Quilts are tangible records of American life, a tactile method of storytelling. Anna Von Mertens’ bold conceptual quilts tell more than stories: they’re hand-dyed, hand-stitched reflections on existential questions about time and space. “Time plays a key role in my work,” she says. “I’m drawn to existential or time-based scientific data. Looking, observing, quantifying and naming—it’s not dissimilar to the artistic process of looking and seeing.”

Originally a printmaker, Von Mertens, who lives and works in Peterborough, New Hampshire, received a bachelor’s degree from Brown University. She stitched her first quilt in college and was transformed. “I just fell in love with the medium,” she says. “There are all these associations with quilts and if you take an idea, then translate it through quilting, you see things in a different way.” Von Mertens explored her passion in the textile department at the California College of the Arts, receiving a master’s degree in fine art.

Marriage and family eventually brought her back to Peterborough and the east coast. She explored the dichotomy between her east coast roots and west coast sensibilities in an early quilt series called North, South, East, West, depicting each region as energy patterns; the east coast was portrayed as a black hole. “I saw the east coast as an introverted landscape and the west coast as extroverted,“ she says, “but it wasn’t meant to be a definitive statement.”

Jupiter Rising, January 7, 1610, Padua, Italy, 2008, hand-stitched, hand-dyed cotton, 54 x 100 in. Photo courtesy of the artist and Elizabeth Leach Gallery; photo by Don Tuttle.

Her studio, in a former textile mill in Harrisville, New Hampshire, helps create a sense of place. “It’s a wonderful place to work and the history feels very present,“ she says. “I’m in a section where the textile looms were.”

Von Mertens uses scientific phenomena to interpret events, thorougly researching and immersing herself in a subject before, and while, creating her work. She designs her patterns on a computer, then uses a projector to transfer the patterns to hand-dyed fabric, outlining them in chalk; then she stitches the outlines. Her favorite body of work mapped stars above violent historic events in U.S. history, such as September 11, 2001 and the Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War. “It links these questions of time and our place and perspective to it,” she says. “I sited the viewer at the act of violence in a way you’re removed from it but in the moment.”

Bacchus’ aura, after Caravaggio, 2009, hand-dyed, hand-stitched cotton, 39 3/4 x 33 in. Photo courtesy of the artist and Elizabeth Leach Gallery. Don Tuttle photo

Her next project is inspired by her daughter’s fascination with phone emojis. “I’m looking at emojis and how they’ve become a language we’re making together,” she says. “My daughter thinks they’re amazing. It’s like a visual art language.”

Von Mertens’ work is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the RISD Museum; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery, among others. Upcoming shows include Shape/View, the Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, Oregon, September 6-30, 2017; and Another Time, Handwerker Gallery at Ithaca College, Ithaca, New York, November 1-December 17, 2017.

Anna Von Mertens–Artist
Peterborough, New Hampshire
Website

Top image: The Duke and Duchess of Urbino’s auras, after Piero della Francesca, 2009, hand-dyed, hand-stitched cotton, 18 x 13 in. (each). Photo courtesy of the artist and Elizabeth Leach Gallery; photo credit Don Tuttle.

The post A Stitch in Time appeared first on Take Magazine.

The world is often a funny place, and the strangest little influences can end up opening up possibilities you never even could have conceived. If Erin McKeown had attended a different high school in Virginia or the same school at a different time, the quirky song sculptress may never have planted roots in Massachusetts. Lucky for us, she admired a soccer star.

“Growing up in Virginia, I always imagined I would go to the University of Virginia or William & Mary,” says McKeown, who was featured in the first Take issue. “But then, the valedictorian a couple of years ahead of me in school, he went to Brown on a soccer scholarship. I thought that kid was awesome; he was a great mix of artistic and athletic. He wasn’t a great follower of the rules but somehow, made it all work.”

So when it came time to visit colleges, McKeown insisted on touring Brown’s campus, and “loved it.” She’s been in New England ever since, and believes the area absolutely shaped her eclectic, pop-sensible sound. “The winters here align with my psyche, sometimes,” McKeown says. “Three or four years ago, we had a really bad winter; it was like living in an ice palace for six months, with five feet of snow in the front yard. That winter aligned perfectly with how isolated and alone I was feeling. But I also think there’s nothing better than a western Massachusetts summer.

