Member Monday with Michael James

Michael James has long been fascinated with patterns. As a metaphor for the complex systems that run through our world, James explores these patterns through his non-traditional quilts, evoking an ongoing tension between order and disorder. In this month’s feature, we learn more about James’ work, the legacies he carries, and the evolving life of a creative.

Textile Society of America (TSA): Michael, please share a bit about your work and that journey.

I went through art school as a painter and printmaker in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when abstract expressionism had lost traction and other stylistic movements were evolving. That whole period was one of flux in every dimension of our lives, and it was often confusing and unpredictable. I was comfortable with abstraction, with non-representation, and have pretty much remained loyal to that visual strategy across my lifetime. I say that unapologetically. It’s always fit with my need to give some kind of visual form to the undercurrents in my emotional and psychic life. It’s let my work touch the poetic, it’s let it occupy a kind of liminal borderland that’s not always easy to pigeonhole. 

TSA: What was your early relationship to textiles and how has that evolved over the years?

Although I was in graduate school at Rochester Institute of Technology when the weaving program at the School for American Craftsmen [sic] was still active, and had gone through undergraduate school at what had once been a textile institute (and today is UMASS/Dartmouth, whose Program in Artisanry arrived years after I’d graduated), I had no hands-on textile training in those formal contexts. My mother was a sewer, and she made braided wool rugs, and at home I and my siblings participated in some of that. Growing up in New Bedford, we were surrounded by the hulking expanses of brick textile mills, and my nearest ancestors had all been textile mill workers. Since retiring I’ve gained a bit of time to advance genealogical work that some of my family members and I dabble in, and it’s been fascinating to identify the occupations of great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents on both sides of my family: weavers and mule spinners mostly, all immigrant workers who were for the most part at the lower rungs of the industrial revolution’s hierarchies. So I think that there was a certain longstanding sensibility about textiles and their place in society that came to me through that family history.

TSA: Does your work tend to reflect a communal process or more of an individual practice (or both)?

MJ: For most of my career, it’s been just me and my work in the studio, so it’s been largely a solo practice. For a good part of the last two decades, while I was a full-time faculty member in textiles at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, one of my early graduate students, Leah Sorensen-Hayes, worked with me as my studio assistant. That made it possible for me to sustain my creative output while serving both as a faculty member and later as chair of the department. Since I retired in early 2020, I’m back to a strictly solo studio practice

TSA: We love to hear what members and fellow creatives are reading. Do you have any textile-related books that you particularly recommend?

MJ: I’m a heavy-duty bibliophile and reading is as important to me as eating, drinking, sleeping. Truthfully, while I’ve read a lot of textile-related books over the years, that’s not really the subject area where my book recommendations tend to come from. I’ve kept a running journal of all my reading year-by-year since 1985, so going on forty years, and among those there aren’t very many textile subjects. Lots of art books and artists’ lives, lots of history and other nonfiction, not much fiction but some. I did recently finish Joseph McBrinn’s Queering the Subversive Stitch: Men & the Culture of Needlework, a book I began in 2021 and that took me near a year to get through. It reads like a dissertation so not what I’d qualify as a “read for pleasure” title, but it has some interesting history and introduces some makers whose names I’d not run across before.

TSA:  For someone with such broad interests, we have to wonder…if given the power to master any skill instantaneously, what would it be?

MJ: Ah, that’s easy: playing the piano. When I was growing up in a tenement neighborhood in New Bedford, a neighbor gave piano lessons to a number of young players, and I’d see them arrive for their lessons and hear their drills and exercises. We had neither a piano nor any disposable dollars, so my parents were quick to nix my pleas to take lessons. Fast forward to my 51st year and lo and behold my first wife and I buy a home whose sale had a baby grand thrown in. I started taking lessons, but like all languages, it’s much harder to learn as an adult. I periodically pick at the instrument I now have, a Yamaha “AvantGrand N1,” a hybrid console, but I’ll likely never be proficient. That’s one of the frustrating things about life: so many options, too little time!

TSA: And finally, what projects are you currently working on or looking forward to?

MJ: I retired from my “day job” just a few months before the onset of the pandemic. As a recovering primary caregiver, I’d been thinking for some years of writing a memoir of my late wife Judith’s younger onset Alzheimer’s journey, and the pandemic offered the optimal moment. The book is off to the printer as I write this, and will be published by Pine Eden Press later this spring. Like me, Judith was a textile artist, had been involved with textiles all of her life, and had been developing her own studio practice in the eight or so years that preceded her diagnosis. Neither of us was prepared for what we faced. Reflecting long and hard on those years, I committed myself to writing the kind of book I wish I’d had when we launched that journey. For anyone encountering the myriad uncertainties of dementia caregiving for the first time, and for those who are close to sufferers and their caregivers no matter where along the journey they find themselves, I feel that by sharing in often intimate detail the experience of her disease, my memoir will offer readers practical guidance as well as reassurances that the challenge of dementia caregiving can ultimately  be deeply rewarding. Dear Judy: A Love Story Rewritten by Alzheimer’s describes the territory that is Alzheimer’s, instructs the reader on what to expect as the disease advances, and suggests approaches that may optimize quality of life for both patients and caregivers. Dementia caregiving is enormously challenging, but it can also be enriching, and I hope my memoir will provide some ballast for others facing similar challenges. And of course, textiles do find their way into the narrative. They played a role to the very end.

Website: https://www.michaeljamesstudioquilts.com/
Website: https://www.judithjamestextileart.com/
Website: https://pineedenpress.com/
Instagram: @michaeljamesstudioquilts

All images courtesy the artist