Category: At The Seams
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Summer Days
“I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I’ve never let it keep me from a single thing that I wanted to do.” – Georgia O’Keeffe An icon of American modern art, Georgia O’Keeffe is best known for painting surrealism into the desolate American Southwest landscape. These paintings, such as Summer Days, have…
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Diamond Rain
In 1666, Isaac Newton proved that white light is composed of the rainbow spectrum. He used a prism to refract a white light beam into a spectrum of colors, and then another prism to put it back into white light again. Color, however, is perceived inversely. An object soaks up a part of the light…
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Funny Face
“I’d swim the ocean wide just to have you by my side. Though you’re no Queen of Sheba, for worlds I’d not replace your sunny, funny face.” Debuted in 1957, the film Funny Face, starring Audrey Hepburn, was a parable for her ascending style and stardom. In the film, Jo Stockton, a downtown bohemian bookworm,…
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Best In Show
The American artist and art teacher Josef Albers once proclaimed that if you were to say “red” to 50 different people, there would be 50 different versions of the color. Names for color, in particular, evolve with language across cultures. For example, the word for pink once meant yellow in Dutch. While ochre meant “pale…
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A Study of Draping
The history of the draped garment dates back to 3500 BCE. Across the land, visual arts of ancient sculptures, terracottas, cave paintings, and wood carvings depict men and women in unstitched cloth with various draping styles. A notable draped garment in the East is that of the Buddha, called the kāṣāya, named after ochre, an…
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The Fall
“Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?”Genesis 3:1 In the middle of Eden was the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, but…
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The Kantha Gown
Kantha is more than one thousand years old, dating back to the pre-Vedic era in ancient India. Traditionally a utilitarian, functional craft, kantha has evolved into a unique way of portraying and celebrating life events. Today, the word kantha has come to describe the stitching style rather than the object itself. Beyond simple running stitches…
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The Peacock
The world’s most spectacular border ceremony takes place daily before dusk at Wagah, roughly halfway between Lahore in Pakistan and Amritsar in India. Large crowd gathers between the Indian Border Security Forces and the Pakistan Rangers to witness a spectacle of what could be appropriately coined “Peacocks at Sunset.” Using their body instead of weapon,…
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Flowers of Giverny
“All gardening is landscape painting,” said Alexander Pope, the English poet in the 18th century. The picturesque tradition continues to dominate the field of landscape architecture to the present day. Dotted across the history of landscaping are alternative points of view, however. For example, the Sacro Bosco garden was unlike any other design during the…
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The Kantha Jacket
Kantha, meaning “patched cloth”, refers to both the traditional craft of making quilted blankets as well as the stitch itself. The craft is native to rural Eastern South Asia, particularly Bangladesh and the neighboring Indian states of West Bengal and Odisha, along the Bay of Bengal. Originally made from old, recycled saris, the traditional kantha…
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