Category: Art
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Quilt Stories with Lisa Walton
Woohoo! Another 15 minutes of fame. Well, really 24 minutes and 54 seconds. Our friend and colleague, Lisa Walton, has created a series of videos called Quilt Stories where she chats with quilters and artists about one of their quilts. Lisa’s talks include traditional quilters and art quilters from all over the world. Deb has…
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Because It Bears Repeating: Black Lives Matter
This is Kris with some more thoughts on the Black Lives Matter movement. It has been a little over a month since George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota. We already wrote about our support of the movement here, but we wanted to share a couple of our artworks again within…
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Mark Your Ballot Because Black Lives Matter
Let’s not equivocate: Black Lives Matter. If you are familiar with our art, you know that we have often addressed the issue of race. Take our Language of Color Series: various compositions of colored pencils that expose, upon closer inspection, the often tortured relationship between the races. But this subtlety might be lost on some…
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We’re Showing Our True Colors
This is Kris with a post about colors. Although the ongoing pandemic has definitely put a dent in the Pixeladies’ creative productivity, it has also allowed us some time to explore random topics that keep us inspired. One thing I’ve noticed recently is the incredible things some businesses have done . . . sure maybe…
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Art vs. Craft: The Greta Gerwig Sacramento Edition
For those of you who know me (Kris), you know that I love to spend my Sundays working on the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle. So what does that have to do with the big art vs. craft debate and Greta Gerwig? Let me explain. The Art of the NYT Times Crossword Puzzle Well,…
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Collaboration in Isolation: A New Road Map
This is Kris with a short explanation of how the Pixeladies are creating a new road map to help us collaborate in isolation. Let me tell you, it ain’t that easy, but we are not complaining. All of our families are safe and healthy. And, although we have several family members (on both sides!) in…
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Collaboration During A Pandemic And Our SDA Article
Well, we’ve been sheltering in place in California for over a month now. That’s not very conducive to collaborating, especially when you are the most creative when the two of you sneak out for gelato or have giggle fits when making your text collages. We’ve managed to stay busy, though. Deb has sewn almost a…
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Deb’s Love Of Art And Basketball Explained
This is Deb here to answer the burning question, “What does a visit to your local museum, in my case the Crocker Art Museum, have to do with basketball?” I’ll drive or even fly for hours to see a museum exhibition, but it’s hard for me to take three hours out of my day and…
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MACC: Go For The Art, Stay For The Networking
As members of Studio Art Quilts Associates, we are always on the lookout to see the exhibitions the organization mounts. It’s a way for us to do some networking and see great art at the same time. We usually have to travel to do this, but in September we’ll get to see SAQA’s “Stitching California”…
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Are You Registered To Vote? Our Art Asks You To Protect Your Voting Rights!
We live in California and for the longest time our primary took place in June. We were, for lack of a better term, irrelevant. Now our primary is March 3 on what is now truly a Super Tuesday primary. Over the past few years, our art has sometimes focused on the political process and the…
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Cribbage, Dad, Quilts, And Making Lasting Memories
National Cribbage Day is February 10, and Kris’ dad’s birthday is February 21. Now, what do those two things have in common and what do they have to do with the Pixeladies? Well, let Kris explain! The Quilt The first quilt we ever made together as the Pixeladies was for the River City Quilters’ Guild’s…
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Love, Christo, Jeanne-Claude, And The Wrapped Reichstag
Love is in the air, so In honor of Valentine’s Day, I (Kris) wanted to talk about a great artistic couple. I am not talking here about men and their muses, think Dalí and Gaia or Modigliani and Jeanne Hébuterne. I’m talking about the husband and wife team of Christo and Jeanne-Claude. I love their…
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Craft In America: The Quilts Episode And Susan Else
This is Kris, with a non-techie blog post today. PBS started airing the Quilts episode of Craft in America. If you haven’t had a chance to see it yet, I highly recommend it. This episode focuses on just four artists, but they are representative of the diverse field that is our medium. I was struck…
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Voting Rights And Our Fannie Lou Hamer Project
Our new project is an artwork for the exhibition Women’s Votes, Women’s Voices, Women’s Rights, which will premiere September 2020 at the William J. Clinton Presidential Library and Museum. The curators, Allida Black and Allison Wilbur, asked us if we were willing to do a piece about Fannie Lou Hamer. Born black, poor, and uneducated…
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Sam Bowker Provides Context For The Tentmakers of Cairo
The Tentmakers of Cairo We’ve just returned from a visit to the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles to hear Dr. Sam Bowker present a lecture* on the history of the tentmakers of Cairo. Our quilting friends have perhaps heard of the tentmakers of Cairo or even been fortunate enough to see one of…
