QSOS Interview with Joe Cunningham

Interviewer Janneken Smucker (JS): Good afternoon, this is Janneken Smucker.

Im here with Joe Cunningham, who has graciously agreed to be interviewed as

part of Quilters Save Our Stories. Today is August 18th, [2007.], and we are

in Joes studio in San Francisco, California. Thanks so much for agreeing to

meet with me today.

Interviewee Joe Cunningham (JC): Youre welcome.

JS: Im really happy to have met you this weekend, and I look forward to

getting to know you better.

JC: Yes.

JS: Were going to start our conversation today by talking about one of the

quilts here in your studio. Do you have one that you would like to talk about

in particular?

JC: Well, yes, I think the blue-and-white one.

JS: Okay. JC: It represents a lot of things that Im all about. For one,

its nice to sleep under; its a blanket. For another, its a classic

pattern. I get all of my ideas from quilts. I get really edgy or not edgy,

nervous when Im not making a quilt. When Im making a quilt, I dont get

nervous at all. I feel like, Oh, well, I know how to do this. Its the

one thing I know how to do, is to make a quilt. So when I make something like

this quilt over here, Id ask, Should I do this? Should I do that? What

do other people think about it? et cetera. I have these endless

insecurities. But making a quilt, like the blue-and-white one, I dont have

those kinds of insecurities.

This was made in 2001. Its a six-year-old quilt now. And I made it for my

musical about Joe Hedley, Joe the Quilter, from England, who lived 200 years

ago. And so I made six quilts to tell the story of his quiltmaking career. And

I tell the story of his life and then sing songs that I wrote about him. So

this quilt is a classic design. Tree Everlasting, its called, or other

things. Its just sawtooth-edged bars that I wanted to know, What would it

be like if I just used scissors and cut everything freehand? Because you

know a lot of old quilts were made that way. Youll see quilts youve

seen quilts that you wonder, What kind of template was she using, anyway?

The template she was using was no template, I think, sometimes. So, What

would it be like to just cut well, you see the top row there, its

disappointingly easy to do, it turns out. You can just I wanted a wilder

effect, so I started out on the top row just cutting triangles. Well, my eye is

good enough at this point, I could just cut triangles and they all fit and

everything was easy. Thats not the effect I wanted. So then I started

deliberately messing things up and using scraps to sort of get it so that I

could finally get wildness like I did eventually. You can see it as the bars go

down. Then I evened it all up because I have enough of the quiltmaker in me

or the, what do I want to say, the prissiness or something in me from learning

from old ladies how to make quilts that I want it to be square and flat.

So I evened it all up, added borders, and then quilted it freehand. And so

since I quilted it freehand let me see, so I quilted in the letters down the

white lines there. Joe Hedleys first quilt, it says, made by Joe

Cunningham. In the next bar, the next white bar, it says, Blue and White

2001, and then on the bottom its just a kind of a vine with leaves, with

background quilting. In the blue print there, theres fancy designs. Its

around the outside border, theres this sort of a sunrise, then a half of

a feather wreath, and then a swag with this sort of so its this very

fancy design. Then down the blue and white bars, the blue bars there, its a

spiral that goes into a fleur de lis.

JS: Oh, I see it.

JC: See that?

JS: Yes.

JC: A spiral into a fleur de lis. And then here theres the swag. Heres

the little bit of feather wreath. This is kind of a sunrise. Its very

complex. And I quilted it all freehand. And when I got it done, you couldnt

see it at all. It took me months. I mean, it was not months of quilting. As

you know, it doesnt take that long. For me, it takes about twelve days,

twelve working days, to quilt a quilt, a six-foot-square quilt. But it took me

months to get those twelve working days in. So it was months working on it, and

then when I get it done, there I am with something that you cant even see the

hand quilting in it, which is one of my favorite things, actually. Because a

woman gave me a quilt one time it was a Pennsylvania German quilt Merry

Silber, the great quilt collector. It was a crib quilt, Pennsylvania German.

The bars were about three-and-a-half or four inches wide. And Im trying to

remember, were they pink and yellow or red and yellow, that kind of and it

was the Ely and Walker print, the tiny little calico print that was in print for

130 years or whatever it was. So it was made sometime near the turn of the

century, a little before probably, 1890 or so. It was so boring. It was just

you couldnt even there was nothing. But it was nice and she gave it to

me, and so, Thank you very much.

One day in my studio, it was lying in a certain way, and when the sun raked

across it, all of a sudden I could see that in this bar were cables, in this bar

were feather wreaths, cables, feather wreaths. But you couldnt see; they

were invisible. Well, thats somebody that likes to quilt. And I like to

quilt. And quilting, hand quilting, the one element of its decline has been

that people how people view it. They view it as this enormous barrier

between their finished piece. But all the effort goes into the top. This,

Its surface design. Were artists. Were making this design.

