The Art of Joan Schulze: An Appreciation
by Robert McDonald
This survey of her career, featuring full-color reproductions, essays by three distinguished artists and scholars, original poems and comprehensive chronological and bibliographical lists, is as remarkable an achievement as one of Joan Schulze's mixed-media studio works. It carries to a public, broader than ever before, visual and written information -- literary as well as critical and historical -- about an inclusive artist who composes her works using information about and impressions from life during the second half of the 2Oth century. In realizing her vision, she uses, among other means, materials as ancient as cotton, silk, linen and paper and as contemporary as plastic fabrics, lint and Velcro; she uses traditional dyes and modern acrylics; hand stitchery, machine stitchery, and phototransfer. Her antecedents range from the makers of medieval and Renaissance tapestries to anonymous farm wives to mixed-media, aleatory artist Robert Rauschenberg.
Joan Schulze responded to a vocation for art only after having already been a schoolteacher, wife and mother. Having accumulated a full treasure of experiences from which to draw her subject matter; having practiced daily the habits of economy of means, such as recycling, to maintain a home for her spouse and four children; and having acquired skill in the basic - initially domestic -- techniques that she would use to fabricate her works -- chiefly sewing - she possessed, seemingly, no more resources than those of an "ordinary housewife." In addition, she lacked formal training in art (which she acquired intermittently, however, as she discerned what additional skills and information she needed). An important difference, however, was that she had worked with children, guiding their learning while developing their self-discipline and encouraging their creativity to satisfy their needs. "Kids' liberation" -- that of her own children as well as that of her students - reinforced her appreciation for a perpetual sense of wonder, inquisitiveness, openness, experimentation, daring, impetuosity, resilience, and self-reliance combined with a wish to please and a desire to connect.
Schulze had an exceptional will to succeed in one of the most taxing of human endeavors - that of becoming a significant artist. Experimenting with innovative techniques, especially phototransfer, she has with her mentors and peers developed "quilts" into an art form for which there is still no comprehensive name.
Nevertheless, Schulze's works exist. Initially, they engage and delight viewers with their complexity and ravish them with their beauty. Then, when viewers discover their reverse sides, which ostensibly recall the simple and utilitarian origins of their form, they arouse admiration for the artist's mastery of contemporary drawing and her predilection for evoking the emotional satisfactions of tradition.
"Art quilts," "artists' quilts," "contemporary tapestries," "wall hangings," "textile art hangings," "mixed-media wall works," "textile collages" (big or small, hanging or framed): What are they? What are they for? Whatever their name might be, they are the means by which Joan Schulze realizes her personal artistic vision, pushes the definition of "work of art" beyond its former limits, fuses what previously in western society have been separate and arbitrary categories of art, experiments with visual materials as wildly as jazz musicians experiment with words and sounds. They are exciting pleasing, and yes, even comforting.