I saw this article through another list, and I
wondered what you all thought about it.  I won't
comment now, though I do have an opinion...

Kim Kenney
Curator
McKinley Museum

*********************************************

"MUSEUMS COZY UP TO QUILTS"

It's High Season for Blankets,
But Patrons Ask: Is It Art?
Competing with El Greco

By BROOKS BARNES
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Museum curators have a lot to worry about in these
tough times: attendance,
security, damaged art.
And now ... bedbugs?

>From Colorado to Connecticut, some of the season's
biggest blockbuster
exhibits
have nothing to do with van Gogh and Vermeer --
they're all about quilts.
Indeed, the kind of bedcovers that look like something

from Aunt Edna's
boudoir
have made it to a surprising number of big-city
museums, from "The Quilted
Surface" in Columbus, Ohio, to "The Quilts of Gee's
Bend," which will hit
the
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Another museum on the
tour -- New York's
august
Whitney Museum of American Art.

But here's a question: Is it art? Curators and
auctioneers are quick to
point
out that this is legitimate stuff, with its own
masterworks and history.
Plus,
they say, quilts are great for attendance, pulling in
a lot of people who
wouldn't otherwise set foot in a museum. But many
everyday museum-goers say
they're surprised to see the usual fare replaced by
beaux-arts blankies:
This
stuff's not art, they say -- it's crafts.

Disappointing

Kelly Howard, for one, made a recent trip to the UBS
PaineWebber Art Gallery
in
Manhattan after friends raved about its exhibit of
rare Tibetan artifacts.
Instead, she found a show called "Six Continents of
Quilts," which is set to
appear in national and international museums for the
next four years. "To be
honest, I'm a little disappointed," the New York
actress says. Two of the
showpieces -- one with yellow police tape woven into
it and another that
incorporated computer circuitry -- did catch her eye.
"I'm glad those two
are
hanging on a wall," she says, because they would "hurt

somebody on a bed."

This isn't the first time quilts have made the museum
scene. The Whitney
mounted the first major-museum quilt show back in
1971, and a Civil War-era
quilt sold for $264,000 at Sotheby's in the in the
mid-'90s. But in general,
these pieces rarely made it beyond folk-art museums
and the historic-homes
circuit -- until now. Suddenly, quilts seem to be
coming out all over, with
eight big shows hitting art museums around the U.S.
this year. The latest
development: quilt subgenres. Indianapolis is cozying
up to 50 food-related
works, while Yale University Art Gallery is
highlighting "Nine
African-American
Quilters."

After all, adherents argue, if mosaics and collages
are art, why not quilts?
"They're highly refined objects that often address
important historical
themes," says Nancy Druckman, director of Sotheby's
folk-art department.
Also,
the nation has 20 million quilters -- a hefty,
built-in audience for any one
of
these displays.

But there may be another, more prosaic reason for the
quilt craze: These
shows
are cheap to mount. And museums need that, especially
at a time when
attendance
is falling, outside funding is drying up and insurance

costs are soaring.
Insuring a quilt exhibition costs "peanuts" compared
with even a modest
painting or sculpture show, says Michele Twyman, who
handles museums for
Chubb
insurance. Shipping's cheaper, too: While a large
painting may cost $1,000
to
transport from Houston to New York, quilts of the same

size can go for about
$400. "They're a cinch compared to traditional
artworks," says Jonathan
Schwartz, president of Atelier 4, a New York
art-shipping outfit.

An Easy Sell

Better still, quilts are an easy sell to finicky
corporate sponsors who
usually
like uncontroversial art. Even Kenneth Lay, former
chief executive of Enron,
is
a sponsor of "Gee's Bend." (The show features denim,
corduroy and
cotton-scrap
quilts by African-American women in rural Alabama.)
"Everybody wants a piece
of
it," says Shelly Zegart, the show's consulting
curator. The Museum of Fine
Arts, Houston expects the show to attract 110,000
visitors during its 54-day
run there -- on a par with the "Masterworks from El
Greco to Picasso" show
that
will follow it.

Still, some visitors hoping for Brancusi are
disappointed to find batting.
Dallas teacher Michelle Woodall was thinking about
hitting the Houston
museum
as part of her junior high class's upcoming field trip

to the Johnson Space
Center. But when she saw the fall exhibition schedule,

she nixed the plan.
"Quilts that keep you warm, in an art museum?" she
says. "I'd lose all my
credibility."

She may want to brace for more shows like it, though.
Quilting is just one
piece of a broader patchwork of fields that are
gaining recognition in the
art
world. Glass, ceramics, clothing, even "fiber arts"
(grass baskets) are
showing
up in big museums at a time when, coincidentally or
not, budgets are at
their
tightest in a decade. The St. Louis Art Museum is
showing "The Art of
African
Cloth" while the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston is
showing ladies' hats.

A MORE PROSAIC REASON FOR THE CURRENT QUILT CRAZE:
THESE SHOWS ARE CHEAP TO
MOUNT.

But even the folks in the art world think museums
should raise the bar, if
only
a bit. "No more quilts!" begs Jonathon Glus, a
municipal official in charge
of
public-art projects for Pasadena, Calif., calling
institutions that give
star
treatment to quilts "essentially lazy." Adds Josephine

Gear, a
museum-studies
professor at New York University: "Just because
something is popular doesn't
mean it belongs in a museum."

Write to Brooks Barnes at [log in to unmask]
Updated August 23, 2002


=====
**********************************
Kimberly A. Kenney
Curator
McKinley Museum
800 McKinley Monument Dr. NW
Canton OH  44708
330-455-7043

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