Image: Kate Deak, “Embedded” includes dry-point etching, collage, and embroidery

article by Roberta Werdinger

On Saturday, February 17, Barbara Kibbe will present a talk and gallery tour of the Grace Hudson Museum’s current exhibit, Printed & Stitched. 

The talk will be part of the Studio Art Quilt Associates (California/Nevada Regions) regional meeting, which starts at 11 a.m. and runs to 1 p.m. Kibbe’s talk will begin after members’ introductions, and all are welcome to attend the meeting. A co-curator of the exhibit, past chair of the regional exhibitions committee for Studio Art Quilt Associates (SAQA), a lawyer with extensive experience in the nonprofit arts world, and a printmaker and textile artist herself, Kibbe is well positioned to comment on and create an exhibit that presents an intriguing interplay between two artistic disciplines. 

Growing up in New York, Barbara Kibbe became interested in artmaking early, encouraged by a high school teacher. “I realized how soothing and healing artmaking could be,” she recalls. “It’s a place to engage different parts of your brain and heart.” She went on to earn a degree in art with a focus on printmaking, yet “I was always making quilts and hanging them on the walls,” exploring the two forms and synthesizing the results. She later got a law degree, moving to San Francisco in 1978 to work for Bay Area Lawyers for the Arts, as executive director for that organization and later serving other nonprofit and arts foundations. “I went from being an artist to someone who helped artists,” Kibbe, who still provides executive coaching to nonprofit and arts workers, reflects. Ten years ago, she decided “I want to be back on that path,” and re-established herself as a printmaker and painter.

Happy to be back in the studio full-time after a productive career in philanthropy, Kibbe still feels the same range of emotions as when she started out as an art student at age 22. “When making an artwork or print,” she comments, “there’s excitement, anticipation, anxiety, then resolution; then you do it all over again. 

“People say artists are problem-solvers,” she continues, “but we, the people who create the art, also create the problems we then have to solve.” This is true, but an artist’s creation of problems is not merely self-indulgent. It often presents a foray into a new way of perceiving, experiencing, and working. Artists take their respective disciplines seriously; it can often take a lifetime to master even one form. And yet, printmaking and art-quilting have long been gesturing toward each other. As the description for the exhibit states, “Printmakers often reference fiber and stitching, while textile artists/art quilters incorporate printed elements into their work. At their confluence there is pigment and pressure, woven layers, and borders sewn with fiber … Textile and print go hand in hand, and the combinations are constantly being reinvented.”

It is this confluence that Kibbe spotted and which prompted her to approach the California Society of Printmakers with a proposal for an exhibit. Together, SAQA and CSP created a curatorial team. The result was, to Kibbe’s mind, “a wonderful survey of technique.” As examples of boundary-crossing, she cites two works in the show: First, “Embedded” by Kate Deak, whom Kibbe describes as “a printmaker who really went for it.” The artwork features a balanced, yellow wash of color, which uses dry-point etching, collage, and bold embroidery stitches which extend beyond the bottom of the picture frame, creating “a whole new compositional element.” Then there’s Susan Gibson Kelly’s artwork, “Doodle,” printed fabric pieced together into a quilt collage. The result “looks like something a printmaker would make with a collagraph plate,” Kibbe comments. 

Thus, Kibbe notes, Deak’s work “was stretching from printmaking into stitching,” while Kelly’s was “was stretching from quiltmaking into printing to make her own printed fabric.” This notion of stretching may be one means of problem-solving artists use: all efforts can fail– including, Kibbe admits, some of her own artwork. Even so, she reflects, “It’s a journey. You did one thing and it may never work, but there is some aspect that will take it in a different direction.”

Printed & Stitched closes on Feb. 18, the day after Kibbe’s talk, so this is a good opportunity to walk the gallery and take a deeper dive into the artwork with one of its originators. Tickets to the event are free with Museum admission: $5 general; $12 per family; $4 for students and seniors; and always free to members, Native Americans, and standing military personnel. For more information please go to www.gracehudsonmuseum.org or call (707) 467-2836.