Interview with Susan Walen

Karen Musgrave (KM): This is Karen Musgrave and I am doing a Quilters' S.O.S. - Save Our Stories interview with Susan Walen. Susan is in Bethesda, Maryland and I'm in Naperville, Illinois, so we are conducting this interview over the telephone. Today's date is December 9, 2008 and it is now 12:24 in the afternoon. Susan, thank you so much for doing this interview with me. Please tell me about your quilt that you chose for the interview which is called "Dear Mr. Obama--"

Susan Walen (SW): I was moved to do this quilt because I just fell in love with him. When I heard him give the speech at the Democratic Convention in 2004 and whenever a picture came out about him I was clipping pictures. I read his books and I just thought, 'this is the most exciting person on the scene.' At the same time I was so disillusioned, so I had sort of given up on America and the men who just keep seeming to have a way of grabbing the presidency despite their incompetence and their lack of ethical standards and the Bush administration was the last stand for me and I was very seriously talking to my husband about if we don't get a good leader from the Democrats this time we have to move, we have to find another place to live, this is just really too dreadful, I'm embarrassed to be an American and I don't think I can avoid reading newspapers for four more years. I knew that I was an Obama supporter from the beginning and what moved me to do something other than just collect snippets of phrases that he had written or things I had heard him say or pictures. Moveon.com put out a call for Obama art and they said, 'You have ten days to submit something.' It was just suddenly the rush of imagination for me. So the first thing I did was I sat down and I wrote a letter to Obama and it turned into a nine page letter. The next thing I did was I sorted through my pictures of him and the pictures I almost always moved to grab are ones where he looks like he is thinking or pondering. I found one that is sort of a side view and he is rolling up his sleeves and it looks like he is thinking. That became the image and the words became a picture in my mind and the picture was that he is looking out a window thinking about the troubles of the world and what one can do about this and then the panes of glass that he is looking through became the nine pages of this letter that I wrote to him. It was for me a ten day fury. I didn't cook supper for ten days and my husband was very supportive of it. I was just lost in making this quilt. It is a fairly simple image but it was an outpouring of words from my heart about how important I think this election is and how wonderful a candidate I think he is and how much he moves me. This quilt that I made I offered to the Obama Headquarters in Bethesda, that was the group that I was working through for his campaign, doing canvassing, phone banking, and they were thrilled to have this huge image of him and these words of him on their wall. It became the spot where people took pictures in front of. They took photos of each other in front of the quilt. And oh by the way, I didn't get into the Moveon.com show. It was very gratifying to learn that there had been something like 1,2000 submissions to Moveon.com so I figured, 'Okay, that is fine.' [laughs.] I didn't know if any quilts had made it but I subsequently met the quilter whose work did get into that show. The day after the election I was over the moon about this. I was so relieved and so happy and so grateful to the American public for choosing this man and so grateful for his wisdom and humanity. I went over there just swimming with feeling and still ready to cry at the drop of a hat and they were taking the office apart and I took down my quilt and brought it home, and as I was driving home with "Mr. Obama" in the other seat I thought 'you know there must be quilters out there across the country who have been so moved to make Obama art.' I had seen Susan Shie's stuff. In fact I purchased the most expensive thing I ever bought was a little tiny Susan Shie quilt at QSDS [Quilt Surface Design Symposium.] at an auction the last day of the last session last summer. I couldn't believe it. My hand kept sticking itself up in the air to make the highest bid, so I knew there was at least one quilter who was a passionate Obama mamma. I got home and I wrote up a little note and I sent it to about six friends and I said, 'I need a sanity check because I'm thinking of sending out a nationwide call to see who else is out there and see if we can show our quilts at the inaugural somehow.' My friends said, 'It is okay. Send the letter out. It is a good project.' I first sent a note to Susan Shie and she responded almost immediately and said [that.] she would be delighted to participate. So now I figured I'm a little bit more kosher, so I sent out a note on QuiltArt [listserve.] and on the SAQA [Studio Art Quilt Associates, Inc.] and I mentioned Susan Shie. She was on board and I wanted to see if there were any other people who might want to show our quilts in honor of Mr. Obama at the inaugural. Within thirty hours, I had over forty quilters who had responded. 'I'm in! I'm in!' 'Take me.' 'I'm with you.' 'I will make a quilt.' 'I'm going out right now to buy fabric, or I've already made one and it was shown at the DNC, Democratic National Convention.' I was suddenly flooded with sisters who had made quilts and were eager to do this project. That is when I [laughs.] started to panic, I thought 'oh my god, where am I going to put all these quilts?' We were rejected by the very best places in town. I mean the hotels, the museums, the galleries, the train station. [laughs.] We were rejected by everybody and some people were kind enough to say it is a great idea but we are booked for two years already. I contacted Montgomery County, which is the county that Bethesda is in, contacted the county, I called my congressman and my senators, and some people bounced me to other people so I had a rolling rolodex of places to call. Finally I wrote to the heads of universities. Universities have galleries and museums that are connected with them and finally I hit this one fellow, David Walker from Montgomery College. He wrote me back right away and he said, 'You know we have a committee that is meeting today because they have a hole in their early spring schedule and they are not satisfied with the proposals they have had and this sounds very interesting.' He put it to the Dean of the Arts and Humanities Division. She got excited about it. They presented it. I wrote up a little write up and presented it to their committee and they got excited and so it was like as my grandfather would say, it was 'beshert.' Yiddish for 'it was meant to be.' We were going to be. They needed us and we needed a place and so it was perfect. I wrote a formal proposal for the board and then went to see the little space. It is called the Cafritz Arts Center. It is newly built by donation in Silver Spring, a short Metro ride outside of Washington [D.C.], and it is a wonderful venue. It has high ceilings, high windows, nice walls. It is secured. It has cameras. It's got lots of lovely light-filled space for us to display. I think it couldn't be better. We missed the inauguration. I don't think anybody can get a hotel room let alone a quilt showing space, but this will be right after the inaugural, a month later. Things will have died down and I think people will be able to pay attention to other things going on. So we are going to be February 9 to March 5, 2009 at that venue. I just couldn't be happier.

