Alexander at the podium starting the discussion
Cassidey Kavathas/ The Bona Venture
BY: CASSIDEY KAVATHAS, ADVISORY EDITOR
Mary Lou Alexander had a fascination with fabric since her childhood. Growing up in Youngstown, Ohio, she often spent time in her great aunt’s house where she would play with fabric scraps.
“I became very interested in and have a lot of affection for cloth as she would have scraps lying around, and I would make costumes, dolls and things like that. So sewing, especially, became my go to way to make art,” Alexander said.
Alexander, a contemporary quilter, gave a gallery talk in the Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts at St. Bonaventure University on March 7 followed by a hands-on fabric-dyeing workshop.
Her talk featured her journey to becoming a textile artist as well as her inspirations behind her quilts.
In her early 20s, Alexander began to work on traditional quilting through a Texas star quilt for her king size bed. A traditional Texas star quilt has eight points.
“It had seven points and then the eighth point came up in the middle, so it was totally useless for a bed or for anything else,” Alexander said. “I abandoned it and decided this is too hard. I’m going to go to grad school.”
She went to graduate school at Penn State University and moved on to get a PhD in biological anthropology at Kent State University. She taught at Kent State and immersed herself as a biological anthropologist for 25 years.
Everything changed for Alexander after she took a class with Japanese textile artist Yoshiko Wada. With Wada, Alexander learned about shibori which is a technique of dyeing fabric.
“She was so inspirational that within a couple of years of taking that class, I had resigned my professorship and became a full time artist,” Alexander said.
She continued her learning with the familiarity of quilting through art-quilter Nancy Crow. Her education from Crow — specifically Crow’s use of improvisational quilting — sticks with Alexander today and has become her artistic philosophy.
“The reason I’m making the object is the process. If the object wasn’t there, in the end that would be okay. I want to immerse myself in the making,” Alexander said. “My work is the doing and not the having. It’s very craftsmanship oriented.”
Alexander’s art takes several weeks as she first dyes the fabric before cutting and sewing the piece to make a finished product. The dying and piecing the fabric back together allows for unique patterns throughout her work.
Alexander holds a deep love for the entire process but especially enjoys dyeing the fabric.
“It’s like Christmas morning. You don’t exactly know what’s gonna happen. You wrap it up and you dye it, and then you unwrap it the next day, and you hope that it’s going to be usable, but you’re never sure,” Alexander said.
She also said she finds her craftsmanship therapeutic in a sense.
“I love the composition part of it, that’s where you really get lost in it. The time just flies because you’re working so diligently to get it right. Pulling it on and off and changing. I love that part,” Alexander said. “Sewing, it’s kind of meditative.”
Alexander pulls inspiration for her colors and design from nature and her scientific background. She often uses her travel experience to jumpstart her designs.
“My husband and I were up in the Arctic. We were in a biological field station, and they have a little room at the top of the station with a clear dome ceiling, and you could lie down on cots and look up and see the aurora borealis moving across the sky. That was my inspiration,” Alexander said.
To finish her gallery talk, she recited a quote by Charles Raymond Blackman.
“Art is making a thing and trying to make a better one, and you keep doing this until you die, and that’s a pretty good life,” she said.
Alexander’s work can be seen in Kenney Gallery at the Quick Center.
kavathcj20@bonaventure.edu
