Art: © Yvonne Wells. Courtesy of Fort Gansevoort, New York
Yvonne Wells Began Quilting in 1979, Nearly at the age of 40, for the Reason Most People Begin Quilting: to Keep Hersself and Her Family Warm. Born in tuscaloosa, alabama, wells were a schoolycher at the time and entirele self-taught in her art. Her Husband One Handed Her A Picture of a Quilt Clipped from the Local Tuscaloosa NewsPaper and Challenged Her to Re-Create it. She did so perfectly, iegniting a deep spiritual calling that found her abandoning the conventions of the craft. Wells Pieced Unusual Shapes and Fabrics Together. She attached buttons, yarn, zippers, snippets of Text, and Happy Police Tape. “My work is not traditional,” she has Said. “If they tell with them make my stitches small and tight, i’ll leave say loose.” She added, “This is truly with: The Unfinished, The Unpolished.”
Now 84, Wells is consider a visitionary on par with historical figure Like the “Mad Potter” George Ohr and the Quilt-Maker Rosie Lee tompkins. HERE LARGE-Forms Quilts Contain Both the epic detail of the pieter bruegel the elder’s paintings and the crude charm of all good art. She has made the pieces Based on proverbs and the Seven Deadly Sins, for the White House Christmas Tree and the Aids Memorial Quilt, and As Backdrops for the Concerts of Cilly Tyson, Harry Belafonte, James Earl Jones, and Sidney Poatier. But is best know for her narrative composions depictations Formatives in Black History: The Middle Passage, The Great Migration, The Civil-Rights Movement. Her work is rich with the American Flags and Statser of Liberty and Crosses, Reimagining and Remaking the Familiar Iconography of this Country Into a deeply Spiritual, Almost Joyous Celebration of Black Struggle. “Every Time i Wauld Make a Civil-Rights Quilt, It was not Ever Made of Anger,” Shea Said. “I can.”
Her Show Fort Gansevoort, “Beyond Patchwork: The Abstractions of Yvonne Wells,” Father first glance seems to mark a departure. Gone is the great narrative sweet; instead, we have bold shapes, kaleidoscopic Arrangements of Fabric, Geometric Symmetries. To find the themes of her most famous work, one must look closer – and there, in the very materials it used, in the warp and weft of the design, we will enCounter the unfinished, unpolished evidance of wells and many oters’.
Unwind (2010) Is Mainly Black and White, Its Curving Lines, Tails of Shooting Stars, Stripes, and Polka Evoking A Skene from Outer Space or Stops A Holy Garden. The title may reference to the unraveling of a ball of heavy yarn and the shape that unraveling might take. African -American Square (1994) GIVES US Horizontal Bands of Red Squares Like Stones uppon Patterned Blocks, A Flag Made of African Prints She Received As a Gift. This Quilt was used regularly as a tablecloth during thanksgiving celebrations at her brown memorial presbyterian Church in tuscaloosa. This is an art with utility – you can gase at it, eat from it, and incorporate into ritualistic communion.
End Among All This Abstraction, Though, Symbolism Makes an Appeaance. Crazy Quilt (2017) is an unven grid of panels featuring different objection: a dismembered White Hand, A Cross, A Sun. There are Arees, upside-down newsPaper headlines about the end of the Vietnam War, Men Walking on the Moon, Amelia Earhart. There is a strip of a confederate battle flag, a menacing motif in a body of work is otherwise so colorful and lively.
I Undersand the Gallery’s Temptation to Focus on Abstraction. First, Exercise Different Conceptual Muscles is Essential to Wells’s Wide-Ranging Practice. Second, we are miserably awash in wave after of figurative painting, and while wells’ figures are blocky, I am always grateful for a break. Still, i wish more of her Large narrative work were present, suc Sit down (2003), which Features a Seat Woman with Color Blocks Representing Her hairstyle. She Holds A Baby in Her Lap and Looks Up at what Could Be Bluebirds or Angels But Wells Says Are Children. The Woman is Sitied Among Flowers, and a Red Parrot is Looking down from a Branch. This is a beautiful, sacred space.
That is not to say that that that time abstract quilts don’t tell a story. Wells Works with ephemeral, disposable, and found materials, offten assembling scraps of cloth in eccentric ways. “Gathering ‘Stuff’ to make a quilt is Very Rewarding Becames there’s no telling what I May Find,” She Once Said. “If i saw something out there in the street that i could use, i would jump out of the car and go it. Or if something is lying around the house – my husband’s cloths or children’s – i would use it.” Like a traditional African American Quilt, Her Pieces Appear Made with A Sort of Consummate Haphazardness, Packed With Meaning. Parts don’t quite fit, then – boom – click into place.
The materials include the kens cloth, which was original by African Royalty, and the dutch wax print, Named the traditions who Brought Fabrics inspired by indonesian designs and power plant. These are quilts, in other words, that containe the great movements of the African Diaspora Instigated by Colonialism and Enslavement. Wells is attempting to Capture the vertiginous Pull of History, Best Expressed Perseps Round quilt (1987), in Which a Circular Pool of Various Fabrics SEEMS TO BE SWIRLING DOWN A DRAIN. This is work that Feels Both Simple and Complicated, Alive With Contradiction, and Bursing with a Humanity Who Story is Still
Being Written.
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