Joe Cunningham has been a professional quilt artist since 1979. He has written essays on the subject for museum catalogues, books and magazines. His book, Men and the Art of Quiltmaking was the first book on its subject. In 2004 he received a $30,000 Shulte Grant from the Fort Mason Foundation. In 2009 he received a grant to study with the Gees Bend quilters in Alabama. In 2010 he was artist in residence at the De Young Museum in San Francisco, which purchased one of his quilts for its permanent collection. Joe travels throughout the country to give lectures and workshops on quiltmaking. His ten books on quiltmaking include the first biography of a living quilter, the first book on men who make quilts (Men and the Art of Quiltmaking,) and a definitive book on marking quilts for quilting called Quilting with Style, published by AQS. He has been seen on the Peabody Award-winning PBS series Craft in America, the HGTV series “Simply Quilts with Alex Anderson,” as well as “The Quilt Show” with Ricky Tims and Alex Anderson, and others. Cunningham has performed his musical quilt show, “Joe the Quilter,” for guilds and theaters nationwide. His latest book is Man Made Quilts: Civil War to the Present, a catalogue for the show of the same name at the Shelburne Museum. His quilts are in the permanent collections of the DeYoung museum, The Shelburne Museum, The Newark Museum, The San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles and many private collections.
He has been invited to give lectures in museums and colleges including the DeYoung Museum, University of Michigan, the Chicago Art Institute, the Shelburne Museum, and the International Quilt Study Center and Museum, The National Quilt Museum and the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles.
www.instagram.com/joethequilter/
Return to 9 x 9: Contemporary Quilts & Containers HERE.
Some Dumb Old Painting, 2015. For this portrait of his wife, Joe Cunningham created a background of incongruous fabrics in angular, unwieldy shapes. Using a variety of patterns from his collection of bias tape, he made a wild-haired portrait of his wife, Carol LeMaitre, looking as if she might be saying something. For the word balloon, he used his inkjet printer to print onto unbleached muslin. The artist was thinking about the way quilters always want to be seen as part of the art world, so he had his subject say she rejected that whole idea.
Self Portrait, 2014. Using silk scraps from a long-defunct hippie shirt factory, Joe Cunningham wanted to see if I could give the least visual information required to indicate a face. His own face was right there, handy. He programmed the quilting design in his then-new computerized long-arm quilting machine to start at the top with a variable grid made of 9 directional squares of diagonal lines, then allowed it to progress toward the bottom of the quilt and become leaves. In the end, he gave the subject of the portrait a small flower to look at with its eyes cast sideways. Top Kill, 2010.
Top Kill, 2010. When the Deepwater Horizon oil spill occurred in April of 2010 and continued for months, Joe Cunningham’s feeling of helplessness was a daily burden as engineers tried technique after technique to stop the millions of gallons of oil from flowing freely out of the damaged pipe. At the same time, the artist was working on a quilt top that he felt was not finished and was unsatisfying, something he did not want to quilt and present to the world. When the company came up with the idea of stuffing debris down the pipe to stop the spill, another unsuccessful technique, they called it “Top Kill.” Cunningham’s own unhappy quilt top was hanging on his studio wall, and he realized he could put it into a brand-new category if he addressed the oil spill. To accomplish this, he opened a bottle of India ink and threw ink all over it to create his own “oil spill.” Then, he quilted it by hand in lines similar to the containment booms that floated around the oil on the surface.
It’s a Continuum, 2020. At first, when Joe Cunningham heard about this terrible epidemic—known as Covid 19—coming to the U.S. and then learned that we would be locked down in our houses for an unspecified time, he thought he could get by fine, no matter how long it might take, weeks or even perhaps a month. But as it dragged into the summer months and the death toll mounted higher and higher, as the President and his crew seemed unable to talk about the pandemic in any coherent, helpful way, the artist started to feel like the only thing keeping him together was art. Characteristically, when Cunningham has strong feelings about something, he has to make a quilt about it. The first thing he did was to cut up a few oil paintings and piece them together in a mirror image of the way people cut up quilts to make art or clothing. Then, he added large white spaces for quilting, which he wanted to resemble holes in the fabric of reality or distortions in the space/time continuum. Into this grid, he placed some of his favorites from history, the German Renaissance artist Albrecht Durer in his self-portrait, making himself look like Jesus, and the Greek philosopher and historian Plutarch, from a medieval engraving. The paintbrushes represented the tools by which art is made.
The Sleeping Protestors of Kyiv, 2014. In 2014, Joe Cunningham watched in shock as the Ukrainian government tried unsuccessfully to suppress the protests against its increasingly pro-Russian policies. The protesters eventually occupied Maidan Square in central Kyiv and took over the government buildings after the barricades around the entrances to the square were breached. At that time, he saw a photograph of the protesters sleeping in some government buildings among a jumble of coats, blankets—whatever was on hand. Inspired especially by the idea that the protesters set their own barricades on fire when the government forces attacked, the artist felt he should make a quilt to honor them. He drew some of the images of the protesters into his computerized machine to quilt in the white spaces of his patchwork, then freely drew whatever material from which the barricades were made—tires, pallets, barrels, firewood, etc. Someday, Cunningham hopes to be able to donate this quilt to a museum in Kyiv.
Rest, 2020. Another quilt from the first year of the COVID pandemic, Joe Cunningham made this when he felt he needed a place to sit down and rest to avoid more bombardment with election and pandemic news. When he saw a picture of Vincent Van Gogh’s straw-seated chair, he knew he could steal the image and incorporate it into his quilt. For the artist, the tricky part was integrating it into the body of the quilt and creating a sort of whirlwind of elements all around it. Some of the whirling lines were part of the fabric, and some were his bias tape sewn down to imitate the printed ones. The background fabric is repurposed; it comes from a textile training center in Ghana, where participants experiment with printing, dyeing, and bleaching.
