Older art quilts

Among the first art quilt exhibitions was Quilt National in 1979, set up rather as the Impressionists set up their "salon des refuses" a century before - to give this new genre/style of work a showplace. That show included some iconic pieces - and some forgotten artists. I was interested to find the work of Jean Hewes -

this is Dancers, from the Corea Artquilt Community website. In a review of a 2011 revisiting of the 1986 The Art Quilt show, we learn a little about Hewes (Dancers and also her Angel were in that show):

"Trained as a ceramicist, Hewes put away the messy clay when she had children, shifting to painting in watercolor. Then she began making quilts from scraps, eventually bringing the layering, transparency and soft focus of watercolor into her enigmatic, image-filled quilts."

Interestingly, nearly all those in that 1986 exhibition had formal art and/or design training. Michael James said: "Most went to art school or studied some medium, not necessarily textiles, and had deliberately set out to develop a body of work using the medium of the quilt. That was probably what distinguished that group of people from other group exhibitions of whatever you want to call it -- I hate the word 'art quilt,' so I stumble over it."

Some of the names listed in the 1979 QN show aren't easily accessible by internet.

In reading a review of a 1983 art quilt show, this description made me wish there was a photo of the quilt somewhere-

" The sewing together of squares, the most basic form of quilt making, is used with ingenuity in Sandra Humberson's pieced and embroidered ''Star Map.'' Each tiny hand-silk- screened squares is a microcosmic echo of the whole quilt, which in turn is a microcosm of an imagined map of the heavens. "

A starting-point for an intergalactic quilt "journey" - ?