Above: Crazy Quilt installation at the Ackland Art Museum, 31′ x 12′ custom wallpaper print
ART& Lauren Frances Adams
21 September 2018 – 10 March 2019
ACKLAND ART MUSEUM
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
https://ackland.org/exhibition/art-lauren-frances-adams/
This wallpaper design appropriates from the historic American textile technique called crazy quilting. Quilting is a visual and conceptual framework for incorporating images of a variety of objects from the Ackland’s collection, UNC’s historical memorabilia found in the Wilson Library’s special collections, symbols of the state of North Carolina and references to state history, and my own personal keepsakes. These myriad sources converge into a crazy quilt — a metaphor for the overlapping and sometimes seemingly disjunctive influences moving back and forth between the public and private sphere in our contemporary society. A particular emphasis is placed around images from the Ackland’s collection that feature women, remixing the collection to highlight the roles of women in society, politics, labor, and in art history. Historic commemorative ribbons (memorializing the death of Lincoln or a 19th c. veterans’ gathering) are reworked into a new framing device for elevating women’s history in North Carolina and at UNC.