KM: How many quilt artists are participating in the exhibition?

SW: We are now up to sixty. One person who may drop out and that would be fifty-nine, but right now it is sixty people who are participating and people are starting to make second quilts. Unfortunately this man is so damn inspiring that he is inspiring people to make more art. I think there is going to be Obama art for quite a long time, to tell you the truth.

KM: Is President-Elect Obama aware of the exhibition?

SW: I don't know how to get to him. [laughs.] The closest I have been able to figure out is that I know somebody who has a cousin who is Michelle's cousin and [laughs.] we have been trying to get through on a personal contact, therefore I think the ball just keeps getting dropped but I have no idea how to contact the Obamas and invite them to come. The interesting thing is that you know I as well as the FBI or whoever it is is so wary of anybody harming him and certainly wouldn't want to do anything that would get him out from behind serious plate glass. The museum is closed on Sundays and they would be willing to open for special visitors so he could even have the museum to himself, or himself and friends to show. I keep thinking of the little girls--of Malia and Sasha--and it would be such fun to show them the show. I'm hoping we can find a way to get to them and maybe the college's PR [public relations.] Department will be able to find some way to make a personal invitation to them.

KM: What are your plans for this quilt?

SW: This particular quilt? Well I, first it is just to show it. It has been shown in a couple of quilt shows and one of the things that I learned about this quilt is that while I love to look at it and to read the nine page letter [laughs.] nobody else pays attention to the letter. People glance at it, they get the idea that is a letter about Obama and they move on to something else. The only person I ever saw who stood in front of it and read it like me was a man at a quilt show who was standing separate. His wife was busy and he was just killing time and he stood there and he read the whole thing. [laughs.]

KM: What is in your letters? What is in your letter to Obama?

