Last year I had the odd experience of bidding on one of my older tapestries at auction. I let the other guy win. Lately I found that the other guy (gal? don’t know the identity!) has gallantly offered the work to the Racine Art Museum, a longtime supporter of mine (I sell ribbons in their shop, too!). It is still working its way through the accessions process but they told me it is safe to add it to the resume.

The piece is from the 1980’s, from a series about a wonderful folk art environment in Houston (where I lived for several years), called The Orange Show. It is worth a visit.
These tapestries came on the heels of my Italian-villa series that I sent to the Venice Bienale of Architecture in 1985, and were as different from the Tuscan theme as they could be. Sadly, most of the Orange Show pieces died in a fire at Van Straaten Gallery in 1989 in Chicago (the great gallery fire!) but this one made it out alive beforehand and now has made its way north to Racine.

(The tapestry shown here is a detail of “Villa Farsetti: The Greenhouse #1″, which is in a private collection in Houston. Great piece, approx 10″ tall x 110” across. The beginnings of thinking about ribbon as an art form!)