Visual Systems: The Quilter's Eye ends with Hornung lecture

26 Sep 2008    

Peggy Derrick, Quilt Studies M.A. candidate, and visiting artist David Hornung

On Wednesday, September 24, painter and one-time quilt artist David Hornung, chair of the Dept. of Art & Art History at Adelphi, University in Garden City, Long Island, NY and author of "Color: A Workshop Approach" (McGraw Hill), spoke on "American Quilts and the Grammar of Two-Dimensional Design" as the closing event for the exhibition, which hung in the Eistentrager-Howard Gallery in Richards Hall since early July. Encompassing both traditional and non-traditional quilts, the show was the final thesis project of Master of Arts candidate Peggy Derrick, who served as its curator.

Hornung, who made some twenty quilts between 1980 and 1985, including "Orange Construction", which was included in the exhibition, has long advocated for the legitimacy of quilts as art forms, and has used quilts extensively in his teaching, as examples of inventive and dynamic design solutions. In his talk he showed examples of both quilts and of student work that referenced quilts or that developed out of constructive processes that mimicked the building of pieced quilts.

Installation view of "Visual Systems: The Quilter's Eye" in Richards Hall's Eisentrager-Howard Gallery, Department of Art & Art History, presentation of which was funded in part by a grant from the Nebraska Arts Council.

The exhibition in the Eistentrager-Howard gallery demonstrated that imagination and and inspiration have been part and parcel of the quiltmaker's art for several centuries, and that the vocabulary of two-dimensional design has served as a springboard for surprisingly individual and original expression in the quilt surface.