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Featured Book... Women of Taste "Both quilt artists and chefs select fine ingredients from all over the world and mix them up with inspiration, new ideas, and time-honored recipes, techniques, and materials .... roll up your sleeves, get splattered, get trained, work hard, resist fads, share what you know, be nice, help others and enjoy life. - Julia Child, from the introduction The innovative Women of Taste invitational quilt project matched 51 women quit artists with 51 prominent women chefs and culinary entrepreneurs. The pairings collaborated in creating 50 contemporary art quilts based on personal and professional ideas about food, family and careers. The results are dynamic and as varied as the talents of the women involved. The key word at work is "Sensory." Flipping through the pages, your eyes are taken on a tour of the senses: color, texture and motion in the service of one of the fundamental human activities...preparing and sharing food. The quilts produced range from the representational (lunchtime at a deli, cooks busy chopping and sauteing, a nicoise salad) to more ethereal manifestations of our feelings of women and food (a daydreaming woman, the allure of a certain region [Sonoma] and an abstraction of a white chocolate creme' brulee'!). Each quilt is accompanied by the quilter's thoughts on the process of meeting their "other" and the insights and strategies they have brought to this project. The lovely color reproductions include detailed insets and the layout is bold and inviting. More than the sum of its parts, the collaboration sets its eyes and minds to something even more important than the delights already discussed. Cooking and sewing, once dismissed as "women's work," are here celebrated as a means of women's empowerment and self -realization. These themes are manifest in the co-sponsor of the project, Girls Incorporated. Girls Incorporated, a national nonprofit organization, offers innovative programs designed to help girls grow into responsible, economically independent women. The quilts produced for this collaboration were displayed by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service at numerous venues throughout the United States over a two-year period, beginning in September 1999. To find out more about the Girls Incorporated, visit them at www.girlsinc.org. Women of Taste A few of the pairings of Quilters and Chefs: |
