Baltimore Sonnets

I'm truly enjoying creating new books for my series Love Sonnets from Shakespeare to Baltimore. Each day I wake up to a pile of unfinished pages on my table.  Some days I silkscreen the fabrics.  Some days, I sew the pages together.  Some days, I carve linocuts and print them on the pages. Each day there is something to do.   Yes, life is like a sonnet, we weave our way through difficult verses and stanzas.  Then, when we think we know the ending, there is a volta, a dramatic turn that changes everything.  

Research at the Maryland Center for Culture and History We've been spending our days researching the history of Baltimore Album quilts.  We've been visiting the Maryland Center for Culture and History and looking at their collection of quilts.   Made in Baltimore, their quilts date back to the mid-1800s.  They are so beautiful in person -- photographs don't do them justice.

This morning I read this post on Women in the Arts IG account about one of my books: In celebration of National Library Week, Women in the Arts will be highlighting some of the people, work, and resources from NMWA's Library & Research Center (LRC).  First up, here's a look back at the LRC exhibition " DMV Color " with artist's book by Suzanne Coley. All I Have (2018) is part of a larger project inspired by African textiles that Coley received from the Warren M. Robbins Library (Smithsonian Institute Libraries) at the National Museum of African Art.  In All I Have , Coley gives voice to a woman's painful mourning of a son who drowned while crossing the Mediterranean Sea from North Africa in hopes of a better life in Europe. Happy National Library Week!