Kathleen Loomis
Always been a flag junkie, always will, and flags started appearing in my art during the early days of the Iraq war, when unfortunately they covered the coffins of our returning military. Many other quilts riff on the folly and the consequences of war.
My quilts aren’t all square, but website thumbnails are! Click on the photos to see what the whole quilt looks like.
86 x 100
Exhibited:
Quilt National ’09, Dairy Barn Art Center, Athens OH, and touring throughout US, Quilts Japan Prize
Permanent collection of International Quilt Museum, Lincoln NE
As of Memorial Day, May 26, 2008, there were 4,083 U.S. military dead in Iraq. Here is a flag for each of them.
Detail:
71 x 60
As a fiber artist I have long been familiar with a famous quilt owned by the Kentucky Historical Society called the “Kentucky Graveyard Quilt.” Made in the 1840s, it showed a graveyard full of coffins, each inscribed with the name of a family member who had died. Other coffins waited outside the graveyard for future bereavements. See photo below.
I updated the quilt to memorialize those of our Kentucky family who died in Iraq. This quilt was completed and dated 9/11/06, a fitting time to pause and think of the brave men and women who have been sacrificed. As of that date, 43 troops from Kentucky had died in Iraq.
Original Kentucky Graveyard Quilt:
Detail:
48 x 42
46 x 47
35 x 37
33 x 37
52 x 24
Detail:
25 x 16
My employer, Mercer, had offices in the South Tower of the World Trade Center and I spent many hours there on business in the 1990s. I loved the buildings from the outside as they reflected the sky and the skyscrapers, and from the inside as our conference room overlooked the harbor and the Statue of Liberty. Many of my closest friends and colleagues lost their workspace and possessions when the towers were destroyed, although all escaped safely. Almost 300 colleagues from a sister company, Marsh & McLennan, were not so fortunate and lost their lives in the other tower. The towers live on in my memory — losing their detail, a little frayed along the edges.
52 x 55
33 x 41
59 x 99
Exhibited:
Mid-States Craft Exhibition, Evansville Museum, Evansville IN
Detail:
98 x 54
82 x 97
Detail:
