Taken from A Patchwork Life: The Hands-On Guide To Living by Louise Silk

Available as an ebook: A Patchwork Life: The Hands-On Guide To Living 

When I proposed this exhibition to the JCC on September 21,1992, I had two goals. I wanted to explore the interactive quality of art quilts, my artistic medium for over 20 years. Also, I wanted to learn enough about being Jewish to portray it visually. My larger objective was to combine my vocation as a quiltmaker with my avocation as an active member of the Jewish community. Louise Silk; Artist Statement; Feb. 2, 1994

While my parents had little interest in religion, I was attracted. I enrolled in the afterschool program at the College of Jewish Studies and took a high school English elective on the Hebrew Bible as literature. My father often told me that I would make a good Rebbitzin (Rabbi’s wife). Along with the thinking of the times, the idea of a girl becoming a Rabbi was beyond our grasp.

Years later, a synchronicity of events began with the opportunity for an adult Bat Mitzvah. I joined a group of women at my childhood synagogue learning to chant torah and haftorah and stood before the congregation as a religious adult. Having no understanding of Jewish practice (like how the calendar revolved around the moon or why people stood during a service), learning as an adult allowed for critical thinking and understanding that heightened the religion’s meaning for me.

Building on my knowledge base as an adult Bat Mitzvah, taking advantage of the large window I had to prepare an exhibition, I created a curriculum of books, classes, and private study all with the goal of building a body of quilts about being Jewish.

Some pieces developed easily: Six Days We Create, a quilted microcosm of the active involvement of humans in creation, was a book where the viewer could co-create by turning the pages. With Knowledge, Comes Faith, a stamped collection of truisms was a satisfying way to catalog all of the revealed noteworthy facts that I found enlightening or stuck a cord of agreement with me. 

Others were particularly challenging: For The Prayer Project, I wanted to create an organized aesthetic experience for the viewer to participate in group prayer, as compared to the haphazard way it occurs at the Western Wall. For Bring About Olam Ha Ba–The World To Come, I wanted a view of a perfected world where each individual could agree to participate by taking a ribbon stamped: I join in our task to create WORLD PERFECTION.

On a trip to Israel, I met an orthodox rabbi who challenged me to search for the things in the religion that worked for me, rather than criticize all that I found unpalatable. In doing that, I agreed to study with him. 

It was frustrating. He would explain an orthodox practice. I left uncertain and scrutinized what I had heard, uncovering some fallacy, mostly based on a negating view of women. I returned with a challenge. He would suggest additional justifications that continued to make no sense.

I became so angry with this orthodox view of women that I thought about making an artistic statement by erecting a mechitzah, the partition that separates women from men in the synagogue, in the gallery and throwing blood on it.

This action being unrealistic, I labored my way through to something positive: Men create a separation to exclude women. I will create my own separation to exclude men. Women have a spiritual nature that is legitimate and respected. I will make a space for women to explore their true spiritual nature. I will make a tent, an enclosed space for women that excludes men.

I purchased a support structure. I designed the outside with visual images of women’s souls. The inside was a serene quilted landscape, with music, pillows, and writing materials. It took the entire summer to complete the construction, all the while, releasing my anger into the foot pedal of my sewing machine.

Further into my study, I saw an ad in our Jewish newspaper for the formation of a women’s Rosh Hodesh group. Rosh Hodesh is the celebration of the new moon, traditionally a woman’s holiday. Each month, thereafter, I joined feminist contemporaries for Hebrew celebrations of the new moon. We created rituals, studied innovative interpretations of texts, expanded holiday applications and developed Jewish meditative practices.

One of the participants was a young female Rabbi. To decide on a meaningful opening, beyond wine and cheese, I consulted with her. She listened to my process and told me it sounded like I was trying to find my voice. There was a term in Judaism, Kol Isha– women’s voice. It was mostly a negative term. Men should not hear women speak for fear it might incite them sexually.

My assignment was to make Kol Isha positive. Starting with the Hebrew Bible and going through herstory, I located statements spoken by Jewish women. I asked 36 women, the number of righteous individuals on earth at any time, to participate. Each read a different woman’s words standing in the gallery at a pre-designated place so that their bodies formed the letters representing the word VOICE. I became the dot on the I, my mid-life point. Being 43 at the time, content to live until 86, I titled it my Mid-life Ritual.

