Detail Shot #1

Detail Shot #2

This item is pretty much what the title implies: one of those everyday, functional items that anthropologists collect when searching for the essence of life and culture in a particular place and time. I made this quilted cover specifically for the "Refrigerator Wardrobes" show, but I tend to make household objects like this anyway. And my work, even if idiosyncratic, emerges from a particular local context, reflects a particular time and place. I live in the southwest corner of Berkeley, CA, a ten-minute walk from the cities of Oakland and Emeryville, a 45-minute walk from the university, and a half-hour ride by bus from San Francisco. I live one block from a check-cashing service, one block from a tattoo shop, one block from the Kala printmaking school and art gallery, one block from the Vital Vittles whole foods bakery, and one block from two bus stops that also serve, intermittently, as prostitution pickup points. I'm also two blocks from Tippett Studio, a company of model makers and computer wizards who produce 3D special effects for movies and seem to have much expanded the local market for expresso. The neighbor behind me keeps three hens and a gorgeous rooster. The neighbor next to him is the sort who complains about roosters. We are, in short, a mixed lot.

The area is densely packed with artists, many of whom bought property before it got expensive. It's also full of small commercial/industrial buildings, some still housing light-industrial operations, some converted to antique or specialty shops, to offices or living space. Students, retired people, old hippies, younger professionals with or without children, Vietnam-era vets who camp out, share resources, and panhandle from the traffic divider strip - we've got quite a demographic range within a few blocks. I see all this as I walk around. Which I do often, since I don't own a car (not knowing how to drive and not, in any case, having a car-owning level of income.) So how does my location, the cluster of sights and people around here, make its way into the refrigerator door quilt? Partly in an unconscious way, through my eyes and sensibility. Partly through the materials, all of which came from nearby. Partly though some residue of the old hippie and political subcultures here, which tend to agree on the matter of recycling. Even the materials that aren't recycled - the beads, sequins, and the unbleached muslin - come from around here and carry a bit of associated history. The 99-cent-a-yard muslin comes from the discount fabric store that recently moved into the location vacated by Straw Into Gold (www.straw.com). Once a retail business, now wholesale only, Straw was veritable fiber-arts institution: a seller of yarns and books, a site of classes for weavers, a mecca, during its 30 years of retail existence, for spinners, dyers, weavers, knitters, and artists of all kinds. The beads and sequins come from San Francisco, from General Bead (www.genbead.com) - another decades-old unique enterprise - which has, amazingly, survived in its downtown alley location through all the dotcom boom and bust.

Enough then on the materials. It's clear by now, I guess, that they all mean a little bit more than so many threads in such-and-such color. (And they are, by the way, nearly all over-painted with thin washes of acrylyc color - my way of fine-tuning things.) Time to talk about matters of design. Which also turn out to depend a lot on the local context.

It's obvious, I guess, that this piece owes a huge debt to the textile traditions of Africa and and of Africans-in-the-diaspora. Kente cloth from Ghana, patchwork capes from the Suriname rain forest, the strip-pieced quilts of artists like Arbie Williams - all these influences are there right on the surface. What's less obvious, maybe, is the influence of a certain kind of urban environment. I've spent a lifetime working, walking, and taking public transit, haunting the bookstores, museums, and libraries, in places with a rich ethnic and cultural mix, a mix that includes a large portion of African Americans. I'm a white woman with no hereditary claim on African inventions or traditions, but I feel that this African heritage has seeped into me anyway. That the speech and music and style and aesthetic preferences of all the people around me have installed themselves somewhere in half-conscious parts of my mind. With the result that, when I go to make a refrigerator door cover, it comes out looking surprisingly African.

That's a little bit of what this quilt's about. And, of course, it's about my absurdly small refrigerator, which is itself a reflection of an effort to save energy - a touch of seventies-era Berkeley-influenced politics. Finally - this statement is way too long - the muslin patches get their patterning from some rubber stamps promoting quiltpictures.com, a website I conceived back at the dawn of the dotcom era. I thought up the domain name while walking around San Francisco after volunteering there at the Software Developers Conference. So even the dotcommers made it into the quilt.

Now if I can just find an anthropologist to take an interest in all of this....

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