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Some Thoughts About Art Quilts

by Robert Shaw

I am often asked me to offer thoughts about collecting, pricing, and finding a market, and to explore some of the thorny questions every artist confronts in the marketplace- how does one price work for sale and insurance, how do collectors evaluate work, etc. I'd like to open a dialogue on these and other related subjects, and I welcome input from any and all.

First, let me offer a little background on myself and my perspective. I'm best known in the art quilt world for my book The Art Quilt, and my work as curator of Quilts Inc., the producer of International Quilt Festival in Houston and Quilt Expo in Europe. I have lectured about the art quilt's history and future at the Museum of American Folk Art, the American Craft Museum (both since renamed) and a number of other venues, was a juror of the 1998 Visions and 2003 Quilt National shows, and have curated many exhibits for Quilts Inc., including "The 100 Best American Quilts of the 20th Century," shown at the 1999 International Quilt Festival, and "Art Quilts: America at the Millennium," which was shown at Quilt Expo in Strasbourg, France in April 2000. I also curated two editions of "30 Distinguieshed Quiltmakers of the World" at the Tokyo Great International Quilt Festival in Japan, and have written extensively about quilts and folk arts of all kinds.

My interest in quilts began during my years as curator at the Shelburne Museum here in Vermont where I still live. Although the quilts were actually not part of my curatorial responsibilities during my tenure at Shelburne (I worked primarily with the bird decoys and folk sculpture), I was fascinated by them and spent many hours learning about the history of quilting and quilt collecting. I also had the opportunity to meet and become friends with many quilt historians, collectors, dealers and artists, including Joyce Gross, Julie Silber, Kate Adams (who makes the best miniature quilts I know of), Penny McMorris, Shelly Zegart, and Ardis and Robert James, whose huge collection of antique and art quilts now forms the core of the International Quilt Study Center collection.

Electra Havemeyer Webb, who founded the Shelburne Museum, was one of the first prominent quilt collectors and certainly the first person to view and exhibit quilts as wall hangings rather than bedcoverings. She had hung quilts on walls in her homes since the 1930s, and so when she opened her quilt exhibit in 1957, she had her quilts mounted on racks that turned like the pages of a gigantic book. Mrs. Webb was a visionary who who began collecting handmade American objects-tobacconist figures, weathervanes, hooked rugs, hatboxes, quilts and other things we now call "folk art"-just after World War I and continued unfettered until her death in 1960. She believed these objects were worthy of serious attention at a time when most people thought they were curiosities at best. When she brought home her first cigar store Indian, her mother, who was a close friend of Mary Casatt and collected Monets, Manets, Degases and El Grecos, nearly fainted. "What have you done?" she exclaimed to her wayward teenaged daughter. "I've bought a work of art," Electra replied firmly, at which point her mother must have fairly swooned.

So from the first I looked at quilts as art too, and perhaps because I come from a family that is sewing-impaired and can barely sew a button on a shirt myself, I have always viewed quilts first as visual and historical objects-no differently than I do paintings or sculpture really. While I certainly appreciate fine craftsmanship, it is not what I see first. I am far less interested in how a piece was made or how many stitches (or brushstrokes) it has per inch than I am in whether it speaks to me or not, whether I find it beautiful, whether it is original and expressive of the mind and heart that created it.

Which leads me to the question: how does one place monetary value on something as intangible and ultimately undefinable as art? John Russell, the great art critic once said, "No amount of money is worth a great work of art," and he is, of course, correct in suggesting that great art is priceless precisely because its central meanings and accomplishments have nothing to do with money and the things it can measure.

However, art is a commodity and it can and is valued in the marketplace everyday, like any other commodity. How? Basically, by finding agreement. Value has to be mutually agreed upon or it has no meaning. Paradoxically, money, the measure by which we value art, work, and most other things, is the ultimate example of this truth. Money is a human abstraction, and only has the value that we as a society agree upon. Similarly, the standard definition used by appraisers for fair market value is the price that could be reasonably expected in the current marketplace between a willing seller and a willing buyer. This is what an artist should be seeking when setting a price on her or his work.

Why? For three important reasons. One, because you want your work to sell at a price that is mutually acceptable to you and the buyer. You want to feel like you've received adequate compensation and the buyer want s to feel confident that he has made a good investment. Two, because if, god forbid, you should need to make an insurance claim on one of you quilts, you will need to be able to justify the amount at which you have insured your work. And three, because if, heavens be praised, you or some other beneficent soul wish to donate one of your pieces to a museum, the donor will probably be asked to make their case to the IRS., which just doesn't like inflated values.

Context is probably the most important consideration in assigning value to an art object. Professional appraisal values are always based on comparisons to the performance of similar objects in the marketplace. These comparisons should be specific. Simply because you can show that another quilt sold for a large sum of money doesn't mean that yours is worth the same amount. You need to make a host of comparisons. Compare yourself with other artists. Look at training, experience, exhibition records, prizes, appearances in publications, etc., all of which can add build the confidence of potential collectors and add value and credibility to one's work.As Penny McMorris and others have pointed out, another problem facing the art quilt is the lack of what is known as a secondary market, ie collectors reselling quilts they have purchased from dealers and artists. The art quilt is a new field, no yet really a generation old, and it will take time before enough quilts have changed hands to stabilize the market by providing some long-term patterns.

I also think that quilt artists need to look beyond the all-too-often insular world of art quilts. Every quiltmaker, whether drawn to traditional or contemporary styles, should be aware of the rich and complex history of quitmaking and, even more important, of the history of studio crafts, fiber arts and folk and fine arts. If quilts are to be perceived as art, they need to show an awareness of the larger world of art, both in their pricing and the quality of their design. I would encourage everyone to spend as much time as possible going to museums and galleries, looking at art books and exhibition catalogs, taking art history and design classes, studying anything and everything about art from cave paintings to Keith Haring and beyond. These activities serve two purposes-first, they broaden your scope and the range of potential ideas and influences, and second, they help you to place your work within a a larger world, one that encompasses quilts but is not limited to or by them. Penny McMorris has advised, "Stop looking at quilts," and I couldn't agree more. Look at everything else and then go back to quilts with what you've learned. Nothing could help you and art quilts more.