Imagine a Quilt

At the DeYoung Museum's exhibit of abstract Amish quilts recently, I was struck by one piece (not that above).

It was created by an unknown Amish woman in Illinois, circa 1930, and is one of a few examples of a "Crazy Star" theme among a small group of Amish women from that period.

I wish I could show you a photo of it but photography is not allowed inside the exhibit, and to my dismay, this one piece is the only one not included in the various postcard collections available at the museum store.

This often happens to me at art exhibits -- that I zero in on an outlier piece that the curators apparently deem relevant enough to include but odd enough to exclude as well.

So I'll have to ask you to imagine this quilt.

Imagine a quilt design so far ahead of its time that it anticipated one of the greatest movements in art of the 20th century -- abstract expressionism.

Well over a decade before the trend became recognized and celebrated by critics, in an obscure, unincorporated area of a county in the rural Midwest, an unknown Amish woman created a quilt that is composed of a series of jagged jigsaw puzzles, with muted but vibrant colors, forming not a coherent pattern (as most Amish quilts of the era did) but an abstraction of a pattern -- one where your imagination has to fill in the blanks.

While at the exhibit, I kept returning to this one quilt, trying to summon an analogy. I know that Wassily Kandinsky certainly was creating paintings in Russia around this time that anticipated the American post-war period, but working on canvas he had greater freedom to experiment with shapes and angles, including lines.

Yet, in perhaps the oddest and most experimental part of her quilt, this Crazy Star quilter actually drew out a long thin bright white line -- utterly unique in the quilt's field, although it ostensibly connected with a small unit that resembled several others in the otherwise dark pattern.

Afterwards, rummaging through the gift shop, I was left frustrated, unable to purchase a replica.

The only way to see this quilt again is to go back. That the artist is anonymous only adds to the mystery and raises all sorts of issues about the great collective unconscious that some of us refer to as "God."

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