Above: Quintet ©1980 68" h x 68" w

Cotton fabrics; machine-pieced & hand-quilted by the artist

The Seminole Indian-inspired patchwork that I did in the late 1970s served as a good introduction to strip-pieced design, albeit in a strictly linear-horizontal format. By the time I tired of that particular limitation, I'd begun to visualize strip-pieced patternings that worked in multiple directions across a broader surface expanse. I began playing with strip configurations cut from Canson paper and collaged in "block" arrangements whose potential for variation became immediately apparent. Two of these collages are pictured below, along with the quilt Quartet (1980) that they preceded.

In those days before rotary cutters became ubiquitous, I cut all of the strips with scissors by hand, layering perhaps three or four fabrics when that was workable. Because cotton fabric is anything but rigid or fixed and gives continually, I had to bring enormous care and concentration to sewing the strips so that they'd be as exact and consistent as possible. Matching seams so that points would be spot-on became the challenge. I usually succeeded.

The photo below shows me in my Somerset, MA, studio in 1980, ironing strips as I prepare a panel of five whose graded widths and dark-to-light values would form the basis of this series of works.

The size, value and color gradations combined with the pinwheel configurations made for high-energy effects. That was certainly the case with Rhythmetron, the third quilt in the series and arguably the standout. I appropriated the title from a ballet score composed by Marlos Nobre as a commission from Arthur Mitchell for the Dance Theater of Harlem in 1968. I'd seen a performance of the ballet Rhythmetron at the Providence Performing Arts Center, by Festival Ballet of Rhode Island, about the time I was launching into this series. The choreography's visual dazzle struck a chord, and soon after the quilt materialized.

Below: Rhythmetron ©1980 68" w x 68" h cotton; machine-pieced & hand-quilted

Installation view from my September to November 1983 ten-year retrospective exhibition Michael James: Quiltmaker at the Worcester (MA.) Craft Center, with Rhythmetron hanging at the exhibition's entrance. Photo credit: Robert M. Nash

The formal architecture of these works notwithstanding, they were fun to make, always surprising in their color juxtapositions, the pinwheels rotating within their grids in tireless clockwise or counter-clockwise motion. From the first one made in 1980 to the final one made in 1982, these works held my interest and enthusiasm largely thanks to their peripatetic and buoyant spirit, their pizzazz. I think they hold up pretty well still, some four decades later.

I priced these quilts in the early 1980s at between $1000 for the smaller ones, to $3500 for the larger pieces, roughly $3500 to $11000 in today's dollars. Those felt like fair prices at the time, and for me it was enough. It's becoming evident that on today's secondary market, prices generally haven't increased significantly, and have more typically decreased. A combination of factors is responsible, not least the dearth of serious collectors which, in hindsight, has always been a weak aspect of the non-traditional quilt domain. I hope I'll live long enough to see the market strengthen.

Two among these pieces were traded with other artists for examples of their work, and the many years of living with their creative output amounted to another kind of payment, incalculable but undeniable. One was Quintet, that I traded with the metals artist James Wallace, former director of the National Museum of Ornamental Metalwork. [In my recent memoir, Dear Judy: A Love Story Rewritten by Alzheimer's, I recount in Chapter 14 the circumstance in which I lost the much-treasured wedding band that Jim had created for me almost forty years earlier.]

The other I traded with Yvonne Porcella for a small silk "happi" representative of her work from that period. That "Happi Jacket" is now in the collection of the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, a gift I made to their collection in Yvonne's memory. Coincidentally, the quilt that I'd traded with Yvonne, Graded Polychrome Stripe #4 (shown at bottom left in the photo above), is also at the SJMQT. There's a nice kind of symmetry in their both finding their way into that collection.