Is Fiber Art A Good Fit For Art In Public Places

     It's common to see sculptures in parks and on street corners, but have you ever seen fiber art in those places? My town, DeLand, has just installed art onto electric boxes in our downtown and one of my pieces was chosen. They reproduced it onto vinyl and then shrink-wrapped it onto the electric box.

Me and my art.

It's in front of a beautiful mural.

Back side

They even did the top

Two by my friend, Bobbi Baugh

My friend, Bobbi Baugh, has several of the boxes covered with her fabric art, too. So, yes, fiber art can be installed outside into a semi-permanent place. These will remain until they are no longer attractive due to weather or other problems. What fun! I'm linking this to Off The Wall Friday where you can find other art quilt blogs. Please make comments on the artists' posts to let them know you stopped by. Thanks for visiting.

Sharing Art About Town

     I'm in the process of hand quilting these days and taking apart a marionette that I bought in Burma in 1984 to redo her clothes that have slowly disintegrated over the years. I thought it wouldn't be too interesting to show those photos of the puppet redo in the blog, so I decided to take a few photos of art in my town instead and share those with you instead. Our town, DeLand, Florida, has become quite a mecca for sculpture and murals. Here are two of my favorites which are both located in in Chess Park.

A Conversation Over Chess in 1929
by Jill Cannady

This mural was painted by Jill Cannady from her imagination and I love how she captured the lights and shadows and the movements and expressions of the people. Sitting in front of it is a lovely bronze sculpture.

Peace by Joan Baliker

We have sculptures installed all over town but they only stay a year or two and then are replaced by new ones. There is an artist reception to celebrate the installation of the new ones followed by a sculpture walk around the town to introduce them. Peace, however, was so popular, that a movement germinated to purchase her and it succeeded. So she is now a permanent part of DeLand. 

     And here is how my stitching is progressing on The Puppeteer. I decided to do some echo quilting in the top right section in a thread the same color as the background.

partially quilted

It's difficult to see from the photo, but the quilting is helping the layers to lay flat. Since I used scrim for the background fabric and it has so much texture, the quilting stitches don't add much texture, themselves, like quilting usually does so the quilting won't be much of a feature. It will serve mostly for structure in this piece.

     I'm linking this to Off The Wall Friday where you can find other art quilt blogs. Please make comments on their posts so that the artists know you stopped by. Thanks for visiting.