Fiber Artists Find Stories Everywhere in a New Wisconsin Exhibition

In a new show, the Racine Art Museum sets out to suggest just how many ways a fiber artist can tell a story.

The 25 works in Stitched Stories: Narrative Quilts and Textiles (on view through November 21), all from the museum’s collection, share a storytelling intention, but that’s about all they share. Employing quilting, weaving, embroidery, and even rug-hooking, a roster of international, national, and regional artists tell or suggest tales that are often far from straightforward, taking place in realms ranging from the very down-to-earth to the remote and fantastical—including the dreaming mind, the bottom of the sea, and outer space. 

“There are a number of responses you can have to Stitched Stories,” says Katelyn Mitchell, the museum’s associate curator. “At one level, storytelling is universal, and the figurative is a very straightforward way to tell a story. Some of the pieces incorporate text, which is another familiar way to convey meaning. Hopefully by seeing those approaches in context with other approaches, like decoration and abstraction, visitors can be led to think about stories in a very different way.”

A case in point is Braided River, a 2012 quilted wall hanging by Madison, Wisconsin–based Leah Evans. A narrow, winding, branching black shape makes its way across its surface—the map of a river, no doubt, but without the specificity of a map, it’s nearly abstract. The “land” it traverses is itself crisscrossed by thousands and thousands of hair-thin squiggles that suggest the mind-blowing complexity of the natural world—and, perhaps, of the stories we could tell about it.