Gerrie and I drove down to Coos Bay, Oregon yesterday to attend the opening reception for two art quilt exhibits at the Coos Art Museum. Coos Bay is on the Central Oregon coast and is a less charming town than many coastal towns. More of a working class town that smells of sawdust and fish, it nevertheless, has a wonderful little art museum housed in an Art Deco building that was once a Federal building. For whatever reasons, they have hosted some of the best art/quilt/fiber exhibits of the past few years.
The current big show is called "Speaking in Cloth: 6 Voices". You can see some examples of the work on their web site and read more about it on Gerrie's blog. I will be talking more about it later.
The other show is "Fine Focus" which is a show of small format art quilts. I have a piece in this show, so I was looking forward to seeing it in the context of the entire exhibit. This show has been traveling and will continue to travel for nearly another year. The Coos Bay venue is the only West Coast venue for the show. It will go from there to the Quilt Festival in Chicago and then to a gallery in Old Forge, New York. I was very pleased with how the show looked. There is some wonderful work in this show and I am proud to be a part of it. The Coos Art Museum did a wonderful job of showing it and I really loved that they placed my "Rice Bowl and Bird" at the far end of the long narrow gallery against a brick wall. My only slight disappointment was that when my piece was mounted on the cream colored backer, the bottom right corner was slightly scrunched, which you can see in the photo. Otherwise it looked really good. Good lighting makes a big difference!
one of my favorite smells in Coos Bay/North Bend is the eye-watering smell of the chip piles. Banians consider themselves South Coast. It's probably so much less charming because it refuses to die as a working port, where so many other coastal towns have rolled over to the tourists.
ReplyDeleteYour piece looks great against the brick, Terry. I'm glad to see the museum has better lighting this year. Looking forward to more reports about the exhibit.
ReplyDeleteAs you can tell, I'm back among the living again and binding or at least zigzagging the edges of quilts so I can take them with me tomorrow evening.
June
Hi...I moved to Coos Bay about a month ago, and one of the reasons I like it so much is because it doesn't have the stereotypical tourist "charm"; this town just seems more "real" and fits right in the style of Life I lived up in North Idaho. Coos Bay is a real 'sleeper'; there's plenty of charm, but as in all things good, you've gotta look for it.
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