500 Art Quilts: An Inspiring Collection of Contemporary Work (500 Series)
Today, quilts are finally overcoming their old-fashioned rap. Once perceived as blocklike, follow-the-rules fabric sandwiches, contemporary art quilts—with the emphasis on art—break the ancient code. Bresenhan truly has eyed and chosen 500 of the world’s best, hailing from France and Israel and other countries to the U.S. Each page delivers a different vision of what quilting means, along with the material and manufacturing details. A few examples: a tongue-in-cheek “Cow Pie” depicting, yes, cows meandering in a baked pie. Stark black-and-white whorls in a fingerprint (and so named). Undulating green fabric strips weaving into grass. Bold wisteria in a Tiffany-like stained-glass quilt. Two ready-to-play border collies in a field—just like some museum painting. The quilts here showcase a wide variety of painterly influences, multimedia techniques and materials, and aesthetic periods. Naive, ethnic (e.g., Latino and Native American), abstract, representational, three-dimensional, postmodern, and classics like Chagall and Matisse and Monet. An ooh and aah on every page. --Barbara Jacobs