Telling Your Story: A Quilting Workshop
Joan Gaither
Quilt workshop participants discover how traditional quilts can make emotional connections to identity, telling the human story while celebrating a personal and shared past. Participants will use a brainstorming technique to create a single quilt panel square that starts to tell and preserve the story of an important person, place or event in their personal or community story. While quilt supplies and decorations are available, participants may want to bring their own sewing kit as well as reference photos that might be used on the quilt square. This workshop has two separate sessions. Participants are welcome to sign up for one individually or both.
Dr. Joan M.E. Gaither
I am a native Baltimorean with a history of helping to integrate local schools and businesses during the Civil Rights Movement, receiving a B.S. degree from Morgan State University (an historic Black College) in 1965 and my Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1998 awarded "Outstanding Dissertation Award for 1998 in Educational Research at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee." As Chair of Undergraduate Art Education at MICA (Maryland Institute College of Art), I continued from 1996-2010 to model and facilitate intergenerational participation in art education, public schools, and community arts partnerships.
I continue to thank Mr. George Barrick, my junior high art teacher, mentor, and friend who piqued my curiosity for using art making processes and materials for problem solving everyday concerns and for encouraging my continuous doodling and drawing of characters and settings to tell personal stories that laid the groundwork for creating 300+ documentary story quilts to date to be more than decoration, beauty, comfort, and protection. My work demonstrates by piecing meaningful fabric, traditional patterns, collaged text and images to tell narrative personal stories, layers of meaning can emerge to document your life experiences, experiences of other people, places and events. In my mind, the quilts tell the human story, make emotional connections to issues, telling the story that NEEDS to be TOLD, and keeping the connections to our heritage real, fresh, and very much alive. I've discovered that my voice is informed by an interest in mixed media, fibers, and photographic images that allow close scrutiny of surfaces and metaphors for personal meaning. My work documents pivotal events in my life within the context of my person, biological family, local communities - regional, national, and global. As a fiber artist, educator, researcher, advocate, and community artist, I continue to pose the problem in my art that directs community partners, quilters and myself to examine the possible conflict between the perceptual psychology of visual images and the “hidden meaning embedded” in those images. For me, it becomes important to investigate perceptions of culture in terms of what kind and quality of art-like images habitually surround us in day-to-day living. I encourage all educational partners to provide closer scrutiny to imagery selection processes that present visual knowledge purporting to define, validate, and perpetuate cultural identities. My art documents the lives and contributions, in this case, of African Americans in the history and culture of Maryland, in particular, and in the greater American story in general. I’m on a mission to help my aging generation to document and make visual their proud ancestral legacies in order to preserve the records of contributions and experiences of growing up Colored, Negro, Black, afro-american, Afro American, and African American in these the United States of America.
jgaitherstoryquilter@gmail.com