Michael Francis James (born 30 June 1949) is an American artist, educator, author, and lecturer. He is best known as a leader of the art quilt movement that began in the 1970s.[1] He currently lives and maintains a studio in Lincoln, Nebraska.[2]
James was the first of seven children born to an English and French-Canadian Catholic family in New Bedford, Massachusetts. After high school he enrolled at Southeastern Massachusetts University in neighboring Dartmouth (now the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth), where he studied painting and printmaking.[3]
After receiving his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1971,[4] he moved to Rochester, New York, to attend graduate school at Rochester Institute of Technology,[3] majoring again in painting and printmaking.[4] While in graduate school he married Judith Dionne,[5] a fellow art student from Southeastern Massachusetts University, and their son, Trevor, was born. Even as he pursued a degree in painting, his interest in the medium began to wane. Before the end of his master's program, he had decided that he had "nothing important to say in painting."[3] Within months of receiving his Master of Fine Arts degree in 1973, he stopped painting altogether, turning his attention to fabric construction.[6]
James had experimented with patchwork and quiltmaking as an undergraduate.[3] His growing enthusiasm for these processes in the early 1970s coincided with a national re-interest in traditional arts spurred by the approaching US Bicentennial celebrations.[7] In the summer of 1971, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York exhibited selections from the quilt collection of Jonathan Holstein & Gail van der Hoof, a pivotal exhibition that attracted widespread media attraction.[8] James eventually attended a lecture by Holstein and van Der Hoof in 1973[9] and later said, "The idea that quilts can be art may not have occurred to me had I not seen Amish quilts."[10]
Early career
The growing nationwide interest in quiltmaking created a demand for quilting teachers,[11] and in 1974, James pursued two opportunities to teach adult education classes in nearby communities in Massachusetts—at Bristol Community College in Fall River[3] and at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln[12] outside of Boston.[13] Through his association with the DeCordova Museum, James met a group of like-minded artists from the Boston area.[14] Other academically-trained artists had also turned to quiltmaking,[15] several of whom participated in the June 1975 DeCordova exhibition, "Bed and Board," the third in a series of shows held in celebration of the Bicentennial and one of the first exhibits of non-traditional quilts in an accredited art museum.[16] James was one of the sixteen quiltmakers included in the show. The experience served as a catalyst for him, and thereafter he aspired to introduce more contemporary design into his own work.[14]
In the spring of 1977, James published a three-part series of articles in Quilter's Newsletter, called "Color in Quilts",[17] that explored principles covered in his workshops.[18] Shortly afterwards he was approached by Prentice Hall of Englewood, New Jersey, to write a book on quiltmaking.[5] James's The Quiltmaker's Handbook: A Guide to Design and Construction, published in 1978, focused on quiltmaking fundamentals, giving equal treatment to both hand and machine techniques. It also deconstructed the grid system upon which quilt block patterns are based and emphasized the importance of precision.[19]
Artistic development
Dawn Nebula, 1979
As interest in quiltmaking took off, so did James's career.[20] He was awarded a Visual Artist's Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts in 1978,[21] the first of three that he would receive from the NEA over the next twelve years.[22] In 1979 he served as one of three jurors for the first Quilt National,[23] an exhibition which became a biennial competition showcasing contemporary quiltmaking.[24] By then James was traveling more extensively to teach short, intensive workshops rather than semester-long courses.[14] In that same year, he was the recipient of a Craftsmen's Fellowship from The Artists Foundation of Boston.[25]
Beginning in 1980, James began to create his own striped yardage by sewing strips of cotton[26] and silk[27] together in sets of gradated colors, a development that would drive his work for the next fifteen years.[28] The pieces for his quilt tops were cut from the stripped panels,[29] adding complexity to the repeat block patterns.[26]
James published a sequel to his first instructional book in 1981.[30]The Second Quiltmaker's Handbook: Creative Approaches to Contemporary Quilt Design used exercises from his workshops[31] to explore theories and processes of designing original compositions, and detailed various technical aspects including curved seams and strip-piecing.[32]
Strip-pieced quilts
Many consider strip-piecing to be James's signature technique.[33] His pieced panels eventually grew to encompass 36 strips of fabric, each measuring ¾ to 1 inch wide,[34] and were arranged in "luminous"[35] runs of graded color and value. The quilts themselves could include up to 150 different colors[34] resulting in intricate compositions that required dozens of pattern templates.[36] It was for this work, too, that he earned his reputation as a colorist.[37]
In the early 1980s, James took his workshops overseas, first to England and then, on subsequent trips, to France, Switzerland, Ireland, Italy, and other European countries.[38] His courses emphasized design principles rather than quiltmaking techniques.[39] Through his teaching he aimed to encourage quilters in their own design work by "demystifying color and pattern."[40]
Rhythm/Color: Spanish Dance, 1985
In a 1985 New York Times article by Patricia Malarcher, Ulysses G. Dietz, at the time the curator of decorative arts for the Newark Museum in New Jersey, announced that the museum had commissioned a piece from James for their permanent collection and described the institution's acquisition policy. "The criterion is quality," he said. "That means not only technical excellence, but also distinctive style."[41] The result was the first in the Rhythm/Color series, Rhythm/Color: Spanish Dance.[38] It was also the first quilt in which James began to deliberately override the block structure. [42]
