Quilts and Textiles:
Alice and Vanessa McCallum
 
Quilts and Textiles
Alice and Vanessa McCallum
Reception 3-5 pm Sunday, May 17
Intricate and beautiful quilts – each telling its own story – painted silk shawls, art clothing and several mixed media pieces created by mother and daughter-in-law artists Alice and Vanessa McCallum will go on display in the exhibit, “Quilts and Textiles,” May 15.
Alice McCallum of Pine Bluff says her affair with fabric and thread, good design and fine workmanship was nurtured in her Michigan childhood. After moving to Pine Bluff in the early 1970s, McCallum turned to working with watercolors and then in the late 1980s returned to her love of fabrics. She started turning out one-of-a-kind silk dresses and scarves, dyed and decorated with the floral motifs that dominated her watercolors.
The silk clothing was a success but the business model wasn’t and, one day, in frustration, McCallum tore up a bunch of her work. The act of “tearing everything up,” she says, led her to begin using torn paper and fabric to create what she calls “ceremonial robes,” many which will be on view in this exhibit.
Alice McCallum’s works have been displayed as part a 1997 touring exhibit in Europe, “Paintings from America’s Heartland,” on the walls of the Office of David Pryor in 1996 while he was in Washington, D.C., and in the Arkansas Artists Inaugural Invitational exhibit in Washington, D.C., in 1993. She also has been exhibited at the Arts & Science Center in 2005 and 1990 and at various galleries and museums throughout the state and nation.
Vanessa McCallum, originally of Blytheville, met and married Alice and William McCallum’s son David at Hendrix College. The couple, the parents of two sons both now enrolled at Hendrix, live in Memphis.
Vanessa’s interest in patchwork and art came at an early age when, she says, on her fourth birthday she received an amber plastic sewing box. Soon drafting her own patterns, Vanessa’s first projects were hand-stitched children’s clothes. After an early childhood filled with arts and crafts projects, she enrolled in the after-school oil painting studio of Arkansas artist Samuel Norris. At Hendrix she took studio art and art history classes. In 2007, she placed second in art quilts and pieced miniatures in the Mid-South Fair in Memphis.
Vanessa says she uses quilting as an art form to celebrate milestones – birthdays, graduations and places visited, for example. “I hope future generations treasure the art as well as the family history the stitches capture.”
The exhibit will remain on display through August.
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