Art Quilt Maps

June 17, 2013
Goodwin, an architect who teaches architectural design at Florida A&M, lives in a visual world that speaks “the language of lines, shapes, and colors.” Maps, both metaphorical and geographical, matter to her, and so does sewing, which she learned at her grandmothers’ knees. She braids these interests and skills into a book of quilt maps to follow, starting with her beginnings as a quilt artist and ending with galleries of her work and that of her students. She teaches readers how to use road maps, tourist maps, utility company maps, as well as imaginary maps in quilting. She works her quilts, such as “ArchiTEXTural cARTography” and “City Grid II,” in layers of fabric, paint and thread: the opaque layer, the painted, and the translucent. Fusing is important. She spends time on the background (“music,” she calls it) and energy on techniques, such as stamping and appliqué, for the actual quilt maps. At the end, she offers three treats: embellishing with haiku, designing travel maps with stones and shadows, and mapping memories and landscapes of families and homes.