If the inventive 18th- and 19th-century women of the Elegant Geometry: British and American Patchwork Quilts exhibit at the Taft Museum of Art were alive today, they’d likely be swapping ideas with Heather Jones, a local quilter who has a solo companion show. In A Sense of Home, Jones honors her predecessors and the Taft’s refined art and architecture while staying true to her own modern style.
Jones’ exhibit in the Taft’s cozy Sinton Gallery is part of a series in which local contemporary artists are invited to respond to the museum’s collection, décor or history. (Previous participants include cut-paper artist Kristine Donnelly and painter Cedric Michael Cox.) Jones, who regularly draws inspiration from the simplicity of parking lot grids, cityscapes and grain silos, immediately zeroed in on colors and lines.
Shadows and weathering on the museum’s wooden siding inspired a subtle all-white quilt. Robert S. Duncanson’s landscape murals have been reduced to vertical blocks of blues, whites and browns. The tempest of J.M.W. Turner’s “Europa and the Bull” is calmed in a mini-quilt whose blue and orange strips still suggest the sea, sky and sand. Easily overlooked diamond details on a Barbizon gallery mantel now pop in quilted shades of red and orange.
Jones, of Springboro, is a star in the world of modern quilting, a category that is generally defined by Minimalist designs, bold colors and improvisational piecing rather than precise patterns. She teaches workshops online and in person across the country, has appeared on PBS and been featured on marthastewart.com. She wrote a book (Quilt Local: Finding Inspiration in the Everyday) and founded the Cincinnati chapter of the Modern Quilt Guild.
But the women of Elegant Geometry: British and American Mosaic Patchwork Quilts were no slouches themselves. The 19 quilts on display demonstrate amazing patience and ingenuity in hand-sewing thousands of hexagons together to make what were seen then as practical household goods and today as works of art.
Though the 41-year-old Jones has a modern aesthetic, she appreciates the traditional, too. She started collecting antique quilts as a teen and loves that each one connects her to an anonymous woman from the past. “She couldn’t do a whole lot of other things, unfortunately, because of the time period she lived in, but she could make this,” Jones says. “And it’s still here. And that kind of gives me goosebumps.”
Tamera Muente, associate curator at the Taft, arranged the two quilt exhibits in recognition of the museum’s history as a home. A floor plan for the circa-1820 house designates the current Dutch gallery as a sewing room. A letter by museum namesake Charles Taft refers to a meeting of wife Anna’s sewing circle.
It’s unknown if Anna Taft and fellow former residents Ann Baum and Susan Longworth made quilts, but Elegant Geometry represents the handiwork of upper-class women like them. A mosaic patchwork quilt required a lot of fabric, as well as paper for templates, and the price of those materials was out of reach for most in the early 19th century. A quilt of as many as 15,000 hexagons also required a lot of time, which women of that period and status had plenty of. For many, needlework was their sole creative outlet.
The historic textiles come from the International Quilt Study Center & Museum in Lincoln, Neb., and the oldest was made in 1796. Through the 1700s, most quilts were pieced out of simple triangles and squares of fabric that had been basted onto paper patterns that were removed and reused. But as geometry textbooks became widely available in the late 18th century, women were able to draft accurate hexagons that proved to be more efficient building blocks for flowers, verses, kaleidoscopic effects and other designs.
Muente quotes a director of the Nebraska center: “Quilts can tell us a lot, but they never give us all of their secrets.” Many makers and exact dates are lost to time. Englishwoman Frances Hawkins did stitch her name and the year 1818 onto her quilt using small hexagons. What’s a mystery, though, is why she chose to combine applique and patchwork techniques. Her symmetry is off in places where she added birds and flowers cut out of chintz. “What I love about this piece — to me, it feels like she was kind of winging it,” Muente says.
Nearly two centuries later, Jones was drawn to modern quilting because of the freedom of not having to be perfect. In fact, the path to her current artistic practice is kind of a crazy quilt. She began as a painter, and a representational one at that. Then she married abstract painter Jeffrey Cortland Jones and his sensibilities rubbed off. Now her “paintings” are small stitched-and-stretched fabric works that play mind tricks with viewers who think they are Minimalist acrylics or oils.
Jones’ love of quilts began with a pink coverlet that her great-great aunt Ollie made for her when she was born. “But I was intimidated by the thought of making a quilt myself because a lot of times, traditionally, they are perfect,” Jones says. “All the pieces line up — or so I thought they had to all line up.”
Seeing a 2004 exhibit of quilts made by the women of Gee’s Bend, Ala., was a lightbulb moment, she says. The members of that isolated African-American community are known for improvising with whatever scraps are available to make simple, free-form patterns.
Now Jones’ quilts are creating lightbulb moments for others. Her modern interpretations of works by Duncanson and John Singer Sargent are startling yet refreshing to see in a museum of centuries-old art. It isn’t long before all the pieces fit together — just like in a quilt.
Elegant Geometry continues through Jan. 21 and A Sense of Home continues through Feb. 18 at the Taft Museum of Art, 316 Pike St., Downtown. Tickets and more info: taftmuseum.org.
This article appears in Nov 29 – Dec 6, 2017.