Sandra Sider facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Sandra Sider
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| Nationality | American |
| Education | New York University Institute of Fine Arts, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Columbia University |
| Movement | Quilt art |
Sandra Sider, born in Alabama in 1949, is an American artist, writer, and curator. She is well-known for her unique quilt art. She has a PhD in studying different types of literature from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She also has a master's degree in art history from the New York University Institute of Fine Arts.
Sandra Sider worked as a curator for the Texas Quilt Museum from 2012 to 2021. A curator is someone who manages and organizes art collections for museums. She was also the editor-in-chief for Art Quilt Quarterly magazine from 2017 to 2023.
She has taught art history at several universities, including the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City. She also taught about the history of textiles for a special art program at Parsons School of Design. Sandra Sider has written many books and articles. These include works about the Renaissance period, visual culture, and modern quilt art. Some of her books are Maps, Charts, Globes: Five Centuries of Exploration and Handbook to Life in Renaissance Europe. She also wrote Pioneering Quilt Artists, 1960–1980: A New Direction in American Art. Her most recent book, Quarantine Quilts: Creativity in the Midst of Chaos, came out in 2021.
Contents
What Are Art Quilts?
Since the mid-1990s, many of Sandra Sider's quilts use fabric with photos printed on them. She uses a special process called cyanotype. This is like making blueprints and puts an image onto fabric using an iron stain. The fabric needs to be treated so it reacts to light. What appears on the fabric is the opposite of a normal photo. Dark parts look light, and light parts look dark. This makes the images seem to glow, which can be a bit surprising!
How Sandra Sider Makes Her Quilts
Sandra Sider's quilts often use traditional quilting ideas. She uses block shapes and repeats them, just like old quilts. But she also shows respect for newer artworks. She uses techniques often seen in modern art. Each fabric block in her quilts has only part of an image. Sometimes these parts are different sizes. This makes the artwork look a bit broken up, which makes your eyes move around to see everything.
By using photo methods in her fabric art, Sider has been influenced by famous 20th-century artists. These include Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol. She also combines this with the look of traditional quilts. Like many artists who make "contemporary art quilts," Sider mixes old quilt styles with new design ideas.
Her most recent show, which only featured her cyanotype quilt art, was in 2023. It took place at the Artifact Gallery in New York City.
Getting Art Quilts into Museums
Sandra Sider strongly believes that museums should buy more art quilts. She thinks that if museums see many exciting art quilts, they will start collecting them more often.
Art Quilts in Collections
Sandra Sider did a survey of 140 museums in the United States. She found that these museums own more than 1,800 art quilts! Some of the museums that have art quilts include:
- The American Folk Art Museum
- The Baltimore Museum of Art
- The Denver Art Museum
- The Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco
- The Indianapolis Museum of Art
- The Philadelphia Museum of Art
- The Shelburne Museum
- The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
- The Renwick Gallery – Smithsonian American Art Museum
Why Museums Need More Information
Sandra Sider has pushed for museum curators to have better facts about art quilts. Groups that decide what new art a museum buys can be very strict. Museums also have limited money for different types of art. When an artist or collector tries to sell or give a quilt to a museum, the decision-making group often asks the curator: "How does this fit into our collection? How would it work in a show or book?" The curator needs clear facts about other art in the same style. They often don't have enough time to do a deep search through their art collection.
Sider has noticed that museums are buying more art quilts recently. Her survey asked about quilts made after the year 2000. She found that nearly 25 percent of all art quilts in her survey were made after 2000. Almost all the museums she asked are interested in buying 21st-century quilt art.
