Collaborative Series - working side by side
This is my newest work - a collaborative series with an artist friend, Beck Lane, who is a phenomenal painter and an artist for social justice. Beck’s art is filled with the passion of life. Be sure to view all her work at https://www.becklaneartist.com/.
Peg Green and Beck Lane
In her latest series Beck has been working with the vast archive of photographic portraits of a Boston-area racially diverse community. The photos, by itinerant photographer William Bullard, made in the early 1900s, are archived in a large-volume book format (Rediscovering an American Community of Color: The Photographs of William Bullard, 1897-191, by Janette Greenwood, Nancy Burns, Frank Morrill) and on-line at https://www.bullardphotos.org/.
Beck invited me to collaborate with her to create fabric frames for her smaller quick-sketch portraits.
Rev Colson
This is the first one I created. It’s actually from a separate archive of Sarasota’s early black community leaders. This is Rev Colson. I pulled out the blue and orange shades from her portrait and combined them with browns and khaki greens, just collaging very intuitively. Her guidelines to me were: nothing fancy, none of your usual intricate and immaculate stitching, Peg. Keep in “raw.” And no machine stitching, Peg, do it all by hand.
Mr. Dillon
Here’s Mr Thomas Dillon, a coachman married to Margaret, a domestic servant. They had 3 children, and the family appears several times in the Bullard photo archive. I also incorporated some of Beck’s painted clothing fabric into this piece, because this entire collection is passionately personal to her.
That was a major challenge for me, since I am a machine stitcher and I like clean, precise lines. But the effect with irregular shapes, raw edges, and loosely tacked together fabric scraps was very pleasing, so we continued on.
Dillon Family
Mr Dillon appears again in this cameo excerpt from a family photograph. Here I surround him with African fabrics capturing the gold vest color and emphasizing geometric designs. The gold floral print and French knots add an elegant touch, I think, very suitable for his pose. A man of status and refinement.
These others are from the Bullard series. I delved into my collection of African fabrics that include Kente cloth, Cameroon indigo, wax print, mud cloth, and Shweshwe etch-printed designs.
The Jackson Sisters
For the Jackson Sisters I used a floral-patterned upholstery fabric that had similar oranges and greens, with a light-colored background that brightened up the scene. The crisscrossed strips are from the same fabric, and I added irregular bands of black stitching to give texture and volume. The sisters were photographed in their finest Sunday white dresses among a group of children at their First Communion.
Peg Green at work.