Until this morning, I associated quilting with Little House on the Prairie and Betsy Ross.
Little did I know that, according to this article, quilting is actually a thriving urban art, complete with a Manhattan’s Quilters Guild. The passionate quilters know that the beauty of the art lies in the fabric, and midtown Manhattan’s City Quilter is the Mecca to which they flock. City Quilter provides resources beyond batik and Japanese prints– they provide workshops for various skill levels, attracting both the curious hobbist and the involved artist.
Current exhibits of quilts include the 9/11 Peace Story Quilt at the MET. The artist in charge of the project is Faith Ringgold. She designed the quilt to represent the importance communications between cultures, and symbolically, the quilt was put together by students all over New York City.
I think, just this once, I will let the older generation out do me on the hipness scale, and leave the quilting to my grandmother.
This is really interesting. I never knew that there was a Quilters Guild, either, and that people consider quilting an art. It is logical, though, especially because quilting was used in the past to convey stories from previous generations to future ones. In a sense, maybe every art form is medium of story telling.
I have to agree with the last reply: in some sense, I think every art form seeks to communicate something, and therefore has a story to tell. Sometimes you have to listen harder than other times. Sometimes the ones that are hardest to hear have the most to communicate. Sometimes.