Taken from A Patchwork Life: The Hands-On Guide To Living by Louise Silk

Available as an ebook: A Patchwork Life: The Hands-On Guide To Living 

Quilt making generally regarded as an American form, most European-born women learned the skill here. Jews tended to congregate in large cities, associating almost exclusively with other Jews. For most, quiltmaking was an invisible, alien craft. How did Katie come to make quilts, when so many other Jewish grandmothers did not? Could the difference be the result of her assimilation with her “American” neighbors?

Julie Silber; A Family Story in Cloth

Pretty much from the beginning, I understood that quilters were not Jewish, and Jews did not quilt. Because it was rare to find a Jew among my quilting contemporaries, I made the faulty assumption that Jewish women by nature did not have the patience for quilting. In some crazy unknown way, I was the exception.

With this rationale, it made sense to me to keep my Jewish life as a volunteer and my work as a fiber artist, completely separate. There were many examples of this, like that I steered clear of a beautiful gallery at the Jewish Community Center as too Jewish, and assumed Jewish women enrolled in my class would not be able to master the craft.

On the odd occasion I met a Jewish woman who told me there were quilts in her family, I quickly discovered that either she was a convert with a non-Jewish mother, or her mother had grown up in a very small town, isolated from the larger urban Jewish community. 

Some years later, an article by a curator explained that American Jews, like other ethnic groups, lived together in shtetl-like communities practicing the needlework popular in their countries of origin. For European Jews, it was embroidery, cross stitch, knitting, and crocheting. It is not until we get to be assimilated in American culture, that we become exposed to and then involved in the American craft form of quilting. 

This new understanding of the confluence of being both Jewish and a quilter, influenced my quest to find a new and innovative quilting subject. I was the head volunteer for the local resettlement of Soviet Jews. Pittsburgh settled 540 individuals as a part of our participation with the international community. To organize this, I attended regular meetings. Driving home after a meeting, I had an ah-ha moment: the thought that infusing my quilts with some kind of Jewishness, might somehow forward my work.

The first piece was a small applique diptych about the Russians. On the left, the Russians standing in a long line wearing drab browns. On the right, they danced the hora in bright pastel colors. The second was a curtain, representing the fall of the Berlin wall, with patchwork words like freedom and perestroika.

Following those, I made a piece envisioning my authentic Jewish self. I shared the quilt with the JCC gallery director and agreed to an exhibition 2½ years ahead in February 1994. The idea was to develop my personal individual Jewish identity and practice through the process of making the quilts.

Taken from A Patchwork Life: The Hands-On Guide To Living by Louise Silk

Available as an ebook: A Patchwork Life: The Hands-On Guide To Living 

…feelings like disappointment, embarrassment, irritation, resentment, anger, jealousy, and fear, instead of being bad news, are actually very clear moments that teach us where it is that we’re holding back. They teach us to perk up and lean in when we feel we’d rather collapse and back away. They’re like messengers that show us, with terrifying clarity, exactly where we’re stuck. This very moment is the perfect teacher, and, lucky for us, it’s with us wherever we are.

 Pema Chödrön

I am the descendent of a particularly action-oriented mother and a singularly open-hearted father, neither of whom expressed their feelings. I wrote a three-volume set, Threads, about their lives to help me resolve life-long unexpressed emotions that had affected my physical well-being. It worked. I created a written legacy for my children and resolved a host of inherited family difficulties that had heretofore harmfully impacted my life. The process helped me to accept my life as it is, with much less judgement.

Writing A Patchwork Life is the next step to acknowledge and appreciate the emotional and spiritual underpinnings that have driven my life-long passionate participation in an art quilt movement.

Over the years, I have produced a mountain range of patchwork quilts. Creating patchwork requires such skills as discernment, vision, organization, determination, practice, patience, and compromise.

Using patchwork as a metaphor for the piecing together of other aspects of life: making dinner, organizing a ritual, having a conversation, writing a blog, making a book, requires the identical skills of combining seemingly disparate things into an aesthetic meaningful whole. My quilt experiences culminate here as a display of my particular capacity to piece together just about anything.