Alma Lesch: A Life in Fabric
the exhibition runs through March '06 at Schneider Hall on the campus of the University of Louisville in Kentucky, usa.
Mother and Child, pictured here, is on loan from the Evansville Museum of Art and Science, Evansville, IN.
This full length textile portrait, from the early group of Lesch's signature 'portraits' using vintage clothing w/embellished surface areas and densely embroidered borders, reveals hundreds of buttons on the child's dress giving the textured illusion of an Amish quilt surface delicately puckered by thousands of close hand quilted stitches evident in their 19th century textiles.... again, the linen background fuses the palette into a painterly sensibility not seen in many other artists' textile collages of the 1960s-70s when Alma Lesch developed this form we now call Portraits.
