Chevron Stitch and another review!

(Click on image to enlarge.)

I can't believe it but I'm already behind on my TAST challenge....but I'm about to catch up! Here's the Chevron Stitch. I really liked this one and am planning to use it on Crazy Blues.

Also, the Greenville News included another review of the three solo shows in Pickens. I'm only posting the portion about Blues Chapel:

Works by three women grace Pickens Museum

By Ann Hicks • ARTS WRITER • July 13, 2008, The Greenville News

It was happenstance, says director Allen Coleman at the Pickens County Museum of Art and History, that brought together the museum's current exhibition of works by Victoria Blaker, Glenda Guion and Susan Lenz.

He picked three artists, he says, whose works are very different but also complementary.

Ladies get the blues

Lenz, a Columbia-based fiber artist, belongs to a 13-member group that exhibits at a gallery on Lady Street twice a year along a related theme.

Two years ago, it was "the blues," she says, but not necessarily about blues music.

Nevertheless, that's where Lenz ended up with her installation, "Blues Chapel."

Shortly after the "blues" theme was picked, she happened to visit the nation's capital and its National Museum of Women in the Arts. There, she viewed photographs of early female blues singers. Recorded music and brief biographical texts accompanied the photographs, and by the time she got through the show, she says, she "got" what the blues were all about.

"These were ladies who worked and lived in hard times. They were primarily black, living in the segregated South, and culturally, as women, they were second-class citizens."

Included among her blues heroines are Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Ruth Brown, Sarah Vaughn, Anita O'Day and Koko Taylor.

Lenz's installation honors 24 vocalists depicted as martyred saints with halos. The mixed media group, framed in a traditional block pattern quilt, is heavily ornamented with embroidery, lace, beads, buttons, costume jewelry, paint, paper collage and hand-gilded gold.

To create the "chapel feel" and elevate the religious theme further, the artwork is complemented by music, candles, drapery, church pews and a floral altar where viewers are invited to pay their respects.