Twice each week, I make my way from my loft in Pittsburgh’s Southside to the Heinz History Center in the Strip District. I show the guard my ID badge with the words “Exhibiting Artist,” walk to the fourth floor and sit at my worktable set inside “Louise Silk: A Patchwork Life.” The show is a retrospective of my long career as a quiltmaker and fabric artist.

The exhibition includes archival images, videos and my worktable, which is situated in a scaled-down replica of my studio and surrounded by pieces from my decades of work.

To my left is a section on the SilkDenim fashion label, a collaboration with my daughter, Sarah, that uses recycled materials in objects, artwork and clothing. On display there is a figure made entirely out of denim zippers that represents the Archangel Michael, who, according to midrash, was an angelic advocate for the Jewish people. Directly ahead of me is the brightly colored Yesh quilt, made of T-shirt remnants. To my right is the growing The Witness Quilt, an interactive part of the exhibition that includes over 1,000 patches embroidered with “wisdoms”—folk sayings, Jewish phrases and feminist thoughts—set on a large, curving 8-by-14-foot frame. At my right is also the exhibition entrance, where I can observe visitors’ first reactions.

Behind me, completing my 360-degree perspective, is a wall-sized 20-minute looping video of me working in my home studio.

The seed of this retrospective began during the Covid-19 pandemic. Acknowledging my age and fearful for my own future, I started to develop a 10-year plan to produce work that would bring my career to a purposeful conclusion on my 80th birthday, six years from now.

I began by embroidering 14 flags, designing a kimono and a quilt and writing a book, titled A Patchwork Life. All the projects were connected to the idea of tying significant events during my lifetime to my needlework—and to the phrase, “a patchwork life.” Each of the flags, for example, includes one of the 14 letters in the phrase as well as a theme and an associated Hebrew word. The flag with a “P,” a raised red fist and the Hebrew word gevurah, for strength, references the power of sisterhood and the feminist movement as well as my own trajectory, which began in the 1970s with a women’s consciousness-raising group.

As part of my 10-year plan, I contacted Eric Lidji, director of the Rauh Jewish Archives at the Heinz Center and proposed the possibility of using my quilts in some kind of exhibition. We ended up writing a formal proposal and, after two-plus years, the exhibition opened this past September, the first at the center to be curated by the Rauh archives.

The vision for how to stage the exhibition came together during a studio tour of my loft, when the group from the Heinz center realized they could reproduce my process by piecing together an exhibition as if it itself were a patchwork quilt.

The Witness Quilt, the centerpiece of the exhibition, embodies the major themes of my life—exploring the fluid boundaries between craft and art, highlighting quilting’s interactive aspects and integrating elements of Jewish cultural expression into the broader fabric of American life. It is meant to demonstrate the benefits of community engagement, creating rituals and making memories using cloth. And the numerical value of the Hebrew word for witness, eid, adds up to 74, my current age.

For the project, I initially produced 1,152 patches made from recycled fabric, each with sayings I had collected and heard over my lifetime—“do a mitzvah,” “now and again slow down” and many others. Throughout the run of the exhibition, volunteers from the Patchwork Life Stitching Circle work with me to add patches to the quilt. Visitors to the exhibit also participate, bringing their own swatches of fabric or joining the stitching circle. As of now, The Witness Quilt features over 1,300 patches.

Beginning in February, we will dismantle the quilt patch by patch, giving away some 25 a day to visitors. By the close of the exhibition in early April, nothing will remain but the white fabric underlayer upon which the patches were hung.

Engaging with visitors is the most rewarding aspect of the retrospective for me. I have met former students, distant relatives, old mentors, long-lost friends, dedicated quilters, want-to-be quilters, historians, sports fans and tourists—each of them sharing life encounters relevant to quilting and fabric art.

In a conversation with art students, I had the opportunity to explain why one of my pieces on display, The Home Coming, a miniature appliqué diptych created in the 1980s, was pivotal to my life’s story. On the left side of the diptych, Russians dressed in drab browns and grays stand in a bread line. On the right, colorfully dressed Jews dance the hora. In all my previous pieces, I had kept my Judaism and my quilting separate, but since I was involved at the time as an activist with the Soviet Jewry movement, I began wondering about the possibilities of using Jewish content in my quilts.

This piece was my first attempt, transforming all my work since.

Some visiting stitchers expressed amazement at the complexity of my French knot embroidery portraits, including Through the Generations, which depicts 16 members of my extended family. I explained that I use these tiny knots as a meditation and an entry point to explore my family’s history and heritage. Experiencing each knot as a part of a meditative practice, valuing the long process over the actual product, gives me the time and space to form deep ancestral bonds.

A group of older women, seeing my book BubbeWisdom on display, wanted to understand how and why I came up with the title. I explained that I took the name “bubbe” after my first grandchild was born, wanting to transform the old-fashioned image of the stay-at-home bubbe into that of a modern, accomplished older woman. The book itself is a selection of writings about quilting in connection to my 2015 exhibition of the same name at the American Jewish Museum at the Jewish Community Center of Pittsburgh and posts from my ongoing BubbeWisdom blog. This proactive reframing of the term “bubbe meises,” which means old wives’ tales or superstitions in Yiddish, encourages family members to follow the wisdom of their elders.

As a Heinz center staff member pointed out to me, what the viewer sees and relates to in the exhibition is the emphasis on process over product—the importance of being flexible in the flow of life and navigating its challenges and milestones to achieve an enlightened whole.

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Louise Silk is an artist living and working on Pittsburgh’s South Side.