Were making this artistic statement. And once the top is done, the

artistic statement is over. Theyve done it, theyve said everything they

have to say, but, We still have to quilt it. [spoken disdainfully.] You

know what I mean? So they still have to quilt it, so either they will what

used to happen is they would quilt it perfunctorily. They would quilt it and

you could see they didnt enjoy that, did they? [laughter.] They werent

too hot at it and they didnt really like it and they got it over with as soon

as possible by keeping the lines far apart and all that, quilting in the ditch,

all of that stuff. Which is hard. Its yucky to quilt in the ditch, you know?

JS: I agree.

JC: Who needs that? But theyre so ashamed of their quilting oh, forget

it. Anyway, so, therefore, when machine quilting came along, people were primed

for it. The people, the women of this revival were primed for it because

quilting had become just a chore. There was no joy in it. There was no

artistic value in it. There was no its just a functional thing. You

have to make it a quilt by sewing the two layers together. And the last thing

that people will say many things about hand quilting, but the last thing

that theyll say is how great it is and how renewing it is and how rewarding

it is. And as you know from being a quilter, when you have made this object and

you have quilted it, when you sit down at the frame and its an ocean of

fabric in front of you, its like, its the most unrealistic thing in the

world to think that youre going to quilt that, right?

JS: Yes.

JC: How are you going to do it? You do it a stitch at a time. You cant see

it; its stupid. Theres no way youre ever going to get it done, it just

looks like. Its so intimidating. And then you start quilting and then

its six hours have gone, and you dont know where they went, except you do.

Theyre all right there. And, furthermore, if you quilt on an old-fashioned

frame so that you roll it up as you go, its really great psychologically

because your finished stuff gets rolled up and rolled up and rolled up, until by

the time you have it done, when youre however you do it, but its going

to be twelve or fourteen inches down the middle is all thats left thats

visible, you take that last stitch in there and then you unclamp and yo unroll,

and you cut that sucker out of the frame or unpin it, however you do it, and you

get to see what you did for the first time. Whereas and its great.

Its really, Ah! what a feeling. Hang it up and get a glass of wine, is

what you feel like. Whereas, if you quilt in a hoop, you have the whole thing

dragging around. The whole thing is looking at you all the time, saying,

Partly done. Partly done. Partly done. [laughter.] And theres no

big deal when you get it done. Its no different than when you first started,

looks-wise. I mean, you got it done and thats good. Okay, thats good,

you got it done. And you can hang it up now. But you know what I mean?

You dont get that because when I finish I work spontaneously. I

dont make drawings and I dont get on the computer, so I work

spontaneously. And I dont know what Im doing I mean, I dont know

what its going to look like until Im done making the top, and then I go,

Oh, thats what that idea looked like. Okay. This time. Okay.

So then I put it in the frame and then I quilt it. Lots of times, because it

takes me so darned long to get something quilted nowadays, months, I dont

remember what it looked like. Not really, you know, because I only saw it for a

little while and then I quilted it down, and so its a moment of glory for me,

of existential glory, to pull a quilt out of the frame.

So if you cannot see the quilting, guess what? Who cares? I know its there.

I can find it. If we crawl around on our hands and knees when its on the

floor, or you walk right up to it in a show, and you can see, Oh, yeah, yeah,

yeah. Because quilting, the other aspect of it to me, is that quilting is so

precious. Its so I mean, if youre going to do hand quilting, if you

go to the show where theres 300 quilts hung up in the big auditorium or

convention center, if you are going to hand quilt it, well, by God, those

stitches had better be perfect and theyd better be they better meet at

right angles, and by God, theyd better be close and theyd better be

because youre hand quilting it and youve got to put a lot of hand

quilting. [sigh.] And its so precious because its just not done. And so

you have to do all of this stuff. Well, I just hate the idea of making hand

quilting so precious. I love to quilt and its part of my life. Im a

quilter. And so the idea that its so precious, that engenders, that fosters

all kinds of unhelpful thinking, I believe. If its so precious, then, like I

say, By God, you better not make any mistakes!

And so youre I mean, when I teach hand quilting, Ill get these expert

hand quilters in there whose stitches are much finer than mine, often, in my

classes. But what theyre trying to do is perfect their stitches. And they

want to know, So, at the corner of the block, what do you do? You know,

Youve got the seams. What are you going to do about the seams?

Well, I avoid them, if I can! If theres any way I can, I avoid them.

Well, what do you if you cant avoid them?

Well, my stitches get bigger.

And as you can see, see how it ruins the quilt? See, over there, how it ruins

the quilt because my stitches got bigger? You know what I mean?

JS: [laughter.] Yes.

JC: And I think theres a lot of things that foster that kind of thinking.

