This quilt shows another of PaMdora’s mis-adventures with technology, a deep sea exploration of the mounds of out-of-date technology piled up in the storage of our studio and the battle to stay current (no pun intended – that was truly an accident!)  It was fun to make, and details of the process are on my blog Occupied with Octopi part 1 and Occupied with Octopi part 2. The quilt just came back from the International Quilt Festival in Houston.

It is layered cotton fabrics stitched with thread 55″ x7 0″ and few handmade button to make the creature’s bug eyes. © Pam RuBert 2010

Gallery Marlin
305 W. Mill, Suite 300
Springfield, MO 65806
Opening reception – Thursday, June 16, 5-7 p.m.

Layered cotton fabrics, stitched with thread — 41″ x 59″ – Layered cotton fabrics, stitched with thread, 41″ x 59″. This quilt is traveling with Fiberart International 2010 to Memorial Art Gallery of Rochester in New York and San Francisco Museum of Craft + Design.

© 2008 Pam RuBert

This quilt is traveling as part of Fiberart International 2010. Full color catalog available here. Future venues include:
Memorial Art Gallery of Rochester, Rochester, NY – April 30 ­- July 3, 2011
San Francisco Museum of Craft + Design, San Francisco, CA – October 13, 2011 ­- January 15, 2012

Click on a thumbnail for larger detail and process photos.

Layered cotton fabrics, stitched with thread — 50″ x 65″
© 2010 Pam RuBert
This quilt was made for the International TECHstyle Art Biennial (ITAB) at the San Jose Quilts & Textiles Museum, a juried exhibition of work by artists exploring the intersection of fiber art with new technologies, to be held in conjunction with San Jose’s biennial ZERO1 Festival.

Cell towers and electrical power poles have long fascinated me, both as visual elements and their integral part of our contemporary life. Click on a thumbnail below to see larger images of the inspiration, process of making the quilt, and close-up details.

Artist statement about the quilt for the ITAB exhibition:

ITAB is a juried exhibition of work by artists exploring the intersection of fiber art with new information and communication technologies, to be held in conjunction with San Jose’s biennial ZERO1 Festival, the 2010 01 SJ Biennial, which runs from September 16-19, 2010. The exhibition includes 41 works by 28 artists from six countries—including Canada, China, Germany, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. For more information and some images from the upcoming show, check out the museum website article.

San Jose Quilts & Textiles Museum, San Jose, CA
August 17 – October 31, 2010
Opening reception is Sunday, August 22, 2-4pm

These artists were juried by a panel including:

Carole Collet – Course Director of MA Textile Futures at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design and was co-developer of Nobel Textiles, a two-year collaboration between Central Saint Martins and the Medical Research Council aimed at exploring the interface between science and design. Nobel Textiles paired five Nobel Prize winning scientists with five textile designers to test the premise that “[d]esigners fundamentally shape the way we live, while science pervades the very fabric of our lives.” Collet collaborated with John Sulston, who received a Nobel Prize in 2002 for identifying the first mutation in a gene that participates in the deliberate suicide of unwanted cells in multi-cellular animals. Their conversations resulted in Collet creating “suicidal textiles,” a collection of sustainable garden textiles and furniture that reflected the process of programmed cell death.

Steve Dietz – artistic director ZERO1: the Art and Technology Network. He is the former Curator of New Media at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis , Minnesota , where he founded the New Media Initiatives department in 1996, the online art Gallery 9 and digital art study collection. Dietz has organized and curated numerous new media art exhibitions. He speaks and writes extensively about new media, and his interviews and writings have appeared in Parkett, Artforum, Flash Art, Design Quarterly, Spectra, Salmagundi, Afterimage, Art in America, Museum News, BlackFlash, Public Art Review, Else/Where and Intelligent Agent. He has taught about curating and digital art at California College of the Arts, Carleton College , the University of Minnesota , and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

Dr. Narinder Kapany – Professor Emeritus at University of California , Santa Cruz , Dr. Kapany is acknowledged by many to be the father of fiber-optics. He has over one hundred patents related to his work in fiber-optic communications, lasers, biomedical instrumentation, solar energy and pollution monitoring. An academic and entrepreneur, Kapany has taught at the University of California, Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz, and for seven years directed the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurial Development at UCSC. In 1960, he founded Optics Technology Inc. and was Chairman of the Board, President, and Director of Research for twelve years. In 1967 the company went public with numerous corporate acquisitions and joint-ventures in the United States and abroad. In 1973, Kapany founded Kaptron Inc. and was President and CEO until 1990 when he sold the company to AMP Incorporated. A major collector of Sikh art, Kapany is also an artist. He has created forty “dynoptic” sculptures which were first displayed in a one-man show at the Exploratorium of the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco in 1972.

Matilda McQuaid – Deputy Curatorial Director and head of the Textiles Department at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York City . Among the many exhibits she has curated, Extreme Textiles: Designing for High Performance (2005) was the first major museum exhibit to investigate innovation in technical textiles. The exhibit showcased textile products that have revolutionized the fields of aerospace, apparel, architecture, the environment, medicine and transportation. Previously Associate Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art , she curated the groundbreaking Visions and Utopias: Architectural Drawings from the Museum of Modern Art (2003). Surveying early modern masters such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, and Mies van der Rohe, as well as contemporary practitioners like Frank O. Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, and Daniel Libeskind, this show explored how the digital revolution has transformed the practice of architecture and of architectural drawing as a form of artistic expression.

Pam Kanagawa RuBert & Annie Helmericks-Louder
August 27-October 14, 2010
opening reception: Friday, August 27, 4-6 p.m.
Stephens College – Davis Art Gallery
Corner of Walnut & Ripley
Columbia, MO 65215

my quilts installed on Davis Gallery wall

textile art by Annie Helmericks-Louder

small visitor viewing Fresh!

© 2006 Pam RuBert
Layered cotton fabrics, stitched with thread — 57″ x 85″
Shown at the Springfield Art Museum and won a 2nd place prize at the 2007 International Quilt Festival in Houston.

One day my husband said, “have you noticed how carrying a phone around everywhere seems to make people babble about trivial things they are doing?” And so inspired this quilt. Some detail photos below, click thumbnail to larger image…

Drawing with pens

I’ve always liked telling stories, now I make them in my art. I usually start with lines and do a lot of quick sketches using different approaches, different perspectives, different people. There are so many different ways to portray things — have to think about what to include in the story, what to leave for the viewer to figure out on their own.

Wish You Were Hair

Another drawing for my new series, Wish You Were Hair. I don’t know why, but I’ve always had a fascination with monuments of the world — written about them in my term papers, constructed clay monuments in ceramics, traveled to see them in person.

Now these world monuments are starting to appear in my quilts. They have mysteriously collided with my interest in hair stylists and the results have crash-landed in my studio. I’ve been doodling ideas throughout the summer and am trying to preserve the spontaneity of the original sketches as I convert them to fabric.

© 2005 Pam RuBert
Layered cotton fabrics, stitched with thread — 36″ x 58″
I love cute little vintage purses, but there’s never enough room for everything. This quilt was shown as part of the Fiberart International 2007 exhibition.

© 2006 Pam RuBert
Layered cotton fabrics, stitched with thread — 53″ x 72″
This quilt was shown at Grounds for Sculpture and Modern Materials: The Art of the Quilt.