Crazy Quilt

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This wallpaper design appropriates the historic American textile technique known as “crazy quilting.” I use quilting as a visual and conceptual framework for incorporating a variety of objects from the Ackland Museum’s collection, the University of North Carolina’s historical memorabilia, and symbols of and references to the state of North Carolina, in addition to my own personal statements. These myriad sources converge into a crazy quilt: a metaphor for the overlapping and sometimes seemingly disjunctive influences moving back and forth between the public and private sphere in our contemporary society. A particular emphasis is placed on images from the museum's collection that feature women, remixing the collection as well as highlighting the roles of women in society, politics, labor, and art history. Historic commemorative ribbons (such as ones memorializing the death of Abraham Lincoln or a 19th-century veterans’ gathering) are reworked into a new framing device for elevating specific women in the histories of both North Carolina and the University of North Carolina.

Lauren Frances Adams is a painter and installation artist who received her BFA from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and her MFA from Carnegie Mellon University in 2007. She was born on a pig farm in Snow Hill, North Carolina and currently works in Baltimore. Her work engages political and social histories through iconic images and domestic ornament. Her work has been exhibited at Nymans House National Trust in Sussex; The Walters Museum in Baltimore; The Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh; and the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis. Recent projects include Smack Mellon in Brooklyn and an upcoming project for the Baltimore Museum of Art. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and has held residencies at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris and the Sacatar Foundation in Brazil. She is a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Award and the 2016 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award. She is also the winner of the 2016 Trawick Prize. Her work has been reviewed in Frieze Magazine, The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, Artslant, and Hyperallergic.

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Color IV

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The Body is a Vessel that Speaks