Amish Quilt Show

For the second time in as many weeks, Cathy Curtis has attacked a show at the Laguna Art Museum. The show, “Lit From Within: Amish Quilts of Lancaster County,” is an exhibition of visually stunning quilts made by the women of Lancaster County, Pa., between 1890 and 1940 or so.

The quilts are accompanied by several black-and-white photographs of the Amish (people, architecture, landscape), simple explanatory text, and a wall of five authentic Amish dresses of the period.

In her first piece (“A ‘Cool’ Collection of Funk and Fetish,” Nov. 15), Ms. Curtis dismisses the exhibition in a few lines. The idea of showing quilts in an art museum, she says, is “no longer news from a stylistic or ethnographic point of view.” Instead, she suggests visiting the show downstairs (“Too Cool: Assemblage and Finish Fetish in Los Angeles”), calling it “a show . . . that characterizes forward-looking art of the 1960s.”

In “Better Safe Than Risk Offending” (Nov. 29), she savages the quilt exhibition (and another art show in Orange County) for playing into the hands of political conservatives who have recently won many government seats. Ms. Curtis evidently had her agenda in place before she stepped into the museum. She disdains the exhibit because it does not deal with difficult, current, urban problems.

Ms. Curtis’ main point is a fair and interesting one: that as political trends turn rightward, art exhibitions become more conservative. In her eagerness to make that point, however, she misses the essence of our exhibition. She also adopts the tactics of the very people she means to attack. Isn’t it Jesse Helms and other enemies of the NEA who politicize apolitical material, who remove objects and ideas from their original intent for their own propagandizing purposes?

We all need criticism of our efforts to improve and grow. Ms. Curtis is clearly articulate and intelligent. It is a loss to all of us that she chose to “review” “Lit From Within” for what it isn’t instead of what it is.

JULIE SILBER

Curator of “Lit From Within”

San Rafael

In response to Cathy Curtis’ article “Better Safe Than Risk Offending,” I submit that it is Ms. Curtis’ and not the Laguna Art Museum’s position that is safe. Let’s review the real risks the museum was taking when it was considering “Lit From Within: Amish Quilts of Lancaster County.”

The most obvious one, of course, is the show is composed of quilts, not paintings or sculpture or any of the other “nobler” media. Ms. Curtis’ observation that the same walls that were to display the “long-awaited, first-ever retrospective of John McLaughlin’s abstract paintings” are currently “filled with austere designs in fabric, passed down by generations of Amish women” is curiously revealing. Surely, Ms. Curtis is not suggesting that austere, geometric designs in oil on canvas by a dead male painter holds more significance for the art world than austere, geometric designs in fabric by dead Amish women. Such a conservative, old-fashioned attitude couldn’t possibly still be perpetuated by a young, highly educated writer in 1994.

Second, the quilts were made by vastly traditional, Christian women. Safe? Think again. Even Ms. Curtis knows that for an art museum, this is not a hip move. What would this show do to our risk-taking renegade image that served us so well when “Kustom Kulture” was in the building? Will our new motorhead audience feel betrayed, left in the dust?

Predictably enough, the museum is called out on this very issue. Curtis writes, “The culture that created the quilts is about as removed as possible from the urban reality of welfare, sexual freedom, Godless youth and all those other vexing signs of unruliness that harden the conservative’s heart.”

Apparently the museum is being scolded not only for not dealing with urban reality and unruliness but also for downplaying their importance. I think it is safe to say the Laguna Art Museum has been down that road and back. We’ll return now and again, but for the moment, we’re taking an alternative route . . . in a “snow-covered buggy.”

By choosing to present “Lit From Within,” the museum risked a detour from the safer, more-established museum practice of presenting “foreground history,” which glorifies and perpetuates the ideologies and values of dominant cultures and, instead, focused on what can be viewed as “background history.” Kenneth L. Ames of the New York State Museum in Albany describes the background as “the place where the rhythms of life are affirmed. Memory, connectedness and wholeness are valued. Meaningful accomplishments are made without cost to others.” (Background and foreground history are terms borrowed from radical feminist philosopher Mary Daly.)

Not surprisingly, women take a leading role in background history as the sustainers of civilizations, not the destroyers. They are the generals in the remarkably unglorious struggle to lead our daily lives. Unfortunately, the importance of this struggle has long been devalued by the agents of the foreground, among them, the press. Ms. Curtis’ article is a case in point.

The history of the Amish in America is a perfect example of a culture flourishing for centuries in the background. Dismissed as trivial and sentimental by scholars who have yet to discover they have a choice of perspectives, an examination of Amish society actually provides valuable insight into gender roles, family, work and spirituality--the foundations not of Jesse Helms’ political platform, but of everyday rural life throughout American history.

Ms. Curtis claims that because the art world is part of the real world, it is constantly being affected by political and social issues. But whose “real world” are we talking about? In a museum of American art, that answer must be as diverse as are Americans.

MARGARET ANN MAYNARD