SW: My letter to Obama starts with sort of my--well it begins by saying, 'Thank you for bringing back hope.' For too many years I felt overwhelmed with cynicism about the government and its Congress and the strong undercurrents of corruption and the narcissism of power-hungry, deluded, paranoid and frankly incompetent men and then just being so overwhelmed with negativity. The thing at the end of the first page says, quoting a woman from rural Kentucky who says, 'I know how politics is. I really don't think it is going to matter either way.' Of course that is how I have always felt about so many elections. The Kennedy election being the only other exception. And then it starts--the next page turns to Obama and some of the things that I love about him, like his capacity for listening to people, rich and poor and uneducated, fans and critics, empathically. He listens to everybody and the capacity for listening is to me a basis for understanding and learning and good decision making and that gives me hope for the country. The comparison between Obama and Lincoln has been made over and over again, but I remember one story I read about Lincoln where he would open his doors and people, regular people, were allowed to walk in and make petitions to him or present thoughts to him or criticize him. He had that same ability of openness to people. I'm so pleased that Obama has this calm, pragmatic kind of temperament, that he doesn't get angry, and I think one of the most astonishing examples of that was in a speech that he was giving where there were some men in the back of the auditorium who were holding signs and were trying to interrupt his speech and what Obama did--other people would have had those guys thrown out. He didn't do that. He stopped his speech and he asked them to say what their concerns were, and the men in the back were black men complaining about some way they felt that Obama was not representing black men sufficiently and he listened. Obama listened so politely and then not being angry or putting them down in any way he said he understood and that the men had several choices. They could not vote for him. They could vote for somebody else, or they could get active in politics and see what they could do. I love that. That to me was a good logical head able to be calm under fire and work. His mind doesn't sit still. It is working. What I hope is that for this quilt, [laughs.] I think that was the question--is that I hope it is seen again and that it is seen in the context of people who come to look at Obama, who are Obama supporters rather than just in a quilt show. I hope also that as an end product of this quilt show, which I think is going to be really wonderful, esthetically and politically passionate and creatively passionate, I'm hoping that at the end of this show we will begin the process of making a book about the show, because I'm afraid we are going to have so many quilts offered that we won't be able to hang every one of them. They will all be photographed professionally and they will be put on a DVD and that will play in the lobby of the museum 24/7 [24 hours a day, 7 days a week.]. The quilts will one way or another be shown, but my hope is that all of the quilts will be able to be shown in a book about this, I think, very historic quilt show. Another interesting thing about this quilt show is that my African-American friends have assured me that in most quilt shows they are represented by maybe one or two quilts max, and that this quilt show is unique in that about fifty percent of the quilters are minority people- Latinos and blacks and people from all across the country as far north as Alaska and as far away as Australia. The people who are making these quilts are all working from a common sense of rapture at the end of the election period and hope that is ongoing. So I think this is going to be a wonderful, wonderful show. An emotional show, a historic show, and a very diverse show in terms of the people and their art.

KM: Tell me about your interest in quiltmaking.

SW: My interest in quiltmaking?

KM: Yes.

SW: My interest in quiltmaking is--well, it is George's fault. George is my grandson and George was named after my dad, and my son Andy, who is my youngest, was closest to my dad, and I always knew that he was going to name one of his kids after my dad. George was being formed in his mom's belly with something going terribly wrong. The doctors could tell, so mom was switched to a high risk pregnancy abruptly and what they told us was that while many babies are born with little perforations or little holes in their diaphragm. This baby had no diaphragm and the reason that's serious is that as the baby floats in the amniotic fluid all the organs in the baby's body float as well. And all the guts float up toward the head and the important chest organs, like the heart and the lungs, which were pushed up under his clavicles and did not have a chance to develop properly, so there was very strong doubt that he would live through the birth experience and beyond. I just thought about it. I just couldn't get that out of my mind and I just kept thinking sort of magical thoughts. You know, like if I could just put my hands on him I could keep him safe and I kept dreaming dreams about holding this baby and then I had this dream of my hands and the hands of all the family members, the mommy's side and the daddy's side, all putting their hands on this baby and bringing life to this baby and I sat up in bed and I said, 'I'm going to make a blanket of hands.' Then I woke up at another level and realized that I had never sewn anything in my entire life. I had no idea how to sew. [laughs.] I've never even successfully sewn a button on without making knots and but I was determined to make a blanket for him. The next day I went to the computer and I went to Google and I typed up something like 'quilting help' and I wrote that little story out and sent it out into the ether and I started getting women writing to me and over the next days--whoever they were. Kind people from the Internet said, 'Oh you probably want to make a crib quilt.' and that is the size that a crib quilt is and somebody else said, 'Oh yes hands blanket. We do it all the time. How many squares would you like?' And they just talked me through how to begin attacking this problem. That was the beginning of my making anything with fabric but the addiction hit when I made the trip to the local fabric store, seeing lots of swatches of colors, combinations I could use and obsessing about this and that was it, I was hooked, I spent hours shopping and that became the beginning of my quilting career. [laughs.]

KM: What year is this?

SW: It was exactly six years ago because George is six. He lived and the crib quilt lived over his bed and it has hands of all family members signed and it still it is not a bad looking piece of folk art.

