th Anniversary Campaign in 2022. That same year, Kerry-Harlan's work was displayed in the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art's exhibit Ain’t I A Woman? in celebration of the 2022 Wisconsin Triennial. She also had work displayed in the 2022 Uncovering Black History: Quilts from the Collection of Carolyn Mazloomi exhibition at the International Quilt Museum in Lincoln, Nebraska.