5 minute read
The Newark Museum
by Sandra Sider
The Newark Museum is New Jersey’s largest museum, holding fine collections of American art, decorative arts, contemporary art, and arts of Asia, Africa, the Americas, and of the ancient world. The size of its collection is the 12th largest among museums in the United States. Founding director John Cotton Dana believed that museums were established to promote the appreciation, understanding, and enjoyment of the arts and sciences. Together with a group of public officials, prominent business people, and local collectors, he established the Museum in 1909 at the Newark Public Library. Dana provided the intellectual leadership that made it one of the most progressive cultural institutions in the country. The art and science collections are used to educate, inspire, and transform individuals of all ages, as well as the communities served by the Museum.
I m et with curator Ulysses Dietz in November for a tour of the Newark Museum and discussion about the art quilt collection.
S: What is your position at the Newark Museum and for how long have you served in that capacity?
Anonymous, Wild Goose Chase
90 x 90 inches, early 19th century Pieced wool. Purchase 1918.
Joy Saville Interruptions
92 x 94 inches, 1980 Pieced cotton and polyester.
Purchase 1983, Sophonia
Anderson Bequest Fund
D: I was hired in 1980 as Curator of Decorative Arts, later became Senior Curator, and in 2012 was appointed Chief Curator.
S: What is your background, if any, with quilts or other types of textiles? D: My graduate studies were at Winterthur, where I was exposed to various types of historical textiles being collected by Henry Francis Dupont, and where I learned to do needlework.
S: For how many years has the Newark Museum been collecting art quilts, and how many pieces currently are in the collection? D: We began collecting art quilts in the early 1980s and now have fourteen in the collection.
S: What or who prompted you to purchase the first art quilt for the Museum? Who is the artist? D: Our first art quilt is by New Jersey artist Joy Saville, who was transitioning into becoming a professional artist at the time. I found her work to be very exciting —h ow she uses abstraction in a dynamic way within the quilting tradition.
S: Does the Museum also collect traditional quilts, either antique or contemporary traditional quilts? D: The Newark Museum owns approximately 200 quilts, mostly bed size, but including crib quilts and
Joe Cunningham Snake in the Garden
72 x 74 inches, 2000
Pieced and appliqued cotton. Purchase 2015, Membership Endowment Fund and Robert Riggs Kerr Memorial Fund
doll quilts, also some quilted petticoats. Quilts have always been an important part of the collection, with the first quilt purchased by our founder in 1918. He was a graphic artist, and he bought a red-and-blue wool quilt in the Wild Goose Chase pattern made in the early nineteenth century purely as visual art, not as an antique. By the latter 1920s, quilts were acquired as documentation of local history and folk art, an acquisitions policy that continued into the 1950s. By mid-century, quilts were being acquired to build our collection of Americana (we were also collecting Colonial furniture). In the early 1980s, my colleague in the Art of the Americas department commissioned a Native American star quilt from a Lakota quilter, Nellie Two Bulls.
S: What appeals to you about quilts as contemporary art? D: In the history of quilting, art quilts are distinguished by being consciously created as art, and for me the most successful art quilt should still be a quilt in theory, even if the piece is not intended to be used on a bed. The visible reference to the history of quilting matters to me.
S: Has anyone influenced you in making art quilt purchases? D: Yes, in that the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation in 1984 gave the Museum a grant to commission works of art. I was interested to discover a male quilt artist, Michael James, whose work I admired because, on the one hand, he approached quilting as a medium from a traditional perspective, while also approaching it aesthetically in a purely painterly way. We commissioned a quilt (Rhythm/Color: Spanish Dance) from him as a result of the grant.
S: How and where do you usually acquire art quilts for the Museum? Have any been donated or purchased since 2000?
left:
Marilyn Henrion Disturbances
68 x 66 inches Pieced silks. Photo by D. James Dee
opposite:
Sandy Benjamin Hannibal Potholders and Dervishes Plus
96 x 108 inches, 1996 Pieced cotton. Purchase 2001, The Members’ Fund and Emma Fantone Fund
D: Our art quilts have been purchased from the artists, with just two exceptions. I never want to ask artists to donate work, but of course, to be honest, I would welcome the opportunity to consider possible donations of art quilts. (Ed. note: The curator’s email address is udietz@newarkmuseum.org)
S: How many exhibitions of quilts have been displayed in the Museum? D: There have been lots of quilt exhibitions at the museum since the 1920s (when we opened our “new” building). One major quilt exhibition, Optical Quilts, was curated by J. Stewart Johnson in 1965. This show, for the first time in an American museum, associated the graphic energy of antique quilts with the Op Art movement of the time. Time magazine featured the
exhibition, and Johnson went on to become Curator of Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. We have never shown art quilts alone, only within the broader context of quilts as folk art (From Folk Art to Fine Art is a title I’ve used more than once!). This is really because of limited exhibition space, not because I haven’t wanted to show art quilts on their own.
S: How do you see the art quilt collection ten years from now? D: I will be retiring at the end of 2017, and I hope that my successor continues to expand that collection—indeed, all our collections. Art quilts and historical quilts both are important parts of our decorative arts collection, and we’ll continue to acquire them.