As James's work progressed through the mid to late 1980s, the grid-based composition of his designs became increasingly disguised.[43] He strove to eliminate the traditional quilt block construction method from his work completely, as he felt that it was becoming "too predictable." By 1988, his quilts were still designed upon a gridded foundation, but the construction of the quilt tops no longer relied on square blocks.[44] Between 1986 and 1989, he experimented with the overall silhouette of the quilt, breaking out of the standard, rectangular format.[45] His work was described by newspapers and magazine articles of the time as "spacially complex," "airy",[35] and "full of light and movement."[46]
In 1988 he was awarded a second fellowship from the Boston Artist's Foundation and another from the National Endowment for the Arts.[22] His first European exhibit, "Michael James: Nouveaux Quilts," was shown that same year at Galerie Jonas in Petit-Cortaillod, Switzerland,[38] a gallery to which his work would return five times over the next two decades.[47]
By 1990 James was concerned that he had taken the strip-piecing as far as it would go, and he was doubtful that he would continue to make quilts[48] as he felt confined by their limits of geometry.[49] That year, however, he received his third grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a USA/France Exchange Fellowship. He spent three months, September through November, in an artists' residency in La Napoule, France,[22] where he devoted his time to working with oil pastels and crayons on paper. He credits this brief hiatus from quiltmaking and the resultant drawings with the breakthrough he made after his return to his studio. By 1992, he had found a way to escape the grid structure altogether.[50]
James describes the quilts he made between 1992 and 1995 as a "last hurrah" for the strip-pieced panel technique, and he is best known for the work that he produced during this period.[51] In 1992 James was awarded an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, his alma mater, and the following year, he was the 25th person to be inducted into the Quilter's Hall of Fame in Marion, Indiana.[52] His quilt Quilt No. 150: Rehoboth Meander was acquired by the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.,[22] under the auspices of the James Renwick Alliance, in 1994.[53]
By 1995 he was spending twelve to fourteen weeks a year traveling in Europe and Japan to teach workshops and give lectures.[54] James thought of Switzerland, in particular, as his "second home," as he had taught there every year since 1981.[55] In the summer of 1995, he had a third solo exhibition at Galerie Jonas in Switzerland, which coincided with the release of a retrospective[54] monograph of his work, Michael James: Studio Quilts.[56] The book included documentation of his quilt-building process, as well as photographs of the individual quilts.[57] He was also one of five American artists invited to exhibit in the 8th International Triennial of Tapestry[58] that year in Lodz, Poland, where his piece, The Metaphysics Of Action: Entropic Forms won a juror's citation.[22]
Digital quilts
The Terminus of One Path, 2008
In the late 1990s, James became increasingly involved with activities at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. He served on the inaugural advisory board of the International Quilt Study Center & Museum,[59] (now the International Quilt Museum[60]) which was founded at the university in 1997.[61] In 1999 he was offered a full-time position as a senior lecturer in the Department of Textiles, Clothing and Design[62] (now the Department of Textiles, Merchandising and Fashion Design[63]). This opportunity promised a means to integrate art theory and fabric construction in a collegiate textile program.[37] In 2000 he relocated to Lincoln, Nebraska,[64] and began teaching in the fall semester.[65] Over the course of nearly twenty years on that faculty, he taught a range of courses including foundation design, textile design, and quilt studies.[66]
In early 2002, the textile department at the University of Nebraska acquired a Mimaki TX-1600X digital textile printer that could print reactive dyes on fabric up to 60 inches wide.[67] Access to this technology motivated James to take his work in a new direction.[68] He experimented with digital imagery and produced fabric using images from scanned hard copy or from photographs.[69] He modified these images using Adobe Photoshop® and Illustrator®.[70]
James became chairperson of the Department of Textiles, Merchandising and Fashion Design in 2005,[71] a position that he held until his retirement in early 2020.[72] Despite his increased academic responsibilities, he maintained an active studio practice with the help of assistants.[73] In a 2010 article reviewing the exhibition, "Hand Craft: A Decade of Digital Quilts", at Metropolitan Community College near Omaha, Kent Wolgamott, arts columnist for the Lincoln Journal Star, noted that a decade after James had moved to Nebraska, he had created nearly 100 quilts using digitally-developed fabric.[64]
Late career
James’s wife Judith was diagnosed with younger onset Alzheimer’s Disease in 2009.[74] A “movingly poetic” and “gently resigned”[75] body of work emerged from his experiences with the progression of her illness that culminated in a solo exhibition at the International Quilt Museum in Lincoln from June 2015 to February 2016.[76] The exhibition, “Ambiguity & Enigma,” was credited by Wolgamott as being James’s “best, most powerful exhibition this writer has seen either in person or digital reproduction.” James had a similar assessment saying, “I’m very proud of this work. I think it’s the strongest body of work I’ve done to date. There’s a rightness and a kind of perfection in these pieces I’ve not achieved before. If it turns out to be a kind of coda, that’s fine.”[77] Judith died of the complications of the disease in August of 2015. They had been married 43 years.[78] His memoir of their Alzheimer's journey, Dear Judy–A Love Story Rewritten by Alzheimer's, was published by Pine Eden Press in 2023.