One is the competitions, because judges will actually say that stuff on their

forms, that, Stitches spread out in the corners. And you get marked down

for that. So in a way, the people are right who say that, who think that,

theyre right. If theyre entering contests, theyre going to get marked

down if theres the slightest so I think contests foster a lot of it. But

also, its just the general, overall preciousness of hand quilting. People

then feel like its life and death, its life and death, its the furthest

thing from an ordinary part of my life. Its this, Everything is coming

together. A whole tradition is coming down on me right here in my frame or my

hoop or however Im doing it, and everything has got to be perfect! And

so, what if theres what if you draw a feather wreath and theres one

fewer feather on this wreath than there is on that wreath? How can I make

these feathers line up? Well, they cant line up because its a curve.

Theres going to be more feathers on the outside than on this. What do you

mean, they cant line up? They have to line up! Well, no, they dont.

If you line them up, its not a feather design; its something else.

Arrgh, the tension of it all! And so, I like anything that militates

against the tension in quilts and the overall, but specifically, thats why I

want to talk about this blue-and-white quilt, is I like the idea see, this

was a conceptual thing. I wondered, What would it look like to make a

traditional pattern, because I like to make a lot of traditional patterns

freehand. What would that look like? What would it look like to do a

two-color quilt without any without a plan? So, here we go, this is what it

looks like. Well, guess what, Janneken, its not the greatest quilt ever

made. Its cool. I like it. I like it a lot.

JS: As do I.

JC: But its not the greatest quilt that ever walked. I mean, there it is;

its a two-color quilt. Two-color quilts dont set me on fire, in the first

place, generally. Theyve got to be really unusual, like that chicken the

other night, which did have a third color but still, oh my goodness. Theyve

got to be really something. And this one, it is what it is. Well, good. I

accomplished what I set out to accomplish which was to find out what it would

look like. Right? I found out. It looks like that. Well, great. And in my

show that I made it for, it has a function and its very valuable and

everything, but if its not the most successful quilt, if you cant see the

quilting, well, theyre not all going to be your first quilt, your best, your

greatest quilt you ever made. And so but I believe theres something

about this revival that has made many people feel, I dont know, that their

reputation is at stake or something. I mean, it seems to me that nineteenth

century quiltmakers felt empowered to make quilts their own way. They were

doing something so fundamentally different than what were doing that its

hard to discern and its hard to define, but they were doing something, I

believe, fundamentally different. For instance, there is a great deal of

randomness with nineteenth century quilts. The women would be making pieced

quilts, they would work along until they ran out of that fabric, and then they

would start in with a new fabric. Well, that tells me that they had a wholly

different idea of what they were trying to do. Women today, when theyre

making quilts, if they run out of well, they wouldnt run out. You plan

ahead. Youve got your software telling you how much yardage to get, right?

But if you were making the blocks and you ran out, then youd have to do

something clever. Then, Oh, okay, Ill use another brown and Ill put it

in the corners. Ill arrange it symmetrically. Or Ill put those in the

middle to do the one composition that everybody knows, which is like an

exploding sun or something from the middle. We have an area of lightness but

then so well do something like that with it. Or well in any

event, we have to indicate that it looked intentional. We must control every

aspect of this process. We have to look like I mean, Were artists.

You cant just let things happen, you know what I mean? Where nineteenth

century quiltmakers just let things happen, a lot. They cut borders off. The

border design is going along until theyre done with it and then they cut it

off. You reach the end of the border. Well, now you have to resolve the

corners, right?

JS: Right.

JC: And all this stuff. You have to control every aspect of it. And

nineteenth century quiltmakers, theres many things that they left out, tht

they left to chance. Lots of the great appliqu quilts, the majority of the

great appliqu quilts, their abilities to replicate curves, exact curves, how

about the handles of baskets? Something about the handles of baskets, so that

if you see a basket quilt from the nineteenth century, every handle will be

different. Its because they were doing something fundamentally different.

They were putting handles on the baskets, right? Quilters now are making a

pattern, and youve got to [grunt.], and so you have the template and every

single handle is exactly the same. Stuff like that. Thats what Im so

because otherwise, if you just put handles on the baskets, it would look like,

what? Like you didnt control it. And the suggestion then, I believe, maybe

Im reading too much into it, but the suggestion then is that you didnt

know how to control it. And theres a lot of angst around your ability to

control your process. You want the quilt to lay flat. You want the quilt

and you want the stitches and you want everything symmetrical and you turn

the corner evenly and you know what I mean? [laughter.]

JS: Yes. [laughter.]

JC: So Im always trying to do things that are that I dont control.