KM: What a wonderful story. And a happy ending.

SW: Exactly. George lends me his quilt when I'm doing a trunk show, otherwise it lives right above his bed. [laughs.] That is how I got started and these six years have just been really rich years for me. I found myself. I was working as a clinical psychologist. I had already retired from teaching but I loved my clinical work. But I realized I began to love my fabric work more and I got to the point where I would be looking at the clock and going, 'okay three more hours of patients and then I can go home and finish working on that piece I started.' Then I thought, 'I'm getting too old to be pushing hours away,' and it was very clear that while I loved my clinic work, I think I love this more. Then a friend of mine died and it really hit me that these are decisions that you don't put off too long. I retired and I have never been happier in my life than, than reading, writing, talking, thinking, doing something with fabric, buying, folding, ironing, washing. I guess this is a wonderfully multi-faceted second--I won't say career but second course for me.

KM: Whose works are you drawn to and why?

SW: That is a good question. Hum. Well Susan Shie because she's just amazing, I would love to live inside her head for about a week. She is just so creative and so loving and so sweet. I'm drawn to the work of Ruth McDowell because she has just fabulous fabric choices. I'm always astonished at the fabrics she chooses to put in her quilts. I took one course with her and loved learning from her. I'm drawn to Jane Sassaman, the strong graphic nature of her work and again, a wonderful teacher. More and more--over the six years my taste has changed. I'm terribly bored with conventional quilting and I've gotten more and more into art quilting and more representational art and art that says something-- I guess this is the old psychology interests-- says something that has an emotional tug to it or that moves me and hopefully might move someone else in a way that they have to think a little bit. I'm still sort of an academic about quilting. I love, every time there is a new book about, you know design for art quilters or you know whatever, I've gotten it. I've given about 5,000 psychology books. I am now acquiring hundreds and hundreds of new quilt books so I have more than enough to read, more than enough fabric to last a lifetime and I'm delighted to see what a role the Internet plays in communication across the world. Artists and quilt artists. There is a whole other world.

KM: Very true. Is "Dear Mr. Obama--" typical of your work?

SW: No it was larger than most, but it is pictorial and it has many words on it. [laughs.] I've made two other little quilts. I wasn't sure whether or not the quilters would come through with their quilts so I felt that I would make a couple of little ones just in case. My other two, they are very different but one is a picture of the White House but sort of as a child would draw it, and the whole family is there and Sasha is hiding behind a tree and Malia is waving out the window which has got beautiful curtains and mommy is on the front porch with the dog, the mythical dog they are going to get, and Obama is walking off with his briefcase to go to the Oval Office, and it is sort of a child-like drawing quilt. It is going to be called "Home" because I think that there is something so wonderful about this whole family and the happiness that they exude and the relationships among the people in that family, they are just wonderful role models. Their parenting and 'coupling' and co-parenting and so forth. And the other quilt I made is a very simple one. It's got big fat chunky letters and numbers on it and it is called "Do You Remember Where You Were When" and it just has the two dates of the election and then the inauguration, and there will be a pencil and paper attached to it and hopefully it will be interactive so people can write about how it was for them when, the night that Obama got elected and how it was for them the night that he is inaugurated and five million people crushed into the city to see it. Those are my, those are my two most recent things. [laughs.]

A little story, a little sidebar if we have time. I was out of commission for several months, I had a hip replacement and then my husband had a hip replacement and I didn't get in my studio for a couple of months and then I couldn't remember why on earth I had bought all those piles of fabric and another artist whom I have long admired absolutely inspired me. It is a Japanese artist and I am blocking her name right now. She had an exhibit at the museum, the National Museum of Women and the Arts and I never saw it before I became a quilter but I saw the book that came out of that exhibit and her work is just charming, lovely and simple graphics and I did a lot of research on her. I can't remember her name. [Ayoke Miyawaki.]

KM: You can fill it in later.

SW: When I got down there to my studio and I couldn't remember, my muse had flown away and I'm flipping through this book of hers and I thought 'that's it.' She would go to the fish market and bring home a fish and then she would make a little fish quilt, and I said that is what I will do. I will go to the farmer's market and I will get a vegetable and I will make a vegetable quilt. I started really looking, really looking at vegetables and they are beautiful and the more you can find them with their leaves attached and how they grow, they are beautiful. So I started making a series of vegetable quilts which is still underway, like peeling a piece of corn, an ear of corn and really looking at it as you take each leaf down and then there is the silk like the lingerie covering, so these are imaging that I'm trying to capture in fabric, so that is another little series that I'm doing. Just the beauty of these everyday things, the veggies at the farmer's market.

