The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (CAM) presents the first major museum exhibition in the Midwest of Ulla von Brandenburg as well as the US premiere of her seven-part quilt series, Wagon Wheel.
The presentation comprises of the individual works Wagon Wheel, Bear Paw, Drunkard’s Path, Flying Geese, Log Cabin, Monkey Wrench, and Tumbling Blocks (all 2009), suspended in CAM’s lobby. Von Brandenburg created the quilts following an extended research- based stay in Memphis, Tennessee, where she studied the traditions of predominantly female collectives in the American South (such as in Gee’s Bend) as well as the quilt patterns, symbols, and signs used by slaves to communicate coded messages plotting escape through the Underground Railroad in nineteenth-century