“I think if I had gone to school in the South and lived in North Carolina or went to college in West Virginia, I would be a very different kind of musician,” she continues. “I’d likely be in a band and we would have written much different music.”

McKeown, a close personal friend of onetime WRSI jock and current MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, has issued over 10 collections of songs, including her 2009’s Hundreds of Lions, which was released through Ani DiFranco’s Righteous Babe Records. She’s been touring the United States extensively since the spring release of her latest EP, Mirrors Break Back, and has concerts planned this fall for Australia, New Zealand, and Europe.

McKeown’s socially conscious, exoteric music reflects the musician’s formative years as a fixture of the New England coffeehouse scene. “I grew up taking piano classes, in an attempt to be a well-rounded student,” McKeown says. “But I started playing guitar at 12. From the moment I picked up that guitar, I started writing songs. It came so naturally, because I had always written stories as a kid. What I’m doing now is about trying to create something new and finding my voice as a writer.”

McKeown says she’s already started thinking about her next opus, but intends to spend much of 2018 focusing on Miss You Like Hell, a musical she’s written with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes. “It’s the story of an undocumented woman and her citizen daughter driving across the country together, trying to repair their relationship,” McKeown says. “We’ve been working on it for seven years. Of course, immigration has been an issue in this country for a long, long time, but we had no idea it would spark such a vitriolic political moment.”

Want to hear what McKeown’s listening to? Check out our Take a Listen Spotify channel. While you’re there, check out the playlists from other musicians we’ve featured.

Erin McKeown, singer-songwriter
Northampton, Massachusetts
Website
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Bandcamp

All images courtesy of Erin McKeown

The post Erin McKeown: A Musical Work-in-Progress appeared first on Take Magazine.

Brown University graduates Max Easton and Nico Enriquez have come a long way since the early days of Farmer Willie’s Ginger Beer. “We had to grind 300 pounds of ginger for our first batch in three dinky Cuisinarts,” says Enriquez. “We couldn’t afford anything better.”

Three years, two degrees, and one bobble head later, things are looking up for the alcoholic ginger beer manufacturers. The fresh and refreshing ginger beer, with a blend of cold-pressed ginger, ginger puree, cane sugar, lemon juice, molasses, and nutmeg, is now sold at just over 400 locations.

Beginning production with Isle Brewers Guild in Rhode Island has enabled the founders to scale even further beyond their initial dreams of Cuisinarts and home kitchens; they’re on track to sell more than 3,000 barrels this year alone. “The team, the equipment, the fact that we get to collaborate and learn from some of the best breweries in New England—Devil’s Purse, Newburyport, Narragansett—it’s all upping our game and allowing us to make craft ginger beer at its absolute finest,” says Enriquez.

Now a team of five, plus Willie Fenichel—the eclectic Truro goat farmer whose original recipe inspired Enriquez and Easton to take Farmer Willie’s to the masses—their number one goal is getting product in people’s hands. “All we have to do is get people to try it and they love it,” Enriquez says. “It also helps that we are making a drink that tastes good, uses real ingredients, and has fewer calories than Spiked Seltzer.”

So while production scale might have drastically changed in recent years, having gone from Willie’s home-brewed five-gallon batches to 30bbl batches to currently 300bbl batches (a bbl is 31 gallons, or the equivalent of 330 12oz cans), the do-good mission of Farmer Willie’s has stayed central. “We wanted to make a company with a soul,” Enriquez says. “A company with soul, to me, is something alive and fun that cares about its impact on its customers and the world.”

Consistently playful, the manufacturers created a beer tap of Farmer Willie himself, a ginger beard for ginger beer. Whoever said gingers don’t have souls? (Cue South Park reference).