KM: Does your muse leave you often?

SW: No, that was the only time. [laughs.] She haunts me now. [laughs.]

KM: Which is a good thing.

SW: Right. [laughs.] She and I are good friends. Now I know what to do if she were to take a vacation. Go to the farmer's market, buy a new vegetable, or a flower.

KM: You mentioned your studio, so describe it to me.

SW: My studio, well let's put that in quotes, "My Studio." We live in a three story townhouse and it's the basement, but only a piece of the basement. It has a wall of old bookcases that are stacked with fabrics and it has my ironing board up with a Big Board up on top and I do an awful lot of designing at the ironing board actually. It has a sofa. It has a television set. It has a long, long shelf that my husband put on top of several file cabinets and I have my two machines. One is a simple Pfaff and one is a simple Bernina. My old desk from my office with a glass top which is now my cutting table and other pieces of IKEA furniture and it is sort of crowded and it is incredibly messy when I'm on a project and then there is this calming delight of cleaning it up and making it very good and putting things away so I know where I can find them again. Then I start a new project and make a complete mess again. That is my studio.

KM: Is there anything else that you would like to share before we close?

SW: Well the only other thing is that I've set myself a goal of making one hundred quilts before I die and I've got about sixty done so far. I think I'm going to make it. [laughs.]

KM: Why a hundred?

SW: I don't know. [laughs.] An idea that flew into my head one day, having a goal. I'm going to do a hundred quilts before I die.

KM: Let me ask you, how do you want to be remembered?

SW: Oh, very interesting. I don't really know, I guess I would like to be remembered as somebody who cared for people, who loved her life and wanted to share it with others. Just, that's it.

KM: What advice would you offer somebody starting out?

SW: Sorry.

KM: What advice would you offer someone starting out?

SW: Starting out, come over to my studio and I will help you, I will help you get started. I guess I would say find somebody, find somebody who you enjoy and who is Obama-like in temperament and will be kind and helpful, and watch how somebody else begins. Having a teacher in the beginning is so helpful, and then make your own mistakes.

KM: Who helped you in the beginning?

SW: I just, aside from the ladies on the Internet, the unknown ladies of the Internet, my first teacher was--who was my first teacher? My first teacher was Jane Sassaman. I took a two day class with her at the local quilt store and [laughs.] her course was called "For the Hopelessly Literal and the Drawing Impaired." [laughs.] That is me. She promised to teach you how to be creative and she did. She had a series of exercises that I thought were brilliant and she really opened up a whole other door for me, another way to think about the kind of art we could make with fabric. She was my first teacher and really a very important one. I went back and studied with her again last year and it was great to be with her again.

KM: What do you think is the biggest challenge confronting quiltmakers today?

SW: Confronting quilt?

KM: Makers today.

SW: Quiltmakers today? Well let me think. The biggest challenge confronting quiltmakers today. Well I think the economy seems to be a bit of a hassle for quiltmakers today. There are so many more of us; the growth of quiltmaking is just astonishing. I think that for quilters who are interested in selling their quilts and they are trying to make a living or supplement their living with selling their quilts, I think this is a tough time for them. I guess and there are more expensive fabrics and more expensive but I think aside from the financial side, the biggest challenge. I still don't have another real good answer. I think there are enormous advantages to the quiltmaker today as opposed to say twenty years ago and I think one of the biggest advantages is the presence of the rest of the world in your computer. That I think is just amazing.

KM: I want to thank you for taking time out of your day to talk to me.

SW: [laughs.] You are such a good listener.

KM: Thank you. I wish you much success with your exhibition.

SW: Thank you.

KM: What is the name of the exhibition because I don't think you ever said that?

SW: Okay here it is, "President Obama: A Celebration in Art Quilts." That is what it really is. It is really a tribute quilt show with many, many images of his face, but also other ways that people are expressing their celebratory mood.

KM: I do hope he gets to see it.

SW: Me too.

KM: Thank you so much and we are going to conclude our interview at 1:05.

SW: Thank you very much, I really appreciate this.