Im trying to lose control. Im trying to shed control. So when I do

lectures, its the same thing. I want to provoke myself to use whatever

happens in the room to make it now, to keep dragging myself into the now, and

not into my outline. And so and when Im making quilts, I keep trying to

drag myself into the now. I want I dont want to know if I in the

past, when Ive made commissioned works and I would draw them on computer or

by hand and make a tissue overlay for the quilting designs and everything, and

then I start making the quilt once I get my down payment, and were doing it

and its all official for the designer or the architect or whatever, and I

start work on it, Ive already done Ive already done I have already

had all the fun. And all thats left to do now is the work. Ive done all

the creativity. I solved all the problems. And now I just have to do the work.

And theres a certain journeymans joy in doing something that you know how

to do. Its a good thing, just to do a job that youve worked a long time

at and you can do it. And theres a certain amount of that. But I dont

have to do that anymore, really. I dont Im not thats not what

Im doing. Thats not what I want to do. So I keep trying to come up with

ideas. Well, what would it look like if? And so, then, my quilts are an

answer to that, It would look like, they end up saying, like this.

Thats the message of my quilts, Like this.

JS: There it is. Yes. Thats great. So how did you begin quilting, quiltmaking?

JC: I started making quilts -- [off-the-record discussion about the tape

machine]. Ive got a twenty-three minute answer.

JS: Thats all right. Thats all right. Im happy not to be talking.

JC: I was back in my home town, Flint, [Michigan.], for the summer, after my

one year of college in Colorado. I was going to go back to college that fall.

I went home to work on an album, as a guitar player, with a friend of mine, and

to write the lyrics on this album. And I was there that summer and a friend of

mine said, You should oh, no, he told somebody else. He told this

woman, folk singer, You should hire this guy to play guitar with you on some

concerts. Her name was Gwen Marston. And so Gwen called me up and I went

over to her house for rehearsals for some a series of concerts she was

doing. At her house were these boxes full of blankets. They were blankets;

they were old. It turned out they were the quilts of Mary Schafer, who just

died this winter. She [Gwen.] had gotten a grant to document Marys

collection and to produce a catalogue. She had a bunch of boxes of quilts at

her house, about a third of the collection, for the photographer to take

pictures of. And I wanted to look at them, so she showed me a bunch of the

quilts. Well, something happened to me, you know, I loved them. She made

quilts. She had learned to make quilts from a Mennonite quilting group in

Oregon, when she had been there on a sabbatical once, and so she was making

quilts for her kids and what have you, but just working along as a quiltmaker.

But she had discovered Mary Schafer, who was this great quiltmaker in

mid-Michigan at the time. She [Mary Schafer.] was born in 1910; this was in

1979, so she was sixty-nine years old. And what I wanted to be was a writer, so

and I had just finished my one year of college studying English, primarily.

And Gwen told me at one point as she was doing the documentation for this, she

loved getting all the information together but she was dreading writing the

catalogue because she didnt feel like a writer and she didnt want to

become one just to do it. Well, Id been studying English for a year. I

could do almost anything, really, with the English language, you know what I mean?

JS: [laughter.]

JC: I was twenty-six. And so I said, Well, I can write that for you.

Well, youd have to know something about quilts.

And I had heard a phrase that I loved in school, which was, All the available

literature. I loved that, and I thought to myself, Know something about

quilts? How about if a read all the available literature? How would that be?

JS: [laughter.]

JC: Which, at the time, this is 1979, there was about eight or ten books.

JS: You could read all the available literature.

JC: You could read it all. It took me most of the summer to read [Ruth.]

Finley and Dr. [William Rush.] Dunton, and Marie Webster, Florence Peto. There

was just not that many. These women, all of them became my heroes. And then

Barbara Brackmans stuff in Quilters Newsletter. So I just read

everything that I could read. Then I met Mary, herself, and well, Mary was

thrilled. Here was this young man that was interested in quilts. And one

night, Gwen came over to my apartment with a little crib quilt, it was a

Drunkards Path, and a big thimble that she had found someplace. And she

said, If youre going to write persuasively about quilts, you need to know

how to quilt. So heres how its done. The rocking stitch, she taught me.

All right. I was already becoming very interested in her, so, Fine.

This will make a good impression.

JS: [laughter.]

JC: So by the time I finished that quilt, about a week later, my stitches were

good enough that I could sit at her frame and quilt on her stuff. And then I

wrote the catalogue and we put up this big Mary Schafer quilt show that year, to

which an editor came from a now defunct magazine. Her name was Carter Houck

from the it was called Ladies Circle Patchwork Quilts Magazine. And

Carter was doing a story on Michigan quilts. She asked me if I would write an

article about Mary Schafer. Well, I wanted to be a writer. Getting paid to do

an article about Mary Schafer, who I already had all the material, Id already

written about, Well, sure, Ill do that. And we went around and I

started seeing what other people were doing in quilts, and it seemed to me that

I was so arrogant, but it seemed to me that peoples take on quilts was

fundamentally unserious. There was something see, theyre too serious and

now I want them to be less serious. Im serious. This is my life.

