Archive for the ‘Craft’ Category
1988: “History will record…”
An incredibly powerful photo from Cleve Jones’s book. He says: "Here I am with the friends of Zoel St. Sauver at his panel, 1988. For many of us, AIDS was our World War II, our Vietnam. This photograph reminds me of the classic memorial to Iwo Jima. All of us in the picture were HIV [...]
February 12th, 2012Visiting the AIDS Memorial Quilt
The squares are bigger than you could even imagine. They command the room, the space. What a powerful source of memory, of honoring those who we have lost to AIDS. As I have written about a few times already , I have been exploring the many squares on the AIDS Memorial Quilt, and have been remembering [...]
January 23rd, 2012“With the digital age come new conceptions of authorship.”
I have waxed poetic about my love for Twitter before. Its way of lessening the distance between artists, authors, and other people we admire is my absolute favorite reason for the micro-blogging social network. (A close second place is how it has changed the way I think in my own head. In pithy little statements [...]
January 16th, 2012Ai Weiwei: A game of chess and China’s elemental flaw
Ai Weiwei’s self portrait for the Time Person of the Year issue I have been fascinated by Ai Weiwei, the 54-year-old provocative artist and voice of dissidence in China, since May, when I heard an interview with his English translator on one of the my favorite podcasts. He was detained and questioned and kept by the government for 81 [...]
December 26th, 2011Single Girl quilt face, done
Me excited to see the quilt in baby-size, 4 complete circles. At this point I had 12 left to combine. This fall I took my first quilt class, at Whipstitch Fabrics in Atlanta, because I wanted to tackle a quilt design based in circular design. In particular, I had long coveted Denyse Schmidt’s Single Girl [...]
December 11th, 2011On Christmas and material memory
1950s holiday cheer, and kitsch old & new 1954 sampling of Christmas decorations, which were one way that people made use of electricity in the Tennessee Valley, and the reason someone was paid by the TVA to document and photograph these things. One day last week, I spent the morning compiling and digitizing documents to [...]
December 11th, 2011Weekend in Pictures
Friday Completed Christmas-themed exhibit case we composed at the Archives, using 1950s photographs of Christmas decorations (TVA-documented) and old newspaper clippings, photos, and WWI draft cards featuring the names of reindeer (Blitzen, Rudolph, etc.) and other holiday-themed names (Chris Kringle, Santy Claus, Partridge and Peartree). Single Girl quilt: Home from work, I needed to see [...]
December 5th, 2011Arithmetic, for the floor
Stack o’ pink numbers I can finally post pictures of the gift I made for Elodie Watson’s first birthday, since her party was yesterday. She has two math teachers as parents, and so I was struck one night (literally, while driving home around 1 a.m.) that I should make numbers in the same way that [...]
November 20th, 2011Grace Bonney and me
In the few spare moments I sometimes have to peruse something that is not project- or homework-related readings, I have been absorbing Grace Bonney’s wonderful new home and DIY and all-around inspirational book, based off the blog she created and edits, Design*Sponge. I told her I love the headboard she made for her own room, [...]
November 3rd, 2011“To be off balance but still under control”
Or: too many ideas, a creative explosion, stunning color palettes, African strip quilts, and me Sources of vast inspiration Sometimes, work and play intersect, overlap, combine. For this week’s material culture class, we read four selections, chapters and articles, on design and aesthetic. One of the pieces was a chapter from John M. Vlach’s book [...]
September 23rd, 2011