FRIEDAcommunity - A closer look by Gerri Spilka
FRIEDAcommunity is proud to announce the upcoming show A closer look by Gerri Spilka. The exhibition will be on view from December 1 to January 21.
We invite you to join us for the opening cocktail Friday December 1, as well as for the artist talk on January 17.
100% of the sale proceeds of any artwork during the exhibition go to the artist. In return, we ask that any selected artist schedules time to engage with our community through a workshop, a demonstration, or a discussion.
I consider myself to be an alchemist who takes ordinary pieces of cotton and transforms them into larger-than-life shapes of glorious, luminous colors. My work fuses seemingly disparate elements: modern figurative abstraction, the grittiness of urban life, and decades of observing people. I use these elements to re-imagine traditional quilts, making them into visual stories on the human experience.
A lifelong urbanite, I grew up in the Bronx and Yonkers, NY, in a large, boisterous, extended family, many of whom worked in the textile industry.
After starting my career in urban planning and community development, I co-founded and ran, for 35 years, Equal Measure, a national social research group based in Philadelphia. Today, in addition to being a studio artist, I am an avid promoter of contemporary textiles in the art world. I was instrumental in the production of two widely acclaimed textile exhibitions, Color Improvisations 2 and Material Pulses: Seven Viewpoints, which were attended by more than 10,000 people. I am currently collaborating with a team of leading national textile organizations in the 2024 Textile Print Exhibition, “Repeat Images.”
Gerri Spilka’s work has been widely exhibited in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. It is held in private and public collections, including the International Quilt Museum (Lincoln, NE), as well as Park Towne Place Art Collection and Temple University’s Fox School of Business (both in Philadelphia, PA).
She has a Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology and education from Carnegie Mellon University, a Master’s degree in psychology from Temple University, and a Master’s degree in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania.
