Evelyn Townsend, who began quilting in 1985, uses a long-arm quilting machine to stitch her patterns freehand. Evelyn Townsend of Chesterfield County began quilting in 1985, when patterns were traced and quilts were stitched in more traditional ways. Instead of wooden hoops and a rocking chair, today’s quilter may have design software, USB flash drives, a high-tech sewing or quilting machine, die-cut forms and a stash of beads, ribbons and other embellishments. Her primary hobby room contains the pricey dream that had to wait until she and her husband, Frederick, put their two children through college — a longarm quilting machine, purchased two years ago. Townsend can attach an entire quilt — top, batting and muslin bottom — around rollers on either side of the massive machine. The quilting part, similar to a sewing machine, is guided by handles that resemble steer horns and can be moved in all directions over any part of the quilt that Townsend wants to work on.

Evelyn Townsend, who began quilting in 1985, uses a long-arm quilting machine to stitch her patterns freehand. Evelyn Townsend of Chesterfield County began quilting in 1985, when patterns were traced and quilts were stitched in more traditional ways. Instead of wooden hoops and a rocking chair, today’s quilter may have design software, USB flash drives, a high-tech sewing or quilting machine, die-cut forms and a stash of beads, ribbons and other embellishments. Her primary hobby room contains the pricey dream that had to wait until she and her husband, Frederick, put their two children through college — a longarm quilting machine, purchased two years ago. Townsend can attach an entire quilt — top, batting and muslin bottom — around rollers on either side of the massive machine. The quilting part, similar to a sewing machine, is guided by handles that resemble steer horns and can be moved in all directions over any part of the quilt that Townsend wants to work on.

Instead of taking it for granted, the six women artists who participated in Stains on my Chintz (February 7-March 20), curated by Paula Sengupta, had consciously created and displayed their works in a manner that would stimulate a dialogue between their art and the space. Her work, titled The Vanishing , took off from an Englishwoman’s journal of the 19th century in which she recorded how a British officer could expect to shoot 1,000 Royal Bengal tigers during his posting in India. This time, her focus has shifted to what in Victorian times were known as unmentionables, and her work, which also covers the familiar story of migration during the late 1940s, gains added resonance in these surroundings. She has chosen the feminine craft of embroidery, painted motifs in the manner of nakshi katha , a quilting technique at which Bengali women were once adept, and alluded to chintz, the printed fabric produced in India and once a rage in the West, to create her narrative of placid domesticity. For her “Landscapes ‘within - without’” , she has turned an entire room into a darga -like place of worship with an altar circumscribed by a chain of lights, representing the barbed wire barriers that fence off India’s borders with China and Pakistan. Joscelyn Gardner is originally from Barbados but lives in Canada now, and her haunting video and macabre prints (picture) beautiful and perfectly executed despite the violence that seethes under them are based on accounts of the sexual exploitation of black slaves in the colonial Caribbean plantations of the 18th century.

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