Seeing Color, Music and Dance in our Latino-Styled Quilts

By Sara Cogswell, curator of "Threads of Evidence"

Material Culture exhibitor Soammy Feliciano-Hurst will be having a dialogue with regional quilt artist Cathy Jeffers on the Material Culture stage at the 2009 Cityfolk Festival during a session they have entitled, “Seeing Color, Music and Dance in our Latino-Styled Quilts”. Both quilters are of Puerto Rican heritage, and will both bring their unique cultural influences and vision to share with the festival audience.

Soammy Feliciano-Hurst was born in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico. Her mother taught her to sew when she was very little. She moved to Ohio in 1988 to pursue a master’s degree in Early Childhood, and it was not until then that she saw her first quilt while visiting a friend here in Ohio. Puerto Rico’s climate is such that there is no need for heavy blankets. However, Soammy was fascinated by quilting, and since she had been sewing since early in her life, decided that she would like to learn to quilt.

In her first fourteen years of quilting, she stayed with very traditional styles, mostly from patterns. She was “afraid to put too much color in her work”. Two years ago, she met Cathy Jeffers, a local artist as well as a co-worker in the education field. They were both Puerto Rican, and both loved their culture. Cathy’s passion to create incredible colorful pieces of art intrigued and sparked an interest in Soammy to be more creative in her own work. She began to think about “her people and culture”, and wanted to tell her story with her quilts.

Feliciano-Hurst’s favorite style of quilting is strip piecing. “Cutting hundreds of strips in different lengths and sizes gives me the freedom to create a picture, a story that reflects who I am as a Latino woman.” Often her quilts show the waves of the water in the ocean or a palm tree dancing among the sand dunes. “When I quilt, I feel empowered to imagine and to remember vivid memories that have shaped the person I am today.”

Cathy Jeffers is a prolific artist and quilter. Her collage and layering style of quilting is used to enhance the texture of her very narrative contemporary art quilts. One of her works is currently included in the prestigious Quilt National in Athens, Ohio, an annual international juried quilt exhibition.