This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Jan. 31, 2013 - Rachel Heim’s art quilt exhibit, Odyssey, showing now at Gallery Visio of the University of Missouri-St. Louis reaches back through an American tradition of visual expression to make her very personal mark on the collective fiber art movement.
The word quilt often brings to mind colonial bed coverings that humbly display fine needlework. The quilting tradition also includes American 18th century broderie perse work created by appliqué of cut out motifs from printed chintz fabrics imported from India.
Until Jonathan Holstein and Gale van der Hoof organized the 1971 Whitney Museum exhibition, Abstract Design in American Quilts, the art form was largely relegated to places of honor in private homes, passed on as precious heirlooms.
As early as 1933, however, the Sears National Quilt Contest challenged quilters to make modern quilts featuring the Chicago World’s Fair theme, The Century of Progress, and offered prize money that suggested a value beyond that normally attributed to “women’s work.”
Though Heim’s quilts are of a different sort than the bed-sized blankets celebrated at the Whitney 42 years ago and inspired by the 1933 Sears contest, her single panel ensembles are a result of this rich cultural inheritance.
There is an inverse relationship between quilts of yore and those of Rachel Heim. Heim describes her work as autobiographical. She is a classically educated artist who uses fabric appliqué to create individual portraits and scenes that form a private narrative and are then shown in public galleries, here backed by the authoritative nod of academia. Heim’s quilts embrace centuries of domestic work and push the medium into the public sphere, breaking or ignoring rules of template, pattern, piecing and stitching.
Heim’s fabric portraits are intense. Growth Ripples depicts a man’s expressive face, fragmented in a sea of blue. Mania II draws the viewer’s eye directly to those of the subject.
While working to express her own life experience, Heim is not alone in her vision and realization of the quilting process. St. Louis artist Edna Patterson-Petty’s quilts appear to come from a similar technical conception, with subjects also taken from the artist’s experience. Both Patterson-Petty and Heim also seem to draw from some of the same fabric sources, particularly in their shared reliance upon African prints in piecework.
Sarah Hermes Griesbach is a freelance writer.