Welcome to the Machine

Early American quilts are as much about drudgery as beauty. Painstakingly stitched by hand, they required hundreds of women hours and often left their makers with sore, bleeding hands.

The first home sewing machines, marketed in America in the mid-19th century, freed women from the tyranny of the needle. But women, and a few men, continued to make beautiful things of cloth, as a wonderful show of both traditional and contemporary quilts at the Autry Museum of Western Heritage makes clear.

Called “Patterns of Progress: Quilts in the Machine Age,” the show is a celebration, above all, of the marriage of art and a technology that dramatically improved the lives of women, cutting their sewing time by as much as 75%.

As Theresa R. Gonzalez, an assistant curator at the Autry who headed the project, comments, “From hand-sewn to machine-made, the 51 quilts included in ‘Patterns of Progress’ serve as tangible, beautiful illustrations of the revolution and evolution of this form of ‘women’s work.’ The exhibition is an examination of quilts as clues to the lives of women, especially those who lived and worked in the West, and to the changes they experienced because of the invention and accessibility of the sewing machine.”

Today, when even poor women rarely sew their own clothes or linens, we can hardly imagine what a marvel a new Singer or White once was.

In her catalog for the show, guest curator Barbara Brackman captures the wonder in a letter that a young immigrant, living in New York, wrote to her father in Germany in 1859. “Dear Father, we now have a sewing machine, but you mustn’t think it’s one like Aunt Katharina had, this is completely different, it cost 110 dollars, it sews all by itself you only have to pedal.”

That same excitement is almost palpable in some of the older works in the show. One of the liveliest and loveliest is a small red-and-white quilt, called “Child’s Hands.” Amanda Elizabeth Garman made it in Kill Creek, Kan., shortly after the birth of her daughter, Bertha, in 1878. Mother carefully traced around her baby’s plump little hand and used it as the dominant motif, where a less-imaginative, less-doting mother might have used a more traditional basket or star. Then she whipped it up on her new sewing machine. Brackman notes that Garman’s quilt is always a favorite whenever it is displayed, but that people are often disappointed when they discover that it is machine-made. Indeed, according to Brackman, machine work was the stepchild of the quilting field until 1989, when Caryl Bryer Fallert’s quilt “CoronaII: The Solar Eclipse” won first prize and $10,000 at the highly competitive American Quilters’ Society show in Paducah, Ky.

Since then, Brackman notes, “the sewing machine is finally coming into its own as a tool for quilt makers.”

The new generation of computerized and electronic machines, and such recent innovations as the walking foot, are freeing the imaginations of today’s quilters as never before. Brackman points to Mabry Benson’s quilt “Oak Leaves” as the sort of work a machine can facilitate.

“Without a machine,” Brackman comments, “she might have appliqued leaves, but probably a simpler, more stylized version, and certainly far fewer. Machine applique is affecting the expressiveness of contemporary artists, reducing old limits of time and detail.”

Not all the quilters whose work is on display prefer Singers to hand-stitching. Ruth Powers used a machine to make her prize-winning floral quilt, “Vireya,” only because she was up against a contest deadline. Her preference is to work the time-honored way.

“Handwork is relaxing,” Powers says. “Machine quilting is work.”

Many of the quilts are painted as well as stitched, bright fantasies that have the haunting quality of the illustrations in the best children’s books.

Most of the contemporary quilts are highly personal. None is more so than Carol Bryer Fallert’s work, “Me and My 404 Blues.” Done in 12 shades of one color (a requirement of the 1987 contest in which it took first prize), the blue quilt includes a star motif. In each of the eight points is a portrait of Fallert, smiling above her sewing machine.

Although many of the quilts are as abstract and modern as anything on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art, others honor the past. Carolyn Mazloomi is using her sewing machine to fashion a series of quilts that pay homage to the African-American cowboys of the Old West. Her quilt in the Autry show features Nat Love, a black cattle driver better known as Deadwood Dick. Mazloomi says she uses both hand and machine techniques, whichever works better to create the desired effect.

BE THERE

Quilt show, “Patterns of Progress: Quilts in the Machine Age,” continues through Jan. 25. In connection, the Autry is holding free family workshops in which participants will make a community quilt. The museum is at 4700 Western Heritage Way, in Griffith Park, across from the L.A. Zoo. Open daily, except Monday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. $7.50 for adults, $5 for seniors and students with I.D. and $3 for children 2 through 12. (213) 667-2000.