Shortly after his retirement from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, James donated the bulk of his papers related to the studio quilt movement to the Archives and Special Collections Department at the University Libraries.[1] He continues to maintain a studio practice in Lincoln, Nebraska, and his work is represented by Modern Arts Midtown in Omaha, Nebraska.[2]
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.
Marie Daugherty Webster was a quilt designer, quilt producer, and businesswoman, as well as a lecturer and author of Quilts, Their Story, and How to Make Them (1915), the first American book about the history of quilting, reprinted many times since. She also ran the Practical Patchwork Company, a quilt pattern-making business from her home in Wabash, Indiana, for more than thirty years. Webster's appliquéd quilts influenced modern quilting designs of the early twentieth century. Her quilts have been featured in museums and gallery exhibition in the United States and Japan. The Indianapolis Museum of Art holds the largest collection of her quilts in the United States. Webster was inducted into the Quilters Hall of Fame in 1991. The Marie Webster House, her former residence in Marion, Indiana, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1992, was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1993, and serves as the present-day home of the Quilters Hall of Fame.
Miriam Nathan-Roberts was a textile artist who specialized in Studio Art Quilting. Her work was centered on abstract "illusions of three dimensions on flat or semi-flat surfaces." Nathan-Roberts received many awards at the Quilt National over the years, including Best in Show, the People's Choice Award (1985), and the Juror's Award of Merit (2013); she served as Juror in 2005.
The International Quilt Museum at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln in Lincoln, Nebraska is the home of the largest known public collection of quilts in the world. Also known as Quilt House, the current facility opened in 2008.
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.
Cuesta Benberry was an American historian and scholar. Considered to be one of the pioneers of research on quiltmaking in America, she was the pioneer of research on African-American quiltmaking. Her involvement in quilt research spans from founding and participating in various quilt groups to writing articles in renowned quilt magazines and journals. As a quilt scholar, Benberry acquired a collection of important quilts dating from the late 19th century up to the 21st century, as well as an extensive collection of paper documents supplementing quilting exhibitions, books, articles and her personal research.
The quilts of Gee's Bend are quilts created by a group of women and their ancestors who live or have lived in the isolated African-American hamlet of Gee's Bend, Alabama along the Alabama River. The quilts of Gee's Bend are among the most important African-American visual and cultural contributions to the history of art within the United States. Arlonzia Pettway, Annie Mae Young and Mary Lee Bendolph are among some of the most notable quilters from Gee's Bend. Many of the residents in the community can trace their ancestry back to enslaved people from the Pettway Plantation. Arlonzia Pettway can recall her grandmother's stories of her ancestors, specifically of Dinah Miller, who was brought to the United States by slave ship in 1859.
The Great Lakes Quilt Center is the Michigan State University Museum’s center for quilt-related research, education, and exhibition activities. While the museum, established in 1857, has long held significant collections, its focus of activities on quilt scholarship and education began with the launch of the Michigan Quilt Project at the museum in 1984. The Michigan Quilt Project not only spearheaded the documentation of the state's quiltmaking history, but also stimulated interest in strengthening the museum's quilt collection, upgrading its care, and expanding its use. As of 2008, the Michigan Quilt Project has collected documentation on over 9000 quilts in the state and the collection of quilts numbers over 700 with significant examples from Michigan and the Great Lakes region, examples of quilts from numerous African countries, major ethnographic collections of Native American quilts and Michigan African American quilts, and special collections assembled by Kitty Clark Cole, Harriet Clarke, Merry and Albert Silber, Deborah Harding, and Betty Quarton Hoard. The MSU Museum also houses two important collections developed by pioneering American quilt historians Cuesta Benberry and Mary Schafer.