JS: [laughter.]

JC: And people would call themselves traditional, meaning what they do is make

all symmetrical. I use time-honored blocks and I use easily-blended colors

and I arrange them symmetrically with a border. Thats what they meant by

traditional, when the traditional will put hair on your toenails. Traditional

is wild. Its this realm of wildness, if you really look at whats in the

tradition. And it just it always seemed insulting to me. Well, anyway, and

I thought, Well, I can do better than that. Come on. And so I wanted to

make a quilt. So then we wored together on a quilt and sold it for like

fifteen hundred dollars, the first quilt that we ever made together.

JS: Wow!

JC: Then one night, on the way to a gig I was playing, Gwen was going with me

to Ann Arbor, and I said, I know what to do. I got this thunderbolt of

inspiration. I realized many years later that it was, I think, partly inspired

by reading the story of Joe Hedley, Joe the Quilter from England, a man who was

a professional quiltmaker. But anyway, I said, Lets go pro. Lets get

some business cards printed up that say, Professional Quiltmakers. And

when we meet people, lets tell them were professional quiltmakers.

And, you know, what are they going to say? Like, Whered you go to school?

Wheres your license? or something? They cant prove that youre not

a professional quiltmaker. And then people started hiring us. The Antique Club

there in town heard there was these professional quiltmakers and we would come

and give a talk, so well get paid fifty bucks to talk about the history of

quilts, which thats all I was talking about anyway. [laughter.] And we were

also performers, and so getting up and doing a lecture, well this is a piece of

cake. Its easy. Whereas, at the time, this is late 1979, early 80, when

were getting started, 80, 81, most of the people who were doing quilt

lectures were not performers. They were women who had become very good at

quilts. And its two different things. And so many of the great, the early

great quilt authorities that I saw were reading their lectures from an outline,

and they were not that comfortable doing it. And so and I was twenty-six,

twenty-seven. It was so I was this very tall guy, and it was very easy to

stand up. It was very easy to get a lot of attention. Plus we worked like

crazy. Gwens kids were in college then, and so we had no children to contend

with, so we could just spend all day making quilts. Lots of times we had to

play gigs at night, but we just quilted all day. And so we could produce a lot

of quilts, quilt one at least every month and sometimes more than that. And so

we had a lot of hand quilting done in a hurry and it was very impressive. And

then we started writing. We got a book contract for Dover right away, and then

AQS, and we wrote a bunch of books together, and then eventually got a column

for Ladies Circle Patchwork Quilts, and wrote for them, how to make

quilts. So we eventually built a house on an island in northern Lake Michigan,

and had the upper part of it was a quilt studio, and we moved up there and

started the Beaver Island Quilt Retreat, which still goes on, although not on

the island. Its someplace else now. And made quilts and traveled around the

country and wrote books and made videos and all that sort of stuff, all through

the eighties.

And then we finally split up and I moved to New York City in ninety at the

end of 91, early 1992. And I went back to music for while and was music

director for a theater company, and then got a radio show in Vermont, a crazy

series of things, and I worked for the theater company up there. And then

eventually, I was hired by Julie Silber, who was then the curator of the Esprit

Quilting Company quilt collection, to come out here because she was starting her

exhibition business, The Quilt Complex, and needed a writer, quilt writer who

knew Amish quilts to write all of her materials. So I came out here for a

five-month job and then met Carol, and got married and stayed. So Ive been

here ever since. So thats how I got started. [laughter.]

JS: Thats great. Okay, thats Im glad you brought in the piece

with Julie Silber because thats how I became familiar with you, is I read

your essay in the catalogue of the Brown Collection [Amish Quilts 1880-1940 from

the Collection of Faith and Stephen Brown (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan

Museum of Art, 2000)]

JC: Oh, yes.

JS: And that was when I first saw your name and I was really struck by that,

that essay, because I was starting to study Amish quilts at that point and saw

the exhibition. So did you do a variety of things with Julie and The Quilt Complex?

JC: Yes. I mean, when I started, and let me just reiterate here it was 1979.

JS: Yes, much earlier.

JC: And to see Amish quilts I went to see this show, it was the Holstein

Collection and the van der Hoof Collection at the Detroit Institute of Art.

Mary and Gwen and I went. So there we are, well Mary goes up to this Sawtooth

Center Diamond, and shes got her little cloth tape, you know, and she said

well, she knows not to touch quilts, but shes there like this

[indicating.], and so shes measuring, Those are inch-and-a-half on a

side. Where Im there taking notes and the guard comes over and says,

What are you doing?

Making a sketch.

