Silver Spread (Sovereign)

Barbara Rossi began printing etchings on fabric in the late 1960s. A talented seamstress, she soon started “seeing and sewing these printed images together.” The process of making such quilts was arduous, combining many elements of both fine art and craft. To create Silver Spread, Rossi first printed her images on squares of nylon, a difficult procedure due to the fabric’s slippery and nonabsorbent surface. After filling, backing, and quilting the pieces together, she added fringe and further stitching to emphasize some of the images’ linear elements. As a way of underscoring the resulting object’s hybrid nature, Rossi draped the first quilt she exhibited over a chair, “so it was neither a wall piece or a bed piece or a floor piece. It wasn’t a domestic object. It was something beyond any of those functions.”