Aunt Gin

Are you Single?

The first series in conversation with the past began nine years ago.

A few months after I retired I went to an art quilt conference where I scheduled a meeting with a mentor. I presented a group of 7 pieces I had completed over the course of a few years while still working. She told me that my portfolio of work lacked a clear focus and encouraged me to create a group of 10 compositions that shared common easily recognizable elements. It could be color, size, genre, or process. 

I headed home to my studio ready to abandon almost everything I was doing in my previous studio practice.  One element remained; incorporating a photographic image in my work. 

My love of photographers and their ability to capture a moment in time that told a particular story began in art school. My favorite courses included World History of Photography, A History of Women Photographers, and The Cultural History of Photography. In those courses, I learned to appreciate how the  camera  in an artist's hands creates an image that goes far beyond simple documentation.

After the conference I began my first series focused on portraits.  I used  a collection of family photographs taken in Los Angeles between the depression and the early 1960’s by my Dad’s brother. Starting with these often small, sometimes damaged, printed images, and Photoshop; I taught myself to format them for commercial printing by the yard. The service created a large base portrait in grayscale.

I learned quickly that custom printing on fabric had drawbacks. First, these vintage images printed in black and white were lacking focus; literally blurry. As a composition they lacked any visual impact.  As luck would have it, the beauty of these “impediments” lead me to finding a unique process and discovering the importance of finding my own voice. 

So I began by painting over the figure and painting in the background. I used anything I had in my studio that was water soluble and could be thinned enough to be stitched. I did this not knowing the agreed upon standards in the quilt world. I was diving into a new community and taking with me the background in fine arts. Very quickly I understood I was a unicorn in this world.

One of the first portraits I made was my mentor in the world of not being like everyone else; Aunt Gin.

 

Aunt Virginia was born in 1901. Her mother took her to school a few weeks before her 6th birthday and was told by the Principal “she would have to come back next year when her daughter was 6.” Virginia’s mother had gone to college and had taught school for a short period of time. She was also determined.

My grandmother brought Virginia back to the same school four weeks later after she had taught Virginia to read. Virginia would go on to skip two grades, graduate by 16 and get a full scholarship to Stanford University. There she graduated in three years with Summa Cum Lauder in English and History. Like her mother, she was a very intellegent woman.

What happens to smart women? Why are they more likely to be socially isolated? The answer has been changing, but at the time a woman like Virginia entered the workforce and during the course of much of her career women had assigned roles. Wife. Mother. Secretary. Nurse. Teacher.

As I began painting, I decided to paint this very intelligent and powerful woman in pink! At the time I wasn’t completely aware of the obvious connection to that gendered color and limitations Virginia had to face .

Aunt Gin never married because she wouldn’t be allowed to be both a wife and have a paying job. She needed that paying job. A few years after getting her first teaching position she was contributed most of her salary (along with her siblings and father) to pay off substantial medical debts accrued after the loss of her mother and sister within a year of each other.  

There has been a long history systemic discrimination of married women in the workforce. In a record of a school board meeting in 1933, on the last typed line, the board voted unanimously that a teacher who married would be breaking their contract. Only nine states had laws banning married women from working  prior to the Great Depression. By 1940, 26 states restricted married women from working. At a time of high unemployment women became scapegoats.

When Virginia retired she was a top level administrator in the Los Angeles County School system and a nationally recognized expert in adult literacy. She wrote textbooks, traveled widely, taught at the university level, and served on several boards including the  National Association of Teachers of English. 

Did she miss out on not getting married? I don’t think so; but she missed out on having the choice to do both.