Artist Louise Silk, a born-and-raised Pittsburgher, has created a chronicle of her life over the decades through quilting. Starting on Sunday, visitors to the John Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh’s Strip District will get the chance to see Silk through her art — and stitch themselves into the patchwork as well.

“Louise Silk: A Patchwork Life” examines Silk’s work beginning in the 1970s. Now 74, she learned about quilt-making in Ms. Magazine during its very first year of publication.

“I was a home economics teacher by profession, a very traditional person, and I got into consciousness-raising when I was in college in Philadelphia. So I was kind of rethinking my life,” she said.

Her first quilting project, “Grandmother’s Flower Garden,” is hanging in the exhibit.

The showcase is a project of the Rauh Jewish History Program & Archives — Silk is a Jewish woman who didn’t explore that side of her identity through art until the late 1980s.

“One of the things that Louise taught me as we were doing this is that there is no tradition of quilting in the Jewish community,” said Eric Lidji, director of Rauh Jewish History Program & Archives and co-curator of the exhibit, along with Emily Ruby.

But after two decades of quilting, Silk decided to change that. She had something of an epiphany. “It just hit me, what if you quilt Jewish? Nobody’s doing anything like that and maybe you’ll somehow be able to bring them together.”

So she created a diptych called “Homecoming,” which incorporates both her Jewish identity and the work that she and her family had done in Pittsburgh to help with the resettlement of Soviet Jews.

Silk had her second-ever one-person show at the Jewish Community Center in Squirrel Hill in 1994, full of work that explicitly embodied her Jewish identity and journey. “I made this quilt and then took it to the JCC and said ‘I would like to learn about Judaism and quilt it while I do it,’” she said of her work “The Prologue.”

In the wider context of Pittsburgh, this came at a time when an intersection of Judaism, feminism and art was blossoming.

There are also quilting philosophies around grief, which Silk displays in some of her work from the late 1990s and early 2000s, after she experienced a series of personal losses.

“There’s a long tradition in the quilting world of taking personally meaningful pieces of fabric and incorporating it into quilts as a way of memorializing and a way of processing the loss. Louise’s idea was to take everything from her parents and incorporate it into quilts,” Lidji said.

Silk added that she was also inspired by the AIDS Memorial Quilt, a massive community arts project to immortalize those who have passed from HIV/AIDS.

As her career progressed, Silk started to understand quilting as a process, and not a means to an end, Lidji said.

“That becomes sort of a therapeutic process as well. In recent years, there’s been a fair amount of scholarly research into the way that certain handcrafts can have therapeutic benefits, and Louise was sort of at the forefront of recognizing that through her book, ‘The Quilting Path.’”

“It is all about the process. The product is the product,” Silk said, standing in front of a quilt that contains a loose map of Pittsburgh’s South Side, where she lives and works.

In more recent years, Silk has started to examine sustainability and the idea of her own possessions in her work. This includes quilts made from T-shirts and work that even incorporated pieces of her own diaries.

“I always wanted to work in the gallery with my work, I always want to be with the public and interact with them, it’s an important part of what I like to do. … Another part of it is that I am not just doing decorative textiles. I am doing decorative textiles but it’s important to make sure that they have some kind of meaning, some kind of deeper significance. And also that the viewer has that experience in some way, of that deeper significance,” Silk said.

That is represented by “The Witness Quilt,” an already-large piece that is the only new artwork on display. But it’s more than just a quilt — it’s a community project. And it’s not finished.

“The Witness Quilt” is currently made up of more than 1,100 pieces of fabric bearing slogans and sayings that intrigued Silk. On Sunday, when the exhibit opens to the public, the artist will be on hand from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. and viewers will be able to talk with her and contribute their own patches to the work. Each time a viewer comes back to the exhibit through its run, the work will look different, as volunteer stitchers work to add the donated patches. Then, in February 2025, eight weeks before the exhibit closes, “The Witness Quilt” will begin to be dismounted and patches given away to anyone who visits.

“All of these are totally leftovers. It’s not like I cut something up to do it for this. … So maybe you have a piece of fabric that’s left over for you in some way. … People are welcome to bring that fabric and I promise you it will be used up in this quilt,” Silk said.

“I hope it’s really approachable and fun,” she said of the exhibit. “One thing I hope people see in the context of the exhibit is something they can relate to.”

This was a big goal for Silk, especially as a part of looking towards the future of her work.

“I was supposed to go on a trip for my 70th birthday to Machu Picchu with my daughter Sarah and it was canceled because of the pandemic. So I got really insular … I got kind of panicked, I was 70 years old, how much longer would I be working? What would be the effect of that? I made for myself the idea that I would make a 10-year plan,” Silk said.

“My purpose is to bring my work to a conscious completion so I feel like I did everything I wanted to do,” she added.

“Louise Silk: A Patchwork Life” will open this Sunday at the Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh’s Strip District and will remain open until April 6, 2025. To learn more, visit heinzhistorycenter.org.

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