About this project

I am a quilt artist. I create quilts that draw from traditional American quilting patterns, but feature contemporary images manipulated through my training in art and architecture. Through quilting I investigate American ideas of nostalgia, function, and craft. My work has been shown in national quilt shows, as well as contemporary art galleries.

I am creating new work for an upcoming solo exhibition in New York. The show is in October and will feature twelve new works. I am requesting funding for the raw materials (thread, fabric, batting). The exhibition space and opening are being arranged through Jan Larsen Gallery. This funding for materials would allow me to fully engage with the functional nature of the medium and realize the show at the scale I envisioned.

This exhibition engages the histories of art and quilting, with figures drawn from American paintings and background motifs in traditional quilting patterns. Backgrounds for these images are constructed from used clothing (courtesy of Wearable Collections), while foreground figures are created from carefully selected gradients of quilting fabric. This process of accumulation and layering offers a transformation of the traditional method of quilting, but also resonates with the ideas banding about in contemporary discourse on resources. I want the exhibition to be an opportunity for people to reexamine the issues of comfort and waste, nostalgia and function, and art and craft.
LUKEHaynes.com

Project location: New York, NY

24

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$749

pledged of $3,300 goal

Project By

LUKE Haynes

Seattle, WA

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LUKE creates scenes, images, portraits and environments out of fabric and thread. Drawing from a tradition of meditative American portraiture, with influences ranging from Chuck Close to Kehinde Wiley, Haynes depicts the images with which we find comfort, constructed within the traditional quilting process, layering found cloth pieces, inscribed by thread. With roots in the American South, these quilts respond to American art traditions as well as the emerging culture of the contemporary craft movement. With his research into fine art, craft history and an architectural education, his work lies within the juncture between form and function, art and craft, quilt tradition and contemporary design culture.

LUKE Haynes was born in Durango, Colorado. Growing up across the Southeast, he spent time at twelve schools in seven states, which planted the seeds for a deep interest in the culture of the American South. He studied fine arts at North Carolina School for the Arts, and went on to study architecture at Cooper Union, in New York. He returned to North Carolina to work as an architect, while pursuing art on the side. But his quilts began to gain more press and generate more interest than his work in the architectural office and he chose to pursue that passion full time. He now lives and works in Seattle. His quilts are slated to be included in two upcoming publications on contemporary American quilting, and will be featured in several large scale exhibitions across the country.

1. LUKEHaynes.com