The real soul, however, is the fact that Farmer Willie’s is the only certified carbon-neutral brewery in the U.S. As part of that mission, they plant a tree for every ten cases sold. “We also donate one percent of our sales and a portion of our personal time working on sustainable projects in Massachusetts,” says Enriquez. “Without a planet, we don’t have ginger beer or alcohol or jokes.”

Nico Enriquez–co-founder Farmer Willie’s Ginger Beer
Pawtucket, Rhode Island
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The post Ginger with Soul appeared first on Take Magazine.

As this past summer began to shed the last layers of New England cold, Rhode Island artist John C. Gonzalez presented his first mini-retrospective at Brown University, in the David Winton Bell Gallery. Curated by Ian Alden Russell, the exhibition was a quiet and beautiful collection of Gonzalez’s work, tied by a common thread of collaboration, the visibility of labor, and the capacity to create in unexpected places. The show, titled Works Well With Others featured multiple interdisciplinary works across the mediums of painting, sculpture, and performance. Most notably, Gonzalez worked collectively with a group of employees from Bel Terra Landscaping, a landscaping company contracted by Brown for maintenance of the campus grounds, as well as Verde Design + Horticulture, to build a lush indoor garden in the heart of the exhibition. Created by John C. Gonzalez along with Juan Reyes, Pamela Rodgers, Julin Sanchez, Philip Taylor, and Julin Vasquez, the garden produced a shared space for personal reflection and self-healing.

Home Depot House, 2013 | Designed and installed in collaboration with store employees inside Home Depot store in Providence, RI | Photo by Shane Godfrey

The Brown retrospective captured Gonzalez’s passion as an artist, his constant conversation with art and institutions of labor, the daily exchange of human interaction, and the ways in which creativity is promoted or stifled in a flourishing era of capitalism. “Works Well With Others was about embedding myself into spaces where self-expression is not always encouraged or productive,” says Gonzalez, whose interest in working collectively with laborers stems from his own experience as a tradesman and retail worker. “In these spaces, I wanted to create moments for creativity and exploration.”

In 2013, Gonzalez was commissioned by the deCordova Biennial to create his project, Home Depot House (2013-14). Employed in Providence by the giant home improvement retailer at the time, he worked with his fellow co-workers to build a house. “In a place like Home Depot, you do not really have an opportunity to be super creative,” he acknowledges. “It is not really designed for that space because it is a retail environment. So for me, to work with management to be able to make something that was ours was subversive, because the power structure didn’t initially allow for it. And for me, art is a powerful thing.” From building a home to building a garden, Gonzalez stretches the space between formal art and craftsmanship, enabling art to have a broader sphere and wider accessibility to those who may not consider themselves artists.

Several works from Painting Library, 2017. Part of an installation where visitors may borrow paintings from the collection for the duration of the exhibition at Essex Art Center in Lawrence, MA | Photo courtesy the artist.

Outside of his collaborative sculpture and performance work, Gonzalez is a painter at heart; along with being a full-time father of two, he works at a paint shop by day. Finding collectivity in the seemingly mundane is central to Gonzalez’s artistic approach. “As artists, anytime we buy supplies for our work, like paint, someone had to make that, which leads to a transaction. Every time we find things or buy things, there is always a collaborative relationship, no matter what you do—like buying gas or buying clothing. For me, it is something that shouldn’t be overlooked, but instead be put at the forefront. It makes us reexamine all of these relationships we have every day with people, because we are all creating and doing.”

In June, Gonzalez will be presenting Painting Library, a solo exhibition at the Essex Art Center in Lawrence, Massachusetts, where visitors will be able to borrow paintings from the show for the duration of the exhibition. That same month, he’ll also be featured in a group show curated by John Finnerty and Francisco Gonzalez at The Wurks in Providence.

Portrait of John C. Gonzalez in studio | Photo courtesy the artist

John C. Gonzalez – interdisciplinary artist
Providence, Rhode Island
Website
Portfolio

Top photo Collaborative Garden, 2016 | Designed and installed in collaboration with Bel Terra employees inside David Winton Bell Gallery in Providence, RI | Photograhy by Jesse Banks III

This post has been updated to reflect recent changes.

The post Let’s Build a House Together appeared first on Take Magazine.