No sketching!

No sketching?

There is no sketching, no photography, no drawings.

So, Okay, so one of us would stay out in the hall and the other one would

go in and [measure.], Its about six inches, and then go back out and

tell the person, Its six inches, you know?

JS: [laughter.]

JC: So that was the first Amish quilts I saw in real life. But for the

majority of Amish quilts that we Gwen and I went through a phase when we

first started, I wanted to be serious. Oh!

JS: Well, of course.

JC: And Amish of course! And Amish quilts, you cant be any more serious

than Amish quilts. So I wanted to make these copies of center diamonds and

center squares and stuff. So where could you see them? Well, Julie, I knew a

little bit, and she I had met Julie and she sent me pictures of quilts.

There was the Gallery of Amish Quilts came out then by Bishop and Safanda,

and was it Phyllis Haders had a book on Amish quilts then? [Robert Bishop and

Elizabeth Safanda, A Gallery of Amish Quilts: Design Diversity from a Plain

People, (New York: Dutton, 1976); Haders, Sunshine and Shadow: the Amish and

their Quilts (New York: Universe Books, 1976)]

JS: Uh-huh.

JC: So we copied a bunch. We copied about twenty-five Amish quilts. Well,

were making them out of cotton, but I learned a lot by trying to copy the

quilting. And then I met some Amish quilters, and so I was just totally into

Amish, Amish, Amish. Wed copy these quilts and meticulously copy the colors.

When I came out here and saw the quilts that I had been copying, they were

completely different. They were completely different in every particular. The

colors were not right; the proportions were off. I had copied them very closely

but they were off. And then the quilting designs, which I was so good at

copying, were embarrassingly more sophisticated and better done and, oh, it was

embarrassing to see how I thought I was making these beautiful things [but.] I

was making these pale imitations, these ugly I mean, they were not ugly, but

they were imitations of

JS: When you saw the

JC: when I saw the real thing and was able to handle them a lot. And so

ever since then, nineteen ninetyI saw them when I came out in the eighties,

during the glory days of the Amish Quilt Collection there at Esprit. But ever

since I moved out here to help with Julie, Im the one that handles those

quilts, so Im the one that packed them up to send them to Lancaster when he

[Doug Tompkins, founder of Esprit] finally sold them [Amish quilts] back [to

Lancaster, Pennsylvanias Heritage Center Museum]. And so Ive lived with

these quilts and Ive breathed in their dust and I just love these quilts.

And if I were to set out to make an Amish quilt today, I think I could do a lot

better than the ones that I used to make.

JS: Much more intimately acquainted with them. Those twenty-five or so quilts

that you were making, painstakingly studying, what happened to those?

JC: Well, when Gwen and I split up, she got all of the quilts that we had made.

JS: So those werent ones that you had made to sell or on commission?

JC: A lot of them got sold. Let me seehere. This [indicating a photograph.]

is not a copy; this is just an Amish style Log Cabin. It got sold. They got

sold or, I dont know, is the other answer. I got ten quilts when we

split up, and I only have a couple of those left. Ive sold them.

JS: Right. What is the name of that book? Sets and Borders by Gwen

Marston and Joe Cunningham.

JC: Copy?

JS: Yes, its a pretty good copy.

JC: Its pretty good. Its pretty good until you see the real thing and

see how

JS: Of course.

JC: But then, of course, this photograph doesnt really represent that quilt

either. So now were in this middle ground. Theres these two quilts, and

so that ones pretty good [indicating.]. This one I was very proud of, trying

to make a modern version of an Amish quilt.

JS: What did you like about Amish quilts?

JC: Oh, I mean, its very clear to me what I liked about them. Like I said,

I was afraid of people and especially, my guitar player friends, when they

and musician friends, when they heard that I was making quilts, I was

deathly afraid that they would think that I was making Sunbonnet Sue

things or little tea cozies and stuff like that. Well, the last thing I was

ever going to do was something cute. No thank you. Im a serious

Im an intellectual, and I dont make junk like that. Little gifts for the

grandkids and stuff like that, you know? Come on!

JS: [laughter.]

JC: I make serious things. And theres nothing that could be more serious

than a Lancaster County quilt. You know, its cold. Design-wise, nothing is

more colder and icy and intellectual and seeming, at the time, to me, thats

what they represented. And so thats what I wanted to do. I wanted to do

something that would look intellectually detached and cold and severe, severe,

like that, and intellectual and minimal. And it resembled minimal art. And

its so embarrassing, but thats true. Thats true. And I really liked

the Lancaster County stuff initially, but then that opened the doorway into the

Midwestern stuff. And then, being in the when the [David.] Pottinger

Collection book came out and seeing all those, well, it was a revelation. And

then when I got to actually see Midwestern Amish quilts, then I started having

this whole series of revelations. And especially the Arthur Illinois quilts.

