We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Lorraine Woodruff-Long. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Lorraine below.
Alright, Lorraine thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s jump back to the first dollar you earned as a creative? What can you share with us about how it happened?
I had been a devoted hobbyist quilter for about a decade while I was raising my two kids and working hard as a nonprofit executive for 50-60 hours/week. I enjoyed doing “15 minutes of play” after a long day of work as a relaxing exercise, and once my kids were older would typically spend 8 hours/day, all weekend sewing and creating. I fantasized about having more time to sew and quilt and immerse myself more in the creative process.
That unexpectedly happened when I was laid off from my job in April 2020 during the pandemic. After the shock and fear of losing my job and income (and, to be honest, a large part of my identity) came into view, my next thought was “well, I guess I can really dive into quilting for a couple of months.” At that time, I thought Covid and the pandemic would be over soon and that I’d find another job and go back to my crazy working life. Hiring was at a standstill in my profession and at my level. While I interviewed and was often a finalist for numerous positions, I wasn’t getting offers. It was demoralizing and depressing – it didn’t help that I’d turned 60 that year and I was feeling that my age was against me.
Happily, an opportunity arise that changed my life!
The de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park, part of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, celebrated their 150th anniversary by holding an open submission to showcase artists from the nine-Bay Area counties. “The de Young Open” attracted 12,000 submissions. Museum curators and staff selected 800 works for the show.
I was thrilled – and stunned! – that my quilt submission, Improv Mosaic, was selected from among 12,000 submissions! It was only one of about a dozen fiber pieces in the show that year. An additional bonus was that my quilt was featured on inside of the museum’s “Fine Arts” magazine promoting the show.
In the midst of feeling so down about my nonprofit career and worries about our finances coupled with the scary state of the world during the pandemic, this experience was a light in my life for my creative work to have been selected in a major museum show.
The museum did a wonderful job with each artist featuring their work, artist statement, sale price and contact information on a website gallery that was available to all. At the close of the show, I was contacted by a local collector who wished to purchase my work – my first sale!
The purchaser was a San Franciscan who worked in the medical profession and loved my work – the color, the brightness, the movement. It was a piece they looked forward brightening their home. I felt so happy and energized about what I could do.
The experience with The de Young Open in 2020 was immensely validating – a major American museum selected my fiber piece to hang among the best of Bay Area art and artists and even featured my work in their magazine! The experience of acceptance and my first sale gave me the confidence to pursue my quilting/fiber art more aggressively and to submit my work to more shows and galleries. My work has subsequently been in dozens of shows and museums.
The de Young Open was instrumental in my largest sale to date. The event was such a successful event for the museum (whose idea for a community open showcase is being replicated by museums all over the world now!) that they decided to hold it every 3 years. In 2023, I was thrilled that another quilt I created was selected for The de Young Open! That piece, “You’re Getting Warmer: Rising Global Temperatures 1850-2022,” has garnered a great deal of attention: from the British Consulate, the International Quilt Festival in Houston, and several other art and quilt shows. Because of the 2023 de Young Open Exhibit, a local tech startup contacted me and commissioned me to make another of this piece for their corporate lobby. The resulting commissioned work was my highest price sale to date. It’s truly been a thrill and gratifying that my work has generated excitement and interest from so many in the art world.
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 was not trained as an artist, nor did I ever study visual art. Having played and studied flute/piccolo from middle school through college and participated in community band in my first years in San Francisco, I thought of myself as a musician only. I did not think of myself as a visually creative person as “my” art was music.
I attained a business/marketing degree at the University of Texas/Austin (I don’t know why – boring!) I was expected to get a degree that would help me get a job and career. However, I was a member of the University of Texas Longhorn Band (which is REALLY all I remember doing in college!) and played in concert bands each spring. I continued playing and participating in community bands as a young adult.
The year I graduated from college, a recession hit and job opportunities and openings just dried up. I had always wanted to join the Peace Corps, so took a turn and applied as a volunteer and was accepted. I served two years in Kenya as a business development/cooperative adviser – my focus was with women’s income generation projects. My main project was with a fabric tie-dye and clothing cooperative and helped the co-op sell and market their garments to the lucrative urban tourist centers. As was advertised at the time, Peace Corps was certainly “the toughest job you’ll ever love”! It was a challenging and life altering experience in infinite ways. It drastically changed the way I viewed myself as an American, as a world-citizen, as a woman, and as a human. I wrote about it on my blog here. https://quiltinginthefog.com/american-patriot-words-matter-2/
In college, I had a bucket list of things I wanted to accomplish before I turned 30 (which was as old as I could imagine being while in my 20s!) It included becoming what I believed to be a “renaissance woman” : living abroad, learning another language, having lots of new experiences and traveling around the world – all “checked off” by the Peace Corps. It also included living in an urban area, finding a career and knowing that I could financially support myself. Growing up in Texas, I’d always thought I’d, OF COURSE, end up back in Texas to live out the rest of my life, but after Peace Corps thought it would be fun to check out living in another part of the country for a bit. I was interested in San Francisco for many reasons, one being that Texas was feeling too conservative for my personal and political beliefs, but also because it’s a beautiful and interesting place to live and my mother’s side of the family had originated from there.
