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Contact: Kristen Levesque
(207) 329-3090
kristen@kristenlevesquepr.com
Shelburne Museum presents a Webinar and Virtual Exhibition Opening – Maria Shell: Off the Grid
Contemporary Quilts at Shelburne Museum – Tradition Meets Today
SHELBURNE, Vt. (April 6, 2022) Shelburne Museum presents a webinar and virtual exhibition opening, Maria Shell: Off the Grid, on Wednesday, April 13 at 6 p.m.
This special 75th anniversary presentation by Shelburne Museum Curator Katie Wood Kirchhoff highlights the museum’s extensive collection of decorative bedcovers and its ties to the vibrant contemporary works featured in this season’s exhibition Maria Shell: Off the Grid, opening on May 15 in newly renovated The Dana-Spencer Textile Galleries at Hat and Fragrance. Featuring 14 works by Shell created between 2011 and 2022, this special exhibition will explore the ways Shell pushes the boundaries of the traditional gridded format of the American quilt.
Hailing from Anchorage, Alaska, Maria Shell produces contemporary quilts grounded in the tradition and craft of American quilt making. She takes classical components of traditional bedcovers and manipulates them to create surprising combinations of pattern, repetition, and color. “Limiting the structure of my work to the pieced quilt has allowed me to go deep into color and print,” Shell says. “’How do I get color to vibrate? How can I stitch these elements together so that the viewer sees not only hundreds of scraps of fabric but also the sum—the whole as greater than its parts? What would happen if a traditional bed quilt ate a healthy dose of psychedelic mushrooms?’ Those are the questions I am trying to answer.”
This summer, Maria Shell: Off the Grid will be on view in The Dana-Spencer Textile Galleries at Hat and Fragrance from May 15 through October 16, 2022.
To register for this free webinar, please visit: https://shelburnemuseum.org/event/contemporary-quilts-at-shelburne-museum/
Image Caption: Maria Shell, Everything All At Once, 2019, cotton, 58 x 58 inches. Courtesy of the artist. Photography by Chris Arend.
Hi-res images available upon request.
About Shelburne Museum
Founded in 1947 by trailblazing folk art collector Electra Havemeyer Webb (1888–1960), Shelburne Museum in Shelburne, Vermont, is the largest art and history museum in northern New England and Vermont’s foremost public resource for visual art and material culture. The Museum’s 45-acre campus is comprised of 39 buildings including the Pizzagalli Center for Art and Education and Webb Gallery featuring important American paintings by Andrew Wyeth, Winslow Homer, Grandma Moses, John Singleton Copley and many more. For more information, please visit shelburnemuseum.org.
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