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Anni Albers: Small Works, Big Inspiration
This is Kris with a post that’s been in my head for months. The Bauhaus is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, so it sure was nice to find an exhibit on Anni Albers at the SFMOMA this past June. It was the tiniest of exhibits, all small works, in a little room off to…
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Deb’s 2019 SAQA Dream Collection
This is Deb, back with my SAQA Benefit Auction post. Kris picked eight grid-inspired pieces last week. I decided to try something a little different. I have several auction pieces I’ve purchased over the years, and there’s no rhyme or reason to them. What if this year I picked eight pieces that I could add…
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Kris’ 2019 SAQA Dream Collection
I generally don’t like the end of summer, but one thing that helps ease my pain is looking forward to the annual SAQA Benefit Auction, which begins Sep 13 this year. SAQA invites everyone to create their dream collection, the eight pieces we would “take” home with us in a perfect world. Deb and I…
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Peruse, Palette, Ponder: Creating An Artist’s Palette
This is Deb, pondering a lot lately. I sometimes start my day scanning social media, not a bad thing, especially when it revolves around one’s own artistic palette. My recent perusing evolved into a theme. First I opened my Adobe Create magazine and read an article about illustrator Sarah Hasenmaile. Inspiration Susan limits herself to…
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Our e-Book And the Dangers of Free Downloads
“All we are is data in the wind.” These are the words David Fear uses in his Rolling Stone review of the Netflix documentary, The Great Hack. Companies use the data they retrieve from our Internet searches, games, and, yes, free downloads to gain valuable information they use for a variety of purposes. We…
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Deb Makes A “Selfie” for Cloth in Common
It has been a hectic summer! Since Kris is working part-time at another job, I thought I might need another activity to keep me busy. Yeah, right. After hemming and hawing, I decided to join Cloth in Common, an international group of twelve talented fiber artists organized by Karol Kusmaul from Florida. Cloth in Common Every…
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Graduation, Procrastination, And Quilting Indiana Jones
2010 It’s Deb, back again with a confession. Nine years ago I took some photographs of my favorite Indiana Jones in his suburban backyard. I just loved his style and attitude. As soon as I saw the image in the lower right, I knew it had to become a quilt. Of course I had to…
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Field Trip to the Asian Art Museum & Kids’ Art
Kris and I love to take field trips to museums. Last month we took the long way to San Jose (via San Francisco) so we could visit the “Kimono Refashioned“ exhibit at the Asian Art Museum. We hit the jackpot, though, when we ran into a kids’ art exhibit at the same museum. Kimono Refashioned…
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Writing An Artist Statement
When we were recently asked about our artist statement, we made the ugly realization that it had been a while since we had written one. Even when we updated our website last fall, we didn’t pay attention to our artist statement and just cut and pasted the (outdated) information to the new website. That sure…
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Grab A Friend, Pick Your Favorite Quilt, And Review Your Creative Process
We were recently asked by the German publication, Patchwork Professional Magazin, to tell them which one of our quilts was our favorite and why. You’d think that would be a pretty easy exercise, but since there are two of us, we had to have a discussion. It turned out to be a fascinating exercise about our…
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Katharine McCormick: Finishing Touches
We’re done! It seems like we have been working on our Katharine McCormick project forever, but it’s been closer to nine months. Today we thought we’d tell you about some of the finishing touches. There are links at the bottom of the page to all of the posts about our KDM project. Boo-boos It’s not…
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Katharine McCormick: Reading T.C. Boyle’s “Riven Rock”
This is Kris, taking on one of the last blog installments about our Katharine McCormick project. When we started our research, we learned that T.C. Boyle had written a novel, Riven Rock (1998), based on Katharine’s marriage to Stanley McCormick. We resisted reading the novel until we finished the quilt because we didn’t want it to influence our…
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Katharine McCormick: The Boa
It’s Deb again, back with more about our project for the exhibition Deeds Not Words: Celebrating 100 Years of Women’s Suffrage. One of the reasons I love the particular photo of Katharine McCormick we used is because she’s wearing a boa. In my personal statements, I always end with this: “I’m waiting for feather boas…
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Lottery for the Arts 2019
Blue Line Arts is one of our favorite regional art galleries. This March, Blue Line is hosting its 11th annual Lottery for the Arts. We had never donated to this worthy cause before, so we decided that this year would be a good time to do so. As we delivered our piece, we ran into…
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Katharine McCormick: Two Diaphragms Are Better Than One
It’s Kris, back with another post about our KDM project for the 2020 exhibition, Deeds Not Words: Celebrating 100 Years of Women’s Suffrage. We’ve already blogged about some of the technical issues in creating this piece and some biographical information (see below for links to these posts), but today we want to put the technical and the…