'Textiles: Joan Schulze & Kelly Frigard' opens Feb. 16 in Luce Gallery, McWethy Hall

February 12, 2003

MOUNT VERNON — The work of two internationally recognized textile artists will be exhibited in “Textiles: Joan Schulze & Kelly Frigard” opening Sunday, Feb. 16, in the Peter Paul Luce Gallery at Cornell College’s McWethy Hall.

Gallery hours are 2 to 4 p.m. Sunday and 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday. A closing reception will be Sunday, March 16. Admission to the gallery is free.

California artist Schulze is known worldwide as a major force in the field of contemporary textile art. Her quilts and collages have used common materials such as cotton, linen, silk and paper; plastic fabrics, lint and Velcro; traditional dyes and modern acrylics; hand stitchery, machine stitchery and photo transfer.

“I look at my quilts and collages and see journal entries. I can piece together the narrative of my life. Some events loom large and keep reappearing as a subject. Then a small moment can take over and send me on a different path,” she says.

Her coffee table book, “The Art of Joan Schulze,” won honorable mention last September in the reference books category of the 9th Annual Writer’s Digest National Self-Published Book Awards. To see her work, go to www.joan-of-arts.com.

Frigard works with many traditional techniques including weaving, spinning, embroidery and felting. An assistant professor of art at McPherson College in Kansas, she has shown her work nationally and in Scandinavia.

Cornell will exhibit her installation “Metal, Stone, Bed, Heart, Felt,” which includes 12 miniature beds with embroidery surrounding cast and clay miniature human hearts. Forty miniature knitted and felted dresses and outfits with human hearts form a ring around the beds.

The installation is “inspired by the idea of the human heart as the center of emotion and experience. I want to make a connection to the way we store emotions in the body, and our western association of the heart as the physical place for the soul,” says Frigard, who earned an MFA in intermedia art from the University of Iowa.