“Bits and Pieces of the Universe,” by Dawn Murtaugh, was on display from May 4 to Sept. 14 at the Evansville Museum of Arts, History & Science.
I have never seen a quilted landscape until now, and while the level of detail that Murtaugh was able to capture in these textile works, especially on such a small scale, was impressive, the color palettes felt muddled and dreary.
The show seemed to stem from a fondness for nature and to be about appreciating the beauty of the natural world, but the colors dampened the mood and worked against this message.
While I enjoy experimentation with patterns, in this exhibit, they made it difficult to distinguish trees from the sky in multiple works.
I was really hoping to enjoy this exhibit because I don’t often get to see fiber art in a museum. Even though fiber art has an incredibly long history, it is underappreciated in the art community and often left out of museums because some people consider it craft, rather than high art. Explanations for this distinction generally touch on the frequency with which we encounter textiles, their place in our homes and the fact that they are predominantly created by women.
“Just as US feminist art critics and artists were starting to take seriously crafts such as textiles and their gendered and racialized histories in the 1970s, that decade also witnessed a specific turning point in the wider museum institutionalization of “folk art”—a designation that often encompasses much amateur textile making and can serve as a shorthand for work by men and women of color, poor people, and untrained white women. The “folks” of folk art, that is, are “outsiders” not only to the art world but within structures of stratification and privilege… while the volume’s authors emphasized the folk makers’ personal, “private” visions, feminists understood textile practices as fraught with political and social consequences that rippled out beyond the realm of the “personal.””
-Julia Bryan-Wilson in “Fray: art + textile politics”
Although I appreciate the fact that the museum chose to feature textile artworks, I was not able to appreciate the works themselves.
