Marvtastic Memories!

Ok all you Joan Gaither quilt fans, the time has finally arrived! The latest My American Series quilt is about to be revealed.

Are you ready for it? 

It is my pleasure to introduce to you the seventh quilt in Dr. Gaither's My American Series,

Marvtastic Memories!

Marvtastic Memories documents the history of the National Black Theatre Festival set to open next week in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. As with all of Dr. Gaither's quilts there is so much detail, it is going to take days to explain all of the various components. I will start by giving you a general overview today and then make frequent updates throughout the run of the festival with more information and detail.

So, where to begin? Perhaps by talking about the largest component of the quilt - the figure in black. This figure is a nearly life sized 3-D image of Larry Leon Hamlin, the founder of the National Black Theatre Festival. He founded the festival in 1989 with the vision of hosting a festival every two years, something that has happened consistently since it began. Dr. Gaither fashioned the figure of Mr. Hamlin based on photos taken from the annual programs, matching his brightly adorned clothing down to his hat and sunglasses. Sadly, he passed away shortly before the 2009 festival. Dr. Gaither placed an angel in one of his hands with the other pointing down on the orange map of the theatre festival's venues to symbolize him as the event's guardian angel. For those of you familiar with Dr. Gaither's work, you will recognize the angel as one designed by Ms. Ruth Taylor, Dr. Gaither's "Angel Lady."

Working to the right from Mr. Hamlin's hand you will see photos, oba faces (the brown faces), and black and purple boxes. Each of these sets contains the names of all of the plays and honored celebrities (in the boxes) and the festival chairs for each year. The first festival, held in 1989, was chaired by Maya Angelou followed by Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee. These sets continue around the top and right borders of the quilt all the way through the 2011 festival. If you look underneath these sets you will see Dr. Gaither's traditional My American Series border with a few alterations. On this quilt there is no railroad fabric, but all of the other elements (African fabric, red and blue fabric for the blood shed in the Middle Passage, the safety pins, and the rolled American flag colored fabric) are all there.

On the bottom border you will see several small red rectangles. These are actually the backs of director's chairs with the names of many of the festival plays' directors on them. Also on the bottom of the quilt you can see what look like many light brown lines. Believe it or not, those are letter beads spelling out the names of each and every production company to present a show at the festival in its 28 year history. There is a good story about those which I will share in the next couple days involving Dr. Gaither, myself, and a large problem with math. In the middle of this border is an image which represents stage curtains with the name and details of the festival spelled out in letter beads.

Moving to the left border, you will see a figure in purple just below Mr. Hamlin's foot. That is his wife, Sylvia, with the word "Marvtastic" written next to her. "Marvtastic" was a word Mr. Hamlin coined to convey his, and those of people involved with the festival's, sentiments towards this large event. As you move up Mr. Hamlin's leg, you will see white writing listing the names of the festival's sponsors throughout the year.

I will save the details about the center of the quilt for my next posting. The quilt is currently on display at the Milton Rhodes Arts Center in Winston-Salem and will remain so through 6 August 2011. If you are in Winston-Salem or nearby in the next week, please stop by to take a look. The quilt is on display in the main lobby of the Arts Center

Oops, We Did It Again!

Hello???? Anyone still out there????

I can just hear everyone saying "Where have you been? You haven't posted anything in almost three months!!!!!"

Just as Dr. Gaither was getting into the idea of posting and I had started up weekly postings, we dropped the ball and stopped. With this posting I offer a mea culpa and a few exciting explanations.

The title of this post not only refers to one of our unintentional multi-month hiatus' from posting but also to the fact that for the third time in three years, another My American Series quilt has been completed. Yes, that's right, completed. The National Black Theatre Festival quilt was finally finished last week after months of promises from Dr. Gaither that it would be completed by the end of the month. "It will be finished by the end of February....March...April...May... It has to be finished by the middle of June." And when was it finished? The first weekend in July!

For those of you who are loyal readers of this blog (thank you!), you know that I somewhat serve as Dr. Gaither's personal assistant. I take care of correspondence, posting on this website, monitoring her calendar, helping her with appearances and workshops, and many other duties. One of those duties includes keeping her on task and on schedule which is not an easy feat. Keeping her on task for this latest quilt has been quite the ordeal as she loves to work under the pressure of a deadline and there wasn't one for several months. With every My American Series quilt, there has always been a pressing time factor which has lead to round the clock quilting sessions as well as several public appearances by the quilt as it makes the rounds with community quilting sessions. This quilt was not like that. Begun more than a year ago, this quilt was way ahead of schedule, not needing to be in Winston-Salem, NC until late July/early August.  Because of this, Dr. Gaither seemingly had plenty of time to complete the quilt, despite my insistence that it had to be finished absolutely no later than Memorial Day in order to give the theatre festival representatives time to create the posters, cards, and other items that will be on offer with this quilt.. Plus I need time to be able to create a diagram to allow people to find themselves and their organizations on the quilt. It was finally completed last week because she received the date the quilt was going to travel to Winston-Salem, putting her in a time crunch-induced panic (finally).

The National Black Theatre Festival quilt will make its debut at the festival in three weeks and will be on display for the entire run of the week long festival. Once it has made its debut at the festival, I will be able to post full pictures for everyone to see. Only a few more weeks. Sadly, I will not be able to be there to see the debut of the quilt, but I have put Dr. Gaither on notice that she is to designate one of her friends to be her "official" photographer and get photos for the blog. If I am really daring, perhaps I will venture into the realm of teaching her how to put photos on her computer and upload them to the blog. She keeps swearing her computer is about to blow up on her, so it might not happen. Then again, it could just be her way of getting out of blogging.

So that is Dr. Gaither's excuse for not blogging. It is a partial excuse on my part as well since I have spent many a day and night helping to work on the quilt. I slowed down my involvement on that somewhat after Dr. Gaither threatened to "get me" multiple times after I went through her multiple lists of people, places, and organizations that needed to be added to the quilt and found several omissions. Lets just say for one of the lists, the number was in the triple digits! I will fill you in on that once I can post pictures.

As for the rest of my excuses (and a little self promotion) I have been taking up the community involvement aspect of Dr. Gaither's work and applying it to my own. I just completed the second phase of a great project called Music to Our Ears: The Sounds of the African American Experience at Carr's and Sparrow's Beaches. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Carr's and Sparrow's Beaches, they were two segregation-era hot spots located just outside of Annapolis where African Americans spent their summers relaxing by the water and taking in the biggest musical acts of the day such as James Brown, Aretha Franklin, the Drifters, the Supremes, and many more. These two family-run beaches brought in audiences from all over the East Coast including audiences of 40,000 people for the James Brown concerts. Not bad considering the current population of Annapolis is around 35,000 people. Can you imagine doubling the size of the city for a day?

Very little research has been done on these sites and the people who attended, worked, and performed there are aging quickly. The Coordinator of Social Studies for Anne Arundel County and I put our heads together and came up with the Music to Our Ears project where high school students learn about the beaches as well as how to do oral history interviews. Then the students go out into the community and conduct oral history interviews as well as gather photographs and other memorabilia from their friends, family, and other community members. All of this is then compiled into a public presentation of some sort. Last year the students created a mini-documentary and this year they did an exhibition that opened at the Banneker-Douglass Museum just after Memorial Day and will be up through Labor Day. The project has been embraced by the community and has kept me running and off the blog for the last several months. Now that the project is on break for the summer, I am able to return to my blogging and other activities.

So there you have it. Our mea culpa and reasons for our absence. I promise a plethora of posts to come in the next few weeks and lots of pictures to make up for our absence. Thanks for hanging in there with us!