Susan Shie ’81

Wilma “Peace Voodoo”

The painted, fabric diaries of an American woman who is simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary, Susan Shie’s quilts speak of love, outrage, and sorrow.Words and images trace the everyday texture of the commonplace.

WILMA “PEACE VOODOO”
Susan Shie began creating Wilma on Oct. 20, 2005, and her quilt-journal entries record the progress of Hurricane Wilma as it roared through the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, Haiti, Cuba, and Florida. Like Shie’s I.S. project 25 years earlier, the quilt is also about her female lineage. Her mother, Marie, who died in 2001, often appears on Shie’s quilts as a character named “Saint Quilta.” Susan, daughter Gretchen, and granddaughter Eva are sewn “like Russian stacking dolls…looking…like a Buddha totem pole,” writes Shie in her artist’s statement. As with many of her quilts, Shie airbrushed her design on a whole cloth, used an air pen to draw and write, and a sewing machine to apply a crazy-grid quilt pattern. Shie’s journal entries, an integral part of her designs, capture the day’s events, across the globe and in her own backyard.

As tiny as little stitches, thousands of words march through and around images, with memories bumping up against current events. They speak of Wilma, the devastating hurricane; of the day husband Jimmy burned out a nest of yellow jackets; of the deaths of Coretta Scott King and Rosa Parks; of the indictment of Scooter Libby. They speak of the death of an old family cat, the memory of tear gas at Kent State, and the day a chipmunk was trapped in the living room.

Shie, who is considered one of the earliest pioneers of the art quilt movement, is a full-time professional artist living in Wooster. Her quilts are shown at approximately 20 exhibitions throughout the country every year, and one of the country’s most influential collectors has purchased her work.

Born with albinism and legally blind, Shie has always used her writing to create personal connections. “As a little girl, I couldn’t go out and play in the sunlight, so I wrote long, elaborate letters to my friends.”

Her limited eyesight gave her a special kind of artistic vision, says Shie. “People with albinism have no depth perception. Everything is flat. Our clues to depth come from shadow and overlap, properties that students who study perspective in art classes always have a hard time capturing. But for me, drawing the details that I depended on came easily.”

Growing up in Millersburg, Ohio, Shie describes her childhood as idyllic, though poor. Her father was a factory worker, and every spare dollar went to pay doctors’ bills for her and her brother, who was also born with albinism. Her mother, whom Shie calls “super mom,” sewed her children’s clothes, grew a large, organic garden, and always had snacks waiting for the kids after school.

Although Shie had attended an art class at The College Wooster as a high school student, she never considered it an option for college.Wooster was “sort of this citadel on the hill,” she recalls. “In the locals’ perception, that was where rich people went to school.” Support from Ohio’s Services for the Blind covered tuition for a state institution, so Shie enrolled at Kent State University.

But a marriage, then a child, prompted her to drop out. By the time she was 30, Shie was divorced, paying bills by playing the guitar, and back in northeast Ohio. And once again, she was drawn to the College because of her hunger to create. “ The College was the only place around with a gas kiln, which I needed for my pottery.”

An observant professor of art, George Olson, noticed Shie’s skill, amassed an assortment of grants and scholarships, and Shie quickly became the College’s only full-time, adult student.

“I went through Wooster pinching myself,” Shie remembers.

“I couldn’t believe I was here.”

A spontaneous eruption

An emerging feminism began to shape her thinking and her art. “Miriam Shapiro, a painter from New York, was a visiting professor, and her basic message was, ‘The studio art we are doing now is masculine art.Working with painting and sculpture comes down from the Renaissance. But look at all the art you’re learning from your mothers and your grandmothers. You don’t consider it “serious” because it’s functional.’”

Shie found stretching canvas across frames in the time-honored tradition of painters both unwieldy (she couldn’t drive a car and couldn’t easily transport the heavy pieces) and ultimately unnecessary. “ I said to my adviser, George Olson, ‘Why don’t I forget painting on canvas stretched across frames? Why don’t I just paint on fabric?’ He said, ‘Go for it!’”

Shie’s Independent Study (I.S.) included a quilt and kimonos, created to honor her mother, sister, and daughter. Her mother, who started becoming affected by Alzheimer’s disease soon after Shie’s senior year, helped her stitch the quilt. “It was really good that we did that together, because within two years, she couldn’t sew any more. Looking back, that was a very special time.”

ARTIST AT WORK
Susan Shie, who was 30 years-old when she was a Wooster student, dubbed her studio at the Severance Art Building the “Yin Garment Factory.” Here, she works on her I.S. in 1981.

Shie went on to graduate school at Kent State, and again made a quilt for her thesis. “When I came into the field, they weren’t called art quilts.When I did my thesis, I didn’t know anyone else was doing this. I just thought, ‘I’m this painter who decided to sew on my paintings, and I’m doing this all by myself.’ I thought I’d put my quilts into the closet and go back to cleaning houses.”

But Shie’s graduate adviser urged her to enter her quilts in a national quilt exhibition that was seeking contemporary artists. “I met all these other artists. It was like we spontaneously erupted all over the country, especially in Ohio.”

Shie is both an accomplished seamstress (she can make stitches as perfect as any Amish grandmother’s) and an artist who can paint realistically. But she chooses to depict stylized images and— when she decides to hand-sew—her stitches are as irregular as her eccentric characters.

“What I want people to remember about me is that I am a painter. The fact that I sew my work is secondary.”

Shie’s most recent quilts, which she calls “time capsules,” use images and diary entries to speak out against the war and other policies that she believes are failing the country. “This is my civic duty,” she says. “This is what I do as a responsible citizen.”

She remembers keeping her citizen’s head down for many years, following the shootings at Kent State. She was trapped on campus that day, pregnant, and terrified that the tear gas she was breathing would affect her unborn child. “After that, we all kind of shut up. For a long time, I had no politics. And then I thought, ‘ Wow, this big mess that we’re all in now, maybe it’s because we all shut up.’”

Shie’s relatively new role as grandmother also helped focus her art. Shie’s daughter, who was 10 years old when Shie created her I.S., is now a mother herself, and Shie recently spent 18 months with what she called her “nanny gig.”

“Being with a very innocent soul so much of the time made me more aware of how important it is for our world to be a safe and whole place.”

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