Conley Publishing - Special Sections
Issue link: https://www.ifoldsflip.com/i/121304
Meet MOWA exhibitor By Dan Muckelbauer Daily News Staff Her early creativity found an outlet in poetry, but she's let her art do the communicating since then. From a 30-foot fiberglass dragon clinging to Milwaukee's historic water tower in 1985 to the portrait of a Bangladesh textile worker composed of 30,000 clothing labels in 2005 and beyond, Terese Agnew's cemented a national name for herself — that includes a quilt in the Smithsonian — in the art world. Her way with words expressing social-political views still finds an outlet in her titles. Take the quilt "The DOT Straightens Things Out" in which a woodsy view is framed by lanes of roadway complete with vehicles forming the panes. "What do you mean 'the DOT straightens things out'?" she asked rhetorically. This story came from her almost daily walks through the St. Francis Woods south of Milwaukee and the Department of Transportation's plan to extend Howard Avenue through it. It's a very Wisconsin poke at the DOT born from her childhood experience of seeing the open spaces where she played in Greenfield Terese Agnew paved and otherwise developed. She expresses her point of view through highly developed and meticulous skills in each thread with a twist of humor as seen in the St. Francis Woods scene the Milwaukee Art Museum obtained. "I spent two years cutting out leaves and grass and sewing them on. This is pretty fast compared to what it takes to make a real forest," said Agnew by phone from her southwestern Wisconsin home. She walks the green walk on the other side of the state from where she spent her first 47 years. "I'm so proud of that," she said of her completely carbon-neutral house where she lives with her husband and teen son. "I've gone kind of underground." The art community still beats a path to her door. The "DOT" piece will hang in the Museum of Wisconsin Art in West Bend when it opens its new building on April 5 for almost three months. Why get Agnew for one of the inaugural displays? "She takes quilt working — known for functional, decorative, time-honored patterns — to a 14 • Museum of Wisconsin Art • News Graphic & Daily News • March 2013 whole other level," Graeme Reid, MOWA's Director of Collections & Exhibitions, said. "To do something that complex with that imagination and that concept, she is just so talented." "From a technical point of view you say, 'How does she do that?'" With patience perhaps? "Patience equals audiobooks," Agnew said, showing her wry side. "Can I put in a plug for public radio and audiobooks? My brain is challenged all day." Her concept for "Portrait of a Textile Worker"came from listening to a Kathleen Dunn interview about garment workers on public radio. Couple that with the appearance of three Nicaraguan textile workers at the University of WisconsinMilwaukee, six blocks from Agnew's home at the time. Agnew based the woman on photographer Charles Kernaghan's image of a textile worker in Bangladesh. The idea to use clothing labels as the material came while shopping in a department store a year after the program at UWM. "I saw labels like Calvin Klein, Gloria Vanderbilt, the designers. It's their name, but it's these nameless, faceless people who are making it." She used her skills and patience to make the shades and lines that appear to be drawn, so continuous do they look. When you think of the jump from a sculptor working on a huge scale to honing her quilting ability, it's not like a painter switching from acrylic to oil. As Reid said, "It's radically different." Working with quilts since 1990 to stay warm in a drafty building, she made a conscious move to focus on them, finishing her last public sculpture in 2002. "Intuitively I knew when I started making quilts it had so much potential. It's old and it's about grandmothers and it's about layering. It has so much to it that can be explored in about 25 million different ways," Agnew said. While the attention she received with "The Dragon Project" a year after art school at UWM could have spoiled her and perhaps kept her locked in public sculptures, she used it as a healthy fuel for her creative mind. "I thought this isn't going to be interesting unless it's something else, like how art is a form of communication that affects people's cultures and ways of thinking." Submitted "The DOT Straightens Things Out" by Terese Agnew.