By Mary Owen
More than three decades ago, Lura Schwarz Smith made her first art quilt for her college senior painting class final project.
“I sold it in a Sausalito gallery,” said Schwarz Smith, who earned her bachelor’s degree in art with an emphasis on painting and drawing from San Francisco State University.
Since her quilting debut, Schwarz Smith’s quilts have been recognized nationally and internationally. She was included in the “30 Distinguished Quilt Artists of the World” exhibit at the first Tokyo Dome quilt show in 2002.
Schwarz Smith is the featured artist and guest lecturer at The Oregon Garden “Stitches in Bloom” Quilt Show on Jan. 24-26. The event will feature more than 100 quilts on display, quilting demonstrations and lectures and hands-on workshops. Quilters are invited to submit quilts for display, with prizes awarded.
At her three-day workshop, “Transforming the Traditional,” for intermediate to advanced quilters, Schwarz Smith will teach quilters how to give old favorites new twists. The workshop is 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Jan. 21-23. Cost is $300.
Schwarz Smith got interested in quilting when, in the early 1960s, she helped her self-taught mother make “very bad bed quilts,” she said.
“At that time quilt shows hosted by quilt guilds were not as common as they are today,’ she said. “There were no stores that specialized in selling fabric and other materials to make quilts. Even though the traditional ‘quilting bee’ where women would get together to make bed quilts is centuries old. When I started first making art quilts, I did not have the resources that we enjoy today.”
Schwarz Smith’s first quilts were figurative, bas-relief, soft-sculptural, with minimal quilting, using lots of different fabrics such as velvets and silks.
“For years, I was selling these in galleries, having no idea of the emerging quilt world,” she said. “I explored many techniques over the nearly 40 years since making my first art quilt, photocopying my drawings onto fabric, painting and inking on fabrics, a variety of hand and machine techniques. Some things worked better than others, but all have been viable learning processes.”
Today, Schwarz Smith merges her art background with quilting techniques to create imagery in fabric in her art quilting or textile art.
“One of the newer techniques I am enjoying lately is incorporating digitally printed photo fabrics in my work,” she said. “I don’t need photographs to get imagery in my work as I love direct drawing and painting with various substances on textiles, but it is also great fun to use this digitally printed fabric, combining it with other fabrics in my stash.”
Schwarz Smith’s husband, Kerby, a professional photographer, is also an art quilter. “He began by printing photos on fabric for me to use in my art quilts, and then he began to teach quilters to print their own digital fabrics, first with me as a team-taught class, and then on his own, at very fine quilt conferences.”
The couple co-authored a book, Secrets of Digital Printing from Camera to Quilt. They were accepted to show their quilts at Quilt National, a prestigious biennial art quilt show with rigorous restrictions, including submitted work not having been show anywhere other on the entrant’s personal website. “This keeps the show a leading force in showing the latest and newest work in innovative textile art,” Schwarz Smith said, adding more than 90 percent of international entries are rejected, so their acceptance was exciting. The couple is the first husband-and-wife team in the 35 years of the show’s history. Her Quilt National 2011 piece will be one of her works displayed at the Stitches in Bloom show.
Schwarz Smith’s most-important, career-changing quilt is her “Seams a Lot Like Degas” art quilt, named one of the “100 Best American Quilts of the 20th Century.”
“It seems to be still my best-known piece, and it will also be shown at the quilt show.” she said of the 1966 winning quilt.
