A stitch in the right direction

Pamela Loewen didn’t set out to build a gallery.

The first two times the Williamston quiltmaker needed more space in her home studio, she added onto her house. The third time, she looked for a local building with a teaching space where she could promote her passion for quiltmaking as an art form. But when she walked into the former dance studio that would become her gallery, with its high ceilings and a separate building perfect for teaching, she saw the vision.

That vision became reality on April 25, when Loewen Studio & Gallery opened its doors in downtown Williamston. The gallery opened with an exhibit of Loewen’s own art, running through Aug. 9.

Loewen, a student of influential contemporary quiltmaker Nancy Crow, said the studio was originally Crow’s idea.

Photo by Corey Jarvinen

“In 2016, Nancy Crow said to me that we needed a gallery promoting quilts as art and that I was the one who should do it,” Loewen said. “At the time, I laughed. I had no desire to. Fate’s funny, huh?”

Loewen said galleries focused specifically on quiltmaking are a rarity.

“Most galleries that do craft, like the former Mackerel Sky in East Lansing, have a variety of media,” she said. “They’ll have jewelry, woodwork and clothing. I don’t know of any other gallery that’s specifically focused on promoting quilts as art.”

While she’s open to showing other media if it fits, her primary goal for the gallery is to provide quiltmakers somewhere to showcase their entire bodies of work.

“There are a lot of quilt shows, but the problem with quilt shows is you might only get two pieces in, and that’s it,” Loewen said. “You can’t do a whole body of work, and you really can’t understand an artist unless you can see their body of work.”

The first exhibit represents “about 18 years of creative output” from Loewen. She combines rigid lines with fluid backgrounds to portray gardens, often in vivid, unexpected color palettes and hand-dyed fabrics — aspects that might not come through in just one or two pieces. In providing a space for other artistic quiltmakers to do the same, she hopes her gallery will allow viewers to better understand both the medium and the artists themselves.

Photo by Corey Jarvinen Behind the gallery is a teaching studio, which Loewen intends to use for lectures and workshops. She hopes it will provide artistic quiltmakers with a space to share their work and receive critiques.

The next exhibit will begin in September and feature the work of Peggy Black, a Pennsylvanian quiltmaker and fellow student of Crow.

Loewen has been making quilts for over 30 years, but she began seriously pursuing the craft as an art form after taking a class with Crow in New Zealand, where her husband was working at the time.

“I tried to sign up for a class with her when we were living in the States,” Loewen said, “and the first day I got my little catalog in the mail, I called. The lady laughed and said that class filled in two hours, so when I found out she was coming to New Zealand, I was the first person to sign up.”

The class “was the first time I met a serious artist who was pursuing quiltmaking as an art form and encouraging other people to do so,” Loewen said. She continued taking classes with Crow after returning to the U.S.

The teaching space Loewen originally set out to create is behind the gallery. While it’s not big enough to accommodate multiple working artists at once, it will function as a meeting space for artists to share and receive critiques on their work.

“A lot of artists working in this medium kind of go from workshop to workshop,” Loewen said. “They don’t quite know how to develop their own studio practice. Here, they’re not going to be creating their work in the building, but they’ll get talks and critiques and can meet each other.”

Photo by Corey Jarvinen Loewen works on new art in her studio, which is located above the gallery.

Loewen also has her own studio space upstairs. While the space is her own, she said two universities have already reached out about internship opportunities for college students who could use the space. She said she’s interested in the idea, though she hasn’t pursued it yet, “because it was a mission just to get the building going.”

Loewen is selling limited prints of her work made by RCP Artist Services, which is run out of The Camera Shop in south Lansing. The quilts are scanned in three dimensions, preserving their depth in printed form. The technology also allowed her to include “Butterfly Garden,” a quilt that was bought by the International Quilt Museum, in the collection. To the untrained eye, only the hanging canvas itself gives away the reproduction. The print vividly recreates the piece’s depth, clearly showing every stitch.

“When I first started working on this, there were only 12 of these scanners in the entire country,” Loewen said, “and only two were open to the public. This was one of them.”

Inspired by the annual Cracked Pot Studio Tour, Loewen hopes her venture will become a “destination gallery.”

“We meet people every year who fly in from all over the country to come to the Cracked Pot tour, and that’s the kind of gallery we want to be,” she said. “Anybody who is interested in quilts as an art form, we want to be the first place they think of.”

It’s not lost on Loewen that her goals are lofty for a gallery less than two months old, but she’s clearly serious.

“I know it’s ambitious,” she said, “but you’ve got to aim high, right?”

Photo by Corey Jarvinen Loewen signs a limited-edition print of her quilt “Butterfly Garden.” The prints are made by RCP Services, which scans the quilts in three dimensions to preserve the depth inherent to the medium.