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Biography
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Amy Ahlstrom is a contemporary urban quilter creating hypermodern fiber art. Drawing upon her background as a graphic designer and comix illustrator, Amy digitally photographs the visual details of cities—street art, signs, and architectural details—and collages these images via computer into quilt designs. The resulting quilts, crafted of raw silk and cotton, are tactile visual postcards of urban environments. Based in the Bay Area, Amy has designed urban-themed quilts from images of San Francisco’s Chinatown, North Beach, and Mission districts as well as from her trips to Tokyo, Kyoto, New York City and Chicago. Quilts from images of London, Paris and Amsterdam are in the works. Amy holds a Master of Fine Arts in Fiber from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Fiber from Northern Illinois University.
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| Artist's Statement |
| My quilts are influenced by pop-art painters such as Mark Ryden and artists who have referenced a comic-strip drawing style such as Margaret Killgallen, in that I appreciate bold and graphic takes on images that are inspired by urban life. Though it is textile art rather than drawing or painting, my work is most comparable to that of pop, lowbrow and graffiti artists. My quilts are modern art pieces that happen to be rendered in fabric. I take quilts out of a rural context and bring them into present-day urban environments. My ReMix series of quilts are thematically and visually dense, full of sampled layers of meaning. They reflect the experience of city life, as seen through the graffiti, signs, and buildings present in every city. They serve as an anthropological record of an urban neighborhood, in that the images that I capture are constantly in a state of flux. |
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