JS: Oh, Im with you.

JC: You know what Im talking about?

JS: Yes, exactly.

JC: Those, thats it for me. And then when I saw, Oh, you can be free.

You can just be free. Oh! And so there was those, and it took me a long

time heres a copy of an Iowa Amish quilt. Ive never seen the

original; just a picture of it. There was a time oh, I lost my train of

thought because I saw this picture. I was trying to show you here, see, this is

in here, this is the last book that we did together [indicating.], and you

can always tell, her quilts are playful and fun; my quilts look ice cold. [laughter.]

JS: [laughter.]

JC: This is what appealed to me. I wanted to copy a very difficult quilt of

the past. Oh, theres this gallery section in here. Okay, heres what

were talking about. See? Well take the fundamental ideas of an Amish

quilt and then well alter it in a more intellectual way. Where shes going

much more free stuff. We did these together, but this is me [indicating.].

JS: [laughter.]

JC: So it took me a long time to get over that, but gradually, thats my

train of thought. We did a book on appliqu quilts, but that was never my

favorite thing. It really wasnt. Appliqus meant flowers and all of that.

Well, by golly, by studying these old quilts and then copying them, then I

started to feel I started to get an appreciation for all these different

kinds of beauty and these different kinds of aesthetic realms that quilts represent.

Any questions?

JS: Any questions? What, I get to ask questions? [laughter.] So how has

how did you make that transition from the very serious quilting?

JC: Once you see what happened to me was I met Mary Schafer early on.

Mary, one of the worlds great quiltmakers, where did her aesthetic come from?

Well, I could show you where it came from. Kit quilts. Her whole idea of how

to make a quilt came from kit quilts. She studied history extensively but what

she copied was the symmetrical, was the engineered borders, was everything about

kit quilts, the way they are engineered and designed, she learned to imitate,

down to the way she marked quilts was with a brown paper sack. She would sketch

the design and then perfect it on a brown paper sack and then poke holes with a

knitting needle through, and then lay that on and put pencil marks so that she

had a follow-the-dot pattern because that was the first quilts that she made,

were kit quilts, and they had follow-the-dot patterns. Her whole aesthetic came

from that. So I thought one of my first original ideas that I took over to

Marys, this quilt top, I said, Now I want to quilt it like this. And then

on the border, heres what Im thinking. Heres what Im thinking.

Just bear with me. I want to put the binding on and then just inside the

binding, I want to do this little piping, just like a little, oh, a little

eighth of an inch edge of maybe yellow up against that red binding. And she

said, Well, its not traditional, you know.

JS: [laughter.]

JC: Oh, yes, I guess its not traditional so I guess I cant do it. She

was so serious about the tradition and there was something about that that

appealed to me. And so, Okay, I wont do it then. Fine. It wasnt

that I kept myself from doing anything original, but, I dont know, but

anyhow, so then a couple of years later, Merry Silber showed me a quilt dated

1863, that had a little piping around that border that binding. A little

piping around the binding! Well, what would you know about that! And I mean,

Ill never forget that moment when I saw that quilt and I thought, Now wait

a minute. What is Mary [Schafer.] talking about thats traditional and

whats not? and all of that. And then I really started looking at the

tradition. And when you, like I say, when you look at old quilts, people think

of old quilts as like this sort of mottled brown sort of things or something.

But when you look at whats there, its so wild and glorious. And it was

from really starting to collect and to study old quilts that then the ones that

appealed to me were the ones then okay, what happened was my idea of

intellectual seriousness flipped. And I started thinking more like John Cage.

You cant get any more intellectually serious than that, but also playful. I

started thinking of a whole different thing. I started seeing the other quilts.

And you can find whatever you want. You can go to Kansas, mid-twentieth

century, and get Charlotte Jane Whitehill and that whole crew, Rose Kretsinger

and all of them. Well, you could get lost in that and do that for the rest of

your life. But what appealed to me, as a musician and as a person, was not

knowing what was going to happen next. And once I realized I could find that in

quilts, thats what I wanted. Thats what I wanted to seek and thats

what I wanted to do.

So thats what happened, was at first I thought quilts were valuable insofar

as they resembled art. I thought my job was to make art was to make the

quilts was to make quilts legitimate by making them artistic. At a certain

point, my thinking changed because of what I actually saw in the tradition.

When I actually realized when I realized that, Oh, guess what? Guess

what, Dude? Women thought of large-scale, abstract compositions, with a

great deal of randomness. In the mid-1800s, you can find utility quilts where

she didnt know what it was going to look like; she was just sewing pieces

together, and cutting them freehand, for that matter. Fifty years and

its a good thing I have a woman and a child in the room with me or my

language would go terrible fifty yearsbefore the painters discovered this,

that you could make a large-scale, abstract painting and not know what it was

going to look like ahead of time, you could just express yourself with the

paint, women already were just expressing themselves with fabric, and they had

already discovered this and they were already doing it. So now, then,

eventually what happened was I realized that this was pissing me off that quilts

still look at the Gees Bend quilts; its just the latest thing to happen.

