We recently connected with Joe Cunningham and have shared our conversation below.

Joe, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. When did you first know you wanted to pursue a creative/artistic path professionally?

I learned to play guitar when I got one for Christmas in my seventh year. It seemed almost as if it spoke to me and told me how to play, so I became pretty good fairly young. In fourth grade my teacher asked if I wanted to bring my guitar on the last school day of the year and play a song for the class. When I played “Hang Down Your Head Tom Dooley” and the students all gathered around me to ask for another one, I knew I wanted to do something like this the rest of my life, I loved the magic of producing something interesting with my own hands and I loved being the center of attention. While I ended up working plenty of day jobs, I also started playing professionally when I was 15 years old and have thought of myself as an artist since that day in fourth grade.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I played guitar professionally from the time I was 15 on, until one night a woman introduced herself to me when I was on a break at a bar and asked if she could hire me for some folk music gigs. Over at her house I saw some boxes of quilts and asked to see some. She explained that she had received a grant to document a local collection and had to write a catalogue describing the collection and including a short biography of the woman whose collection it was. I offered to help with the project, and to help with the writing. She explained that I would have to read all the books about quilt history in order to help. While I was doing that she came to my house one night with a small quilting project and a big thimble. “If you are going to write about quilts,” she said, “You should know how to quilt.” Within a couple months I wanted to make my own quilts. Then, to accomplish the mission of completing the catalogue and finding a home for the collection, I decided that we should become professional quiltmakers. The idea hit me like a thunderbolt. We had business cards printed up and started telling people we were professional quiltmakers. Though we eventually split up, I have been a professional quiltmaker ever since. Mary Schafer, whose collection it was, guided me through a sort of apprenticeship, thinking that I needed to be a historian of quilts and fabric, an engineer able to design my own patterns, a technician who could master all the skills involved in making a quilt and an artist who could put it all together into quilts of high quality. Having thus learned a lot about quilt history, and then having copied many old quilts to learn how those quilters approached it, I considered myself a “traditional” quilter in an extreme sense. Eventually I veered away from the idea of copying old quilts and began making full-size abstract compositions that could work either on a bed or on a museum wall. So, while I have been a quilt professional since 1979, writing books and articles, lecturing and traveling widely to teach, it is only in the last twenty years that I have made the kind of completely personal and expressive works that I now find absorbing and satisfying.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

Early on I took my mentor’s mission as my own: to “Bring glory to the old-time quilt makers.” I am still promoting the fact that 19th century American women created a realm of infinite artistic freedom, one that deserves to be better understood and appreciated. But my own mission has become more clearly defined by continuing to call myself a quiltmaker, continuing to make bed-size quilts that could be used to warm someone against the coldness of the universe, and that carry a depth of aesthetic value that makes them look comfortable in a gallery or museum setting. Instead of backing away from the identification as a quilter, calling myself a “fiber artist” or “textile artist”, I want to identify with all the ordinary people who have made extraordinary quilts over the years. My goal is to get people to see my work and think that perhaps they should take another look at the quilts in their lives. And I hope to get my work into more art museum and more art settings.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

While I have no religious beliefs, I do have a sort of superstitious belief that we are all, individually, best suited for a certain type of life. For me, it was all about art and music and literature early in my life. It feels to me like art is what I was put in this world to do. And my particular medium, quiltmaking, gives me lots of opportunity for silent, improvisatory sewing time, which leads me directly to a state of flow. Also, I feel that my work is very personal and revealing, which makes me feel deliberately vulnerable and exposed. In my mind, that is the only way I can advance artistically: to put myself all on the line with every piece. The result of all this is that at the end of each day I feel energized and happy, rather than depleted and used, as I have felt in the past when I worked jobs for other people. To me the feeling of being seen, and the feeling that I am doing what I was made for, give me all the reward I need.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.joecunninghamquilts.com
• Instagram: @joethequilter
• Facebook: @joethequilter
• Youtube: @joethequilter

Image Credits
Joe Cunningham Henrik Kam (Headshot)