Rosie Lee Tompkins (1936–2006) is the art pseudonym of Effie Mae Martin Howard, a widely acclaimed African-American quiltmaker and fiber artist of Richmond, California. The New York Times called her "one of the great American artists," and her work "one of the century’s major artistic accomplishments." More than 500 works by Tompkins reside at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
Holice Edward Turnbow is an American quilter, artist, and textile consultant. Since the early 1970s, Turnbow has curated, judged, and lectured at a multitude of quilting events throughout the United States and Canada. He is certified by the National Quilting Association as a judge and teacher. In 1988, he co-founded the Hoffman Challenge, a national quilting, clothing, and dolls contest featuring hundreds of participants. His design have been commissioned by Spartex, Inc., Stencil House, and Benartex, Inc.
Polly Barton is an American textile artist.
Michael Cummings is an American artist and quilter who lives in Harlem, New York.
Women of Color Quilters Network (WCQN) is a national organization dedicated to preserving African American quiltmaking.
Linda MacDonald was born in 1946, in Berkeley, California. She is a multimedia artist who was at the forefront of the studio quilt art movements. She has been called a "fine artist [who works] with quilting techniques."
Yvonne Porcella was an American art quilter.
Mary Catherine Lamb was an American textile artist, whose quilts reframed traditional Roman Catholic iconography. Recycling vintage textiles popular during the mid-20th Century, she both honored and affectionately skewered her Catholic upbringing.
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.
Lucinda Toomer was an American artist who worked in the African-American tradition of quiltmaking. Her quilts are known for their bold compositions, visual rhythm, and improvisational style. They were at the forefront of a surge of national recognition for the art form during the 1990s.
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.
"Creative Activity"(PDF). TCD Digest. University of Nebraska-Lincoln: College of Education and Human Sciences. April–May 2007. Archived from the original(PDF) on 31 October 2008. Retrieved 24 June 2013.
Ducey, Carolyn (2015). "Foreword". Ambiguity & Enigma: Recent Quilts by Michael James. Lincoln, NE: International Quilt Study Center & Museum. ISBN978-0-9814582-8-1.
Green, Michelle (October 5, 2011). "Academic Planning Committee Minutes"(PDF). Academic Planning Committee. University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Retrieved 23 October 2020.
Halpern, Nancy (June 2002). "Pioneers: Teaching the World to Quilt". Quilter's Newsletter Magazine (343).
Harris, Patricia; Lyon, David; Malarcher, Patricia (1995). Michael James: Studio Quilts. Neuchatel, Switzerland: Editions Victor Attinger, SA. ISBN2-88380-006-5.
Harris, Patricia; Lyon, David (1998). Michael James: Art & Inspirations. Lafayette, CA: C&T Publishing, Inc. ISBN1-57120-040-1.
Harriss, Joseph (May 1987). "The Newest Quilt Fad Seems to be Going like Crazy". Smithsonian. 18 (2).
James, Michael (1998). "Preface". Michael James: Art & Inspirations. Lafayette, CA: C&T Publishing. ISBN1-57120-040-1.
James, Michael (Spring 2001). "In the Beginning: Musings on the Birth of the Studio Art Quilt Movement". Blanket Statements. American Quilt Study Group (64).
James, Michael (November–December 2003). "The Digital Quilt". Quilter's Newsletter Magazine. 30 (3).
James, Michael (Fall 2010). "The Art Quilt: A Critical Perspective". Surface Design Journal.
James, Michael (2015). "Making Sense: Ambiguous Abstractions and Enigmatic Meanings". Ambiguity & Enigma: Recent Quilts by Michael James. Lincoln, NE: International Quilt Study Center & Museum. ISBN978-0-9814582-8-1.
Jurgelski, Susan (March 20, 1992). "Piecing It Together: Quilter/Workshop Leader Michael James an Artist by Design". Lancaster New Era. Pennsylvania.
Klein, Jody (March–April 1984). "Michael James: A Ten-Year Retrospective". FiberArts.
Koplos, Janet (2015). "Michael James: Context and Interpretation". Ambiguity & Enigma: Recent Quilts by Michael James. Lincoln, NE: International Quilt Study Center & Museum. ISBN978-0-9814582-8-1.
Laury, Jean Ray (March 2004). "My Journey through Quilting". Quilter's Newsletter Magazine (360).
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