Revelation: The Quilts of Marie “Big Mama” Roseman
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No less weird is that, for over a century, “insider” artists from Picasso to the Chicago Imagists and Basquiat have co-opted the visual markers of the transcendently deranged to give their own scribbles some reflected charismatic authority. In the past few years, a few art collectives–Dearraindrop, Royal Art Lodge, Paper Rad–have appropriated outside artists’ hallucinatory takes on pop culture. Now that these dudes have blown up, doing videos for VH1 and designing shirts for Urban Outfitters, it’s refreshing to find a show that reminds me what educated aesthetes have always liked about marginal art–a bracing, inspiring disregard for visual tradition.
“Revelation! The Quilts of Marie ‘Big Mama’ Roseman,” now on display at Intuit, gives hope for the future of fiber art. In her irregularly shaped quilts, pillows, and foot warmers, subtly combined found fabrics provide a surface for dazzling free-form embroidery: dense accretions of yarn render scattered fragments of text, meandering lines, and plant and animal images that electrify the visual cortex. A twisting storm of stitchery that corrupts every genteel standard of needlework descends onto her serene pastel patchwork landscapes. But I don’t mean to project an avant-garde fantasy of violence onto this highly contemplative artwork, whose strange and delicate gestures seem both obsessive and unconscious. The disjointed vines, shimmering birds, and starburst flowers are more like mysterious, half-finished indications of forms, forces, and flights that exceed everyday experience. The dynamic balance of joyful excess and uncentered fierceness in the work suggests a lush, blossoming meadow whose oldest, most majestic tree has been split by lightning, creating a mighty ruin in turn slowly becoming a home for a colorful variety of new life.
When: Through 9/2: Tue-Sat 11-5, Thu till 7:30
