BACK TO ARTISTS

Pauline Parker

Quiltmaker

  Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States    

Michigan Quilt Project

A retired high school art teacher discovers quilting.
img
One morning I woke up and saw the apple trees in full bloom and I thought this is wonderful, what can I do to celebrate it? And I thought at once of making a quilt. I didn’t know how to make a quilt, I’d been a landscape painter specializing in oil and watercolor for 40 years. I’d just retired from 20 years of teaching art in high school. I knew there ought to be a sun behind the apple tree, so I cut all the fabric into pieces, set them beside the sewing machine and just started sewing them together. But it didn’t make a quilt. So I started over, this time making objects instead of square patches. I finally had four quilts. I thought these are great, better have a show. But to fill out a show, I would need the best thing I could do. The epic stories from the Bible seemed to fit the broad swatches of fabric.


Pauline wrote, My mother came from a large German farm family in Southern Illinois where she and all her sisters made quilts. I started making quilts when I retired from teaching art in high school. Working with he fabric was fun but I found that when the quilt lay on the bed, I ouldn’t really see the patterns. So I started hanging them on the wall. Then I saw how the patches of fabric could tell stories. The materials with their patterns and textures had the strength of somebody else’s creative thought. They made me do things I hadn’t thought of doing before. After a while it was a real merry-­‐go-­‐round. The large patches of fabric seemed good for telling big stories.”

Artist Pauline Parker was a lifelong painter from her childhood in Alton, Illinois, into her nineties in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She studied landscape painting at the Art Institute of Chicago in the 30's, taking paints and paper into the city streets. She never minded attracting a crowd while she worked, whether in the squares of Mexico or the hills of Wisconsin.

Her painting has been shown at the Art Institute of Chicago and around the midwest where she lived from 1915 to 2013. In her later years she also took up quilt making, turning large compositions into lively vehicles for storytelling. She'd grown up sewing clothes for herself and her family and now her love of fabric and pattern was released to serve her imagination. Often something found like an old lace dress, stimulated a whole composition, or a brash spree of patterns told a story that she couldn't ignore. Misprinted fabric, un-­‐ dyed textiles, cloth bacon wrappers, cut up clothing all turned into narrative visions. Buttons, bones, feathers, torn salvage, old lace and really anything that could be sewn down was her medium, the stranger the better. Her stories ranged from Old Testament tales to special places whose architecture described worlds. Tales of women wove through many of her compositions. Trees, birds, flowers and animals that surrounded her life in rural Wisconsin often opened the door into her rich sense of fantasy where her storytelling ran wild. In her quilts she left behind the reality of landscape in her painting and let her imagination take flight. What carries through from her painting is an extravagant expression of color and texture undiminished by rules of propriety. Her vision was the whole reason for being.

The Collection
Of the forty works in the collection, thirty are large quilts from 91”X70” to 54”X52”. Nine smaller works range from 76”X20” to 14”X25”. The large works are cotton on strong cotton backing fabric, hand quilted with cotton batting. The smaller works are often straight appliqué. Each quilt has a sleeve sewn into the top edge to old a pole for exhibition. They were made from 1980 to 2003, when Pauline was in her seventies to late eighties.

Cateogories
The pieces in the Collection can be grouped thematically to gain an understanding of her thinking. On closer inspection, all the works cross categories, bewitching us with humor, compositional verve and liberal bending of a story line. 
Categories are:
Abstract: Crazy; Floating Squares; Orange Pyramid; and White and Brown Stripes.
Fantasy: Awakening of Spring; Butterfly Tree; Coming Home; Gathering Wild Plum Blossoms in Moon Light; and Under the Owl Tree .
Nature: Apple Tree; Birches in Moonlight; Fishes; Flower Squares; Frog Hunt; Leaves; River and Tree; Shore Birds; Swan Lake; The Peacocks; The Plum Tree; and The Rock, The River, The Tree.
Old Testament: Jacob's Ladder; Joseph's Coat of Many Colors; Moses; Queen of Sheba; Salome and the Seven Veils; and Seven Wise Seven Foolish Virgins.
Special Places: Barn; Blue Mosque; Castine Quilt; Courthouse Jail Richland Center; Praha (Prague); Under the V'lala Trees; and Waldo Handcock Bridge.
Women: Anita Hill and the Senate Judiciary Committee; Chicken Supper; Cleopatra on the Nile; Elegy to an Old Lace Dress; Garden Party Dress; Girl on Beach; and Two Girls Three Geese.
 

Was the maker a woman, man or a group?

Female

When was the quiltmaker born?

05/12/1915

If the quiltmaker was married, what was the wedding date.

Date and place of death.

January 5, 2013

Ethnic background/tribal affiliation:

German

Educational background:

Shurteff College, Monticello, Art Institute of Chicago

Religious affiliation:

Protestant

Occupation (if retired, former occupation):

High school art teacher, painter

Where was the quiltmaker born?

Alton, Illinois (IL), United States

Quiltmaker's maiden name:

Ross

Father's Name:

Edward Ross

Father's ethnic/tribal background:

Retail

Mother's Name:

Henrietta Ross

Mother's ethnic/tribal background:

Homemaker

Spouse's/Spouses' name(s):

Parker, Gilbert Ray

Spouse's/Spouses' occupation:

Carpenter, sculptor, photographer

Number of children:

3 daughters

How did the quiltmaker learn to quilt?

Self-Taught

When did the quiltmaker learn to quilt?

Age 50 or over, After retiring

Other reasons the quiltmaker makes/made quilts.

Pauline learned how to quilt from her mother. She grew up sewing clothes for herself and her family.

Estimate the number of quilts made by this maker:

more than 50

Any other notes or stories about the quiltmaker:

Pauline liked to find ways for tools to help tell her tales. She “experimented using the sewing machine. Instead of the recommended nine stitches per needle used in the hand sewing of quilts, I made one quilt entirely on the sewing machine, changing the length and tension of the stitches to get different effects.” Often she appliquéd the central image by hand, pieced borders with the sewing machine, then quilted the whole using a hoop or with the fabric lying flat on a table. She was inspired by nature, by women’s stories, by epic stories from the Old Testament or contemporary events that had an epic ring, and by grand architectural settings. All her compositions were touched by fantasy and a sense of humor all her own.

Load More

img