Thursday, June 05, 2014

Five Projects: Moratorium

I'm still working on the piece you saw yesterday. I'll be submitting it to the Festival Gallery of Quilt Art. This is an awesome juried exhibit at premiers at Houston International Quilt Festival every year. This year the theme is home.

I have enjoyed sharing my process with you. It's instructive for me to review the decisions I make along the way and I think lots of you enjoy the peek into my process as well.

Too bad.

When I posted a link to that last blog post on Facebook, Betty Hahn mentioned that we are not supposed to publish images of quilts for this exhibit. I gasped and checked the website. Sure enough.

"Quilts must be made specifically for the contest and must not have been published in books, calendars, magazines, newsletters, web sites, blogs, or any other form of publication prior to November 2014."

I am so disappointed. I'm mad at myself for not paying more attention to the call for entry. (But very thankful to Betty.) I'm also so disappointed in this growing trend toward requiring artists to quarantine their work until the (presumably magical) opening of an exhibit. That's a topic for another day.

I finished the quilt today. Whew. I still need to get it photographed and entered tomorrow. I'll proceed with entering the quilt because the finished work is nearly unrecognizable from any of the images I've posted thus far. I don't believe I'll be disqualified. (I shouldn't be.)

So, I'm sorry you won't get to see what happened next. And after that. And still more angst and revisions after that.

I will tease you with an image of the back side of the quilt before I added the backing. 


Draw your own conclusions.

5 comments:

Terry Grant said...

I really, really, REALLY dislike this practice of making the artist keep their work under wraps if it is going to be entered in a show. And I think it is counterproductive as well. I know that pieces that I post in progress on my blog are the ones people really want to see in person and draws them to the exhibits.

Vivien Zepf said...

I agree with Terry; this policy is nonsense. I also believe that there's no "spoiler" in knowing what pieces might be in a show. As a museum docent, I have intimate knowledge of what pieces are in the exhibition in advance, but lighting, installation design, the flow of pieces all interact with the art to create the show... and make or break it, just as much as the pieces.

Sarah Ann Smith said...

Agreed. The moratorium is stiffling conversation and growth among artists. It wasn't so bad when only Visions and Dairy Barn/Quilt National were the only ones requiring utter secrecy. Now there are so many it is just a drag.

Misty said...

I finished my entry yesterday. Good luck to you! Can't wait to see your finished product.

Charlotte Scott said...

I find it a stifling restriction too because I love to share in progress pictures and I really love to read process posts on other people's. It's a shame. But after the exhibition you'll have to continue your set of posts.