Michael James (quilt artist)
[4] While in graduate school he married Judith Dionne,[5] a fellow art student from Southeastern Massachusetts University, and their son, Trevor, was born.
"[3] Within months of receiving his Master of Fine Arts degree in 1973, he stopped painting altogether, turning his attention to fabric construction.
[3] His growing enthusiasm for these processes in the early 1970s coincided with a national re-interest in traditional arts spurred by the approaching US Bicentennial celebrations.
[14] In the spring of 1977, James published a three-part series of articles in Quilter's Newsletter, called "Color in Quilts",[17] that explored principles covered in his workshops.
[25] Beginning in 1980, James began to create his own striped yardage by sewing strips of cotton[26] and silk[27] together in sets of gradated colors, a development that would drive his work for the next fifteen years.
[33] His pieced panels eventually grew to encompass 36 strips of fabric, each measuring ¾ to 1 inch wide,[34] and were arranged in "luminous"[35] runs of graded color and value.
[37] In the early 1980s, James took his workshops overseas, first to England and then, on subsequent trips, to France, Switzerland, Ireland, Italy, and other European countries.
[45] His work was described by newspapers and magazine articles of the time as "spacially complex," "airy",[35] and "full of light and movement.
[22] His first European exhibit, "Michael James: Nouveaux Quilts," was shown that same year at Galerie Jonas in Petit-Cortaillod, Switzerland,[38] a gallery to which his work would return five times over the next two decades.
He spent three months, September through November, in an artists' residency in La Napoule, France,[22] where he devoted his time to working with oil pastels and crayons on paper.
[51] In 1992 James was awarded an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, his alma mater, and the following year, he was the 25th person to be inducted into the Quilter's Hall of Fame in Marion, Indiana.
[53] By 1995 he was spending twelve to fourteen weeks a year traveling in Europe and Japan to teach workshops and give lectures.
[55] In the summer of 1995, he had a third solo exhibition at Galerie Jonas in Switzerland, which coincided with the release of a retrospective[54] monograph of his work, Michael James: Studio Quilts.
[57] He was also one of five American artists invited to exhibit in the 8th International Triennial of Tapestry[58] that year in Lodz, Poland, where his piece, The Metaphysics Of Action: Entropic Forms won a juror's citation.
[70] James became chairperson of the Department of Textiles, Merchandising and Fashion Design in 2005,[71] a position that he held until his retirement in early 2020.
[73] In a 2010 article reviewing the exhibition, "Hand Craft: A Decade of Digital Quilts", at Metropolitan Community College near Omaha, Kent Wolgamott, arts columnist for the Lincoln Journal Star, noted that a decade after James had moved to Nebraska, he had created nearly 100 quilts using digitally-developed fabric.
[74] A “movingly poetic” and “gently resigned”[75] body of work emerged from his experiences with the progression of her illness that culminated in a solo exhibition at the International Quilt Museum in Lincoln from June 2015 to February 2016.
