After more than twenty-five years at Southern Illinois University's School of Art and Design in Carbondale, fiber artist M. Joan Lintault is leaving the classroom to commit herself full time to studio production. Her dedication to her students (and subsequent success as a teacher), her extensive travels, and her considerable exhibition experience have guided her through an abundance of ideas, techniques, images, and presentation styles during her career. Although Lintault assembled her first quilt in 1965, it was not until the past decade that her aesthetic focus turned exclusively toward quiltmaking with an emphasis on portraying nature, both in and of the garden.In 1988, after reviewing her work to date, M. Joan Lintault had, in her words, "an epiphany." She realized that of all her pieces she responded to her early quilts most strongly. "They felt like me," she remembers. This experience centered her attention more closely on the techniques and variations of quiltmaking. Joan recalls an experience she had around the same time: while walking down a New York City street in the dead of winter, a florist's sidewalk display demanded her attention. Flowers of every color and description cascaded from top to bottom in profuse array. A display at her local supermarket similarly captured her attention. The brightly lit fruits and vegetables imparted a sense of incredible abundance and evidence of something more to ponder. These experiences prompted her to look more closely at artists and images that had interested and inspired her in the past, such as the sixteenth-century Italian painter Giuseppe Archimboldo, who created near-surreal images by arranging fruits and vegetables into allegorical portraits, and seventeenth-century Amsterdam artist Rachel Ruysch, who painted still-life images of flowers, insects, and reptiles. Lintault was also fascinated by eighteenth-century ceramicists Jacob Petit, Thomas Whieldon, and Josiah Wedgewood who created bowls, dishes, and platters in the shape of fruits, vegetables, and animals to accommodate the growing consumerism of the Industrial Revolution. She examined their work closely in a quest for how they approached and captured nature. She wanted to find out how she might begin a similar process.
A trip to Italy in 1986 took Lintault to museums, palaces, churches, villas, gardens, ruins, and a variety of alternative sites off the beaten path. She immersed herself in the frescos, mosaics, statues, fifteenth-century illuminated manuscripts, and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century still-life paintings -- the rich artistic heritage so characteristic of the Italian experience. Lintault returned to Carbondale with impressions of Italy fresh in her mind: first-century wall paintings rich with painted garlands of flowers, birds, and fountains; metaphysical images; early Roman garden rooms; and Renaissance wall paintings. She was determined to incorporate into her own work their qualities as well as the beauty, technique, and symbolism she had observed during her European sojourn.
Lintault garnered important lessons on a journey to Japan in 1984. There she studied Kusaki-zome (grass and tree dyes) while on a nine-month Fulbright Research Grant as a Visiting Scholar at Seiko College in Kyoto. As she worked with her new colleagues, Lintault encountered a certain energy, a sense of excitement and movement and a general purposefulness that she wanted to bring to her own studio. During this trip, she developed a deep interest and appreciation of the emotional and spiritual richness of the Japanese aesthetic that focuses on the beauty of simplicity and harmony in life. Through this aesthetic all things are seen as imperfect, impermanent, incomplete, and intuitive -- wherein lies their beauty. Joan refers to this idea as "the pathos of things" and works to impart a sense of it in her own work.
During the last several years, Joan has focused her research on the lore about the 'first' gardens throughout the world. In some traditions, the garden was, in its earliest form, a place of bliss, where nature is portrayed as a divine presence and where man and nature live in harmony. The Greek word for this type of garden is paradeisos or paradise. Uncoiling Snakes (1998) celebrates the tree of life, abundant with fruits, vegetables, mushrooms, insects, birds, and snakes that speak to the sanctity of life. It commemorates the "sacred tree," alluding to the variety of ways the tree has been revered, including the tree in the Garden of Eden, sacred groves, the cosmic tree, the tree in blue-willow pottery, and even the Christmas tree. Lintault celebrates the cultivated gardens of Native Americans in Three Sisters (1999), another quilt in her Evidence of Paradise series. This quilt honors an Iroquois gardening tradition of interspersing corn, beans, and squash together in hills as a way to meet the needs of their crops and their people. They referred to this planting method as the Three Sisters.
While placing herself solidly within the textile tradition, Lintault hopes to be recognized as part of a continuum of artists who have celebrated nature and paradise.
Her quilts in the Evidence of Paradise series lay claim to that heritage with their masterful interpretation of image and metaphor. M. Joan Lintault is recognized as one of the most notable contemporary quilt artists in the state of Illinois. The Museum is honored to present M. Joan Lintault's Evidence of Paradise in her first solo museum-sponsored exhibition.
Acknowledgments:
First and foremost, I want to thank M. Joan Lintault for her time and commitment to this show. Joan took on the challenging task of producing two new quilts, for which I am grateful. There have been so many people that have truly made a difference as I worked toward opening the show, including many Museum staff members. I want to thank Ms. Anne Stone and Mr. Jack Walsh, III, for graciously lending their quilts to the exhibition. A generous thank you is due to Guerry and Michelle Suggs for their gift of A Riddling Tale to the permanent collection of the Illinois State Museum. Finally, I want to thank the School of Art and Design at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, Franklin County Tourism, the Southern Illinois Cultural Alliance, and Bernina of America, Inc. for their support of this project.
Debra K. Tayes, Assistant Curator Southern Illinois Art Gallery, Illinois State Museum
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