The U.S. was still in a recession, and I was feeling anxious as a person with little “real” business experience, and no much needed and newly required computer skills. Armed with “What Color is My Parachute” and a desire to get a work foothold, I followed the book’s plan, did many rounds of informational interviewing and networking in a brand-new-to-me city. Happily, I landed a job working as a marketing coordinator to a newly formed women-owned architectural firm (even though I had no experience, they thought I must be interesting!) A year later I started dating a new guy in the firm. We eventually moved in together, got married and 35+ years and two kids and a house later, are still happily living in San Francisco.
My “renaissance woman” ideology seemed to go against becoming a specialist in anything. Instead, I became a solid generalist in my career, good at a breadth of many things. (This, in contrast to my husband who after writing a report in 7th grade, decided to become an architect and never looked back!) Following the architectural firm, I had a career in advertising, then moved to the client side working in marketing and communications in the emerging Bay Area tech industry. Once I had kids, I became very involved in public education and children and family policy issues in San Francisco. I pivoted to nonprofit management where I could apply my business and strategic development experience to causes that mattered most to me. I LOVE my two decades in nonprofits. I had thought that eventually, several years down the line, my retirement plan would involve spending half my time doing nonprofit consulting and the rest of the time playing and creating for fun – but that was always planned to be many years away.
The next pivot came when the pandemic hit in 2020 and I was unexpectedly laid off from my development director position. It was jarring for so many reasons – we just didn’t know what was going to happen in the world with the pandemic, we lost half our family income and still had a kid in college, I was turning 60 years old and felt like a “has been”, and despite applying and interviewing for many, many jobs, wasn’t getting anywhere.
I used the time (which, at the time, I thought would be brief) to focus on sewing, making and quilting and to really explore and expand my creativity – without really knowing what I was going to do, or that I might really pursue this as a new career development. Happiness and gratitude arrived when a quilt/fiber art piece of mine was accepted into the highly competitive de Young Open Exhibit in 2020 and a buyer purchased this work – my first sale.
I used this forced down-time to continue to create, explore, and pursue new opportunities. I took online classes from a local arts organization on how to grow your arts business practice, including seminars on communications/social media, pricing, marketing, creating a body of work, and more. I was fortunate to find an artist consultant/guide who awarded me a grant to work with her to develop a 3-year artist plan and to set short, medium and long term goals on what I could envision happening and how to get there. Three years later, my fiber art/quilting career has gone better than I ever really would have envisioned or hoped!
I’ve done some adjusting along the way to take advantage of new opportunities that have arisen – including teaching and lecturing. I was invited to teach a few beginning quilting classes at SCRAP-SF, our local reuse and recycling arts center. From the keen interest in these, I was approached by our local community college to submit a proposal to teach through their college extension program. I proposed and began teaching an 11-class Basic Improv Quilting series at City College of San Francisco Extension in Fall 2023. The series sold out the first session! I was invited to continue the series and more in Spring, Summer and Fall of 2024 and have added other classes as well. Teaching has been pure joy and a highlight of my creative life! I’ve subsequently developed curriculum for various workshops that I teach at guilds and shops. My goal is to develop more on-demand and zoom classes and to continue to teach in person locally and wherever a teaching will send me. To generate additional income, I have taken on some nonprofit clients as a fundraising consultant but try to devote most of my time to creating and teaching.
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
I divide my work into three groups: Polychrome, Commentary and Reimagined – each provide a different source of nourishment and satisfaction. I bounce back and forth creating in each. Polychrome inspires me through the use of improvisational intense color and improvisational creation. Reimagined allows me to explore the use of repurposed clothing and fabric in quilts. Commentary quilts have been a way for me to address and process political and social issues that are important to me, including abortion rights, climate change, gun violence and democracy.
My goal is for my art – quilts – to prompt a reaction in the viewer. Whether it’s to stop and admire the beauty and immersive color, or to stop and contemplate a provocative message or thought unexpectedly delivered on a quilt. My teaching practice goal is to help others to explore the joy of creation through quilting, and to find happiness in their own improvisational, personal journeys.
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
It has been rewarding for my work and creativity to be so appreciated. It has been especially rewarding to be validated as an artist – especially as a quilter (with fiber art and quilting historically dismissed in the “fine art” world.) I’ve been especially gratified that my Commentary Quilts have garnered so much attention and traction as provocative political art, and, most especially that other quilters have contacted me to say that my work has inspired them to speak out in their own way as well. As a teacher, I’ve loved meeting so many new wonderful creative people and feel so fulfilled to help them form their own creative journeys.
I never would have fathomed myself an artist earlier in my life – even as recently as the last decade. It makes me realize there are always new worlds to conquer and new things to learn in life – no matter where you are in your life journey!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://quiltinginthefog.com
- Instagram: @quiltinginthefog
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lorraine.woodruff.long
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lorrainewoodrufflong/
Image Credits
All photos taken by Lorraine Woodruff-Long