I love the Gees Bend quilts, but the reason that they got institutional

credibility was because they resemble art. And so everybody its so good,

its like art. Its so good, its a model of art. Its so

condescending, number one. Its condescending to think because the whole

message here is that these uneducated women, these foolish, frivolous women,

stumbled into this they actually it turns out they somehow accidentally

made these things that we, sophisticates, can appreciate them for how artistic

they really are. It makes me want to punch somebody. It makes me so mad that

and so, eventually, I got the feeling that quilts didnt need art. Quilts

exist in an aesthetic realm of their own. There is no art in a Nine Patch, a

red-and-white Nine Patch. Its a community pattern. We all make

red-and-white Nine Patches at some point in our career, or we dont have to,

but we used to. All women used to make a red-and-white Nine Patch at some

point, a green-and-white Nine Patch, make a two-color Nine Patch. Thats a

community pattern. Were not expressing our individuality with it. Were

not expressing an artistic concept that we invented. Were using all

community materials. And yet, and yet, you can look at a red-and-white Nine

Patch and it can be so sublime in its proportions and in its composition that

you just float away from it, its so beautiful. And is it art? To me, its

doing something all different than art is supposed to do. But is it an object

with some form of aesthetic power? Yes. So I started to have the idea that

quilts dont need to be made into art. And then I but then, I see its

just the opposite. [Sigh.]

JS: [laughter.]

JC: Its just the opposite, is whats happening now. Now, everybody thinks

that in order to make quilts legitimate, to make them legitimate, we have to

make them more resemble art. The more a quilt resembles a quilt, the less

intellectually serious you must be. The more a quilt resembles art, the more

intellectually serious you must be. Its that way in the quilt world today.

You know what I mean?

JS: Yes.

JC: So if you make a quilt, dont just dont do it! Be creative!

Express yourself! Just dont make a boring Nine Patch; just dont do it.

Youre told, Dont do it. Because thats just what everybody does.

You dont want to just do were Americans, for Gods sake. We have to

go our own way. We have to be mavericks.

JS: [laugher.]

JC: We have to be creative. We have to be artists. And that so, for

instance, Joan Schultz is an artist.

JS: Yes.

JC: Shes an artist. And shes primarily an artist, and shes working in

the quilt medium. Shes using quilts as a medium.

JS: Right.

JC: And that, I have like absolutely no problem with that. Thats what

people who want to be artists, who make quilts want to make quilts, thats

totally fine. Im not against that at all. But what Im against is the

general feeling in the atmosphere that I just described, that quilts that are

made as art are more valuable, are more serious. This is life and death to me.

Im trying to play as if my life depended on it. Im serious, but Im

trying to play and have fun. And so thats so but, I just keep coming

back to all these ideas come right straight out of the tradition. You dont

have to you can do I mean, you can find whatever you want in the

tradition, but the more you know about the rest of the world, the deeper you can

see into whats already there in quilts. And it doesnt bother me at all

that people are using quilts as an artistic medium, but what bothers me is that

the denigration of the tradition, that its not a worthy pursuit. I want

to make it into a worthy pursuit, to make traditional quilts.

JS: All right.

JC: Of course, I havent thought about this before.

JS: Not at all. [laughter.] So youre currently doing what?

JC: Right. Im currently completely abandoning all those things I just said.

[laughter.] No, my last hand-quilted quilt was eucalyptus leaves and I dont

have it here. Its called The Way Home. Its about where I live in

the Presidio. And I feel like I finally have I dont have to do things

that are using a quilt format any longer. I feel like now I can make quilts

at this point in my life, I feel pretty free to make whatever I want and to do

whatever I want. And so, like this one here [indicating.], its called My

Own Fault, and its about living in San Francisco. And when Im done

quilting it, itll be a quilt big enough to sleep under. Thats all I

really know about it. But at this point, it feels to me like not doing

community patterns. Thats what I feel like not doing. I feel like I just

want to make my own stuff for awhile and see where it goes. But its very

so thats what Im doing.

JS: Well, I think we are running to the end of our time together today.

JC: All right.

JS: I really look forward to continuing our conversation in the future.

JC: Yes, Im all for it.

JS: Thank you so much. Its now 2:49 [p.m.] on August 18[, 2007.], and this

is Janneken Smucker signing off with Joe Cunningham for Quilters S.O.S.

Thank you so much, Joe.

JC: Youre welcome.