Made in New York City: The Business of Folk Art

The Lucinda Honstain quilt in the collection of the International Quilt Study Collection and Museum is being shown at the American Folk Art Museum in Lincoln Square in Manhattan. Made in New York City: The Business of Folk Art is up until the end of July. Museum curator (and AQSG member)  Elizabeth V. Warren  has written a catalog, available from the Museum Store.

I was pleased to see the thread that runs through the exhibit. When I began this blog a year and a half ago I commenced with a rant about all the "quilt history" we have to unlearn.

One woman: one quilt ---from pattern idea through ragbag to binding---with a little neighborly assistance in the quilting. Money was never mentioned (you didn't need money if you were thrifty enough, apparently.) No one ever shopped in a city store, sold a pattern, bought a bundle of scraps, hired someone to mark her quilt top, made up fabric kits or taught patchwork in a needlework class. Women did not work for pay, and they certainly didn't create time-honored American crafts for money.
The irony here is that Webster, McElwain, Finley, McKim and Nancy Cabot each made a living doing many of those activities.... 

Quilting demonstration at a Florida folk art festival 

Every one of those authors painted a false picture of the past by ignoring the economic and commercial aspects of women's needlework at which she herself was succeeding admirably. Plus: I wanna know: Did city dwellers ever make quilts?" 

Warren has answered my last question.

Elizabeth V. Warren

and a New York quilt

From descriptions of the show:

"The exhibition is divided into two parts. 'The Art of Business' includes paintings, quilts, sculpture, and signs that either depict or relate to businesses that operated in the five boroughs of New York during this time period.

H. Prouse Cooper's Downtown Store

'The Business of Art' encompasses works that were the products of businesses that were producing what we today call folk art: pottery, portraiture, show figures, carousel animals, weathervanes, and furniture.... 

Commercial sign

"Despite the popular belief that folk art was a rural genre, it has flourished in New York City since the eighteenth century. Many pieces associated with the heartland and considered among the core expressions of American folk art were in fact manufactured and used in New York City." 

 

"W. B. Dry Goods"

pictured in the Honstain quilt

Made in New York City: The Business of Folk Art: Up until July 28, 2019

http://www.artfixdaily.com/artwire/release/2751-made-in-new-york-city-the-business-of-folk-art

https://folkartmuseum.org/exhibitions/current/

https://folkartmuseum.org/exhibitions/made-in-new-york-city/

And a link to my rant.
https://womensworkquilts.blogspot.com/2018/01/quilts-in-economic-context-new-blog.html

The Art of High Style: Minnesota Couture 1880–1914

Fashion label

Minnesota Historical Society

Last year I had a lovely dinner with two Minneapolis curators, Linda McShannock at the Minnesota Historical Society and Nicole LaBouff at MIA (Minneapolis Institute of the Arts.) They told me about their work on the history of  Minneapolis couture---high-end dressmaking. For years Linda has been researching dressmakers in the Twin Cities. Their joint exhibit at MIA The Art of High Style: Minnesota Couture 1880–1914 is on display this summer through August 4.

https://new.artsmia.org/stories/new-exhibit-reveals-minnesotas-golden-age-of-fashion-design/

Detail of Robert Koehler's 1902 painting,

Rainy Day on Hennepin Avenue. MIA Collection.

Art and Fashion in one exhibit.

From Linda's Pinterest page

https://www.pinterest.com/lindellknits/mn-couture-women/

In an interview Linda said they knew a little about the women who bought the clothes, but even less about the women whose names are on the labels. 

Molly Malloy's Workshop in St. Paul

" 'Boyd, Malloy, Christianson. So there was a move afoot to discover who these designers were.'

Mary O'Keefe Malloy 

Minnesota Historical Society 

 "[McShannock] began looking through old city directories, which often listed people’s employers, and noted anyone who appeared to work in the garment industry around the turn of the century. For about 15 years, she deployed volunteers to track these people’s employment history, and now the picture is much clearer: Dressmaking was a major business—the second largest employer of women, below domestic service. In 1890, more than 5,000 women worked as seamstresses, dressmakers, or milliners.

Madame Roseanne Boyd of St. Paul

"The business offered immigrant women, especially, an economic ladder. Beginning as apprentices, they could advance and become more specialized, and potentially be mentored into their own shops."

"WANTED:  GIRL TO DO FIRST-CLASS EMBROIDERY 

work, steady employment. High wages. Madame Boyd"

“At the Historical Society, we have 25 of those names represented and about 100 of the dresses. In this exhibition we represent seven of those dressmakers.”

Linda's admirable database of Minnesota Dressmakers

Details of an ensemble by Julia Tomasek, 1906

Minnesota Historical Society

See the 

Minnesota Dressmakers webpage at the Minnesota Historical Society here:

http://collections.mnhs.org/dressmakers/

See Judith Jerde's article on Molly Malloy:
http://collections.mnhs.org/MNHistoryMagazine/articles/47/v47i03p093-099.pdf

Quilts for a Living: The Harness Family

Opal Harness Hatmaker

(1914-1991)

Molanie Lowe Harness's husband Jerry was killed in a coal mining accident in Briceville, Tennessee in 1919 when she was pregnant with her 14th child. Daughter Anna Opal was about five and recalled the hard times of her childhood in the Appalachia of Anderson County for interviewer John Rice Irwin in the 1980s.

Miners in Briceville, Tennessee.

Molanie had 11 sons, probably coal miners at a young age.

Molanie "depended on quilting to a great extent to feed the family." And the children all helped. Opal remembered that she started "tacking quilts, they call it tying now, when I was 7 or 8 years old. And if us girls didn't do it right, she'd make us take it out and do it again."

The quilting business included finishing quilts for others by quilting them or tying them, and making patchwork tops. 

"We'd quilt a whole quilt for $1.00 and then it raised up to $2.00. We'd get $1.00 for piecing one if they was furnishing the material. People would bring a big bag of quilt pieces and mother would piece all the quilt tops she could get out of it."

Quilts of Tennessee

The Harness family also tacked many utility quilts like this one

by Lizzie Longmire of Anderson County for their own use.

Customers visited the house. Women who'd had a top quilted "would come to pick up their quilts...then they'd see what we had, and if we had anything they wanted, then they'd buy it."

"If we got ahold of, or somebody would give us scraps of cloth, why we'd make little squares or nine diamonds or something like that. The first pattern that I really remember [Mother] doing, she called it the White Water Beauty. ...We made up a pattern we called it the Nine Diamond." 

I hear this is a Nine Diamond pattern

 "They didn't have all these patterns like that. They had the Grandmother's Flower Garden and the Lone Star, Double Wedding Ring, Bow Tie and the Nine Diamond. It was after I was married that we went into all these different patterns. Course they might've been out there but I just hadn't been nowhere to find them"

Fan quilting

Opal recalled that they quilted in fans. "I don't think we ever quilted one by the piece, like I quilt now."

Quilting by the piece, outlining each patch

Opal and Irwin estimated it took the four females in the family three days to piece and quilt a quilt for which they received $2, but at the time agricultural work paid 25 cents a day. The boys helped tack quilts but the three girls and their mother did the quilting and piecing.

Perhaps a Nine Diamond quilt by Siotha Hibbs Longmire, in Anderson County.

Quilts of Tennessee and the Quilt Index

Opal is on the cover of Irwin's book

A People and Their Quilts and you can see a string

suspending her quilting frame from the ceiling on the far left.

"We had the old-fashion swinging quilting frames that hung from the ceiling."

Opal made this quilt for John Rice Irwin in appreciation for

his support of her quiltmaking. She demonstrated quilting

at the fair in Knoxville.

The widow and her fourteen orphans had no financial assistance and survived by quiltmaking and growing most of their own food. Flour, sugar and coffee were luxuries that the quilting money paid for. Shoes were beyond their reach and Opal was only able to go to school through the fourth grade because someone gave her a pair of  "old ragged second hand...high topped shoes."

Peddler in Anderson County, Tennessee in the late 1930s.

Tennessee Virtual Archive

Opal  married Hermon Morton Hatmaker in 1934. Times were better for them. Hermon worked for the Tennessee Valley Authority, a government project during the depression of the 1930s. They had only one child. Opal made quilts to fill her time and told Irwin she'd earned $2010.08 by selling them the year he interviewed her. Opal became a spokesperson for the mountain crafts revival when a sunbonnet was a necessity for demonstrating the "lost art." 

Molanie Harness's grave. Her dates: 1880-1956. She was

39 when her husband died and raised 14 children as a single mother.

Opal and a sampler top. 

She is apparently quilting on a table, a technique she mentions doing as a child,

 with the family's only kerosene lamp sitting in the quilt's center.

Read Opal's story in John Rice Irwin's A People and Their Quilts.

Opal's grave

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/8852677/anna-opal-hatmaker