Object Details
- Artist
- Katherine Westphal, born Los Angeles, CA 1919-died Berkeley, CA 2018
- Copy after
- Edward Moran, born Bolton, England 1829-died New York City 1901
- Exhibition Label
- For me the most important thing is the creativity, the invention, the imagination, not perfecting the thing and making it right.
- --Katherine Westphal
- Katherine Westphal assembled this patchwork quilt from snippets of fabric printed with designs she created for the commercial textile industry. The image is a riff on American artist Edward Moran's patriotic painting of the Statue of Liberty's 1886 dedication, in which the statue towers above a harbor crowded with boats and American flags. Westphal's Lady Liberty seems appalled as she gazes at the chaos below, a comment perhaps on the meaning of liberty at the height of the civil rights movement.
- Westphal, who described herself as a "free spirit," spent eight years designing fabrics for the apparel industry and taught for over a decade at the University of California, Davis. In the late 1950s she began making quilts and was soon transferring images from her own photographs and mass media sources to fabric in clever transformations of conventional quiltmaking practice.
- Credit Line
- Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Katherine Westphal Rossbach
- 1964
- Object number
- 1972.15
- Restrictions & Rights
- Usage conditions apply
- Type
- Decorative Arts-Fiber
- Quilt
- Crafts
- Medium
- cotton
- Dimensions
- 92 3/4 x 66 1/2 in. (235.5 x 168.9 cm.)
- See more items in
- Smithsonian American Art Museum Collection
- Department
- Renwick Gallery
- Smithsonian American Art Museum
- Topic
- Monument\statue\Statue of Liberty
- Record ID
- saam_1972.15
- GUID (Link to Original Record)
- http://n2t.net/ark:/65665/vk7c7c81cd3-9156-41fd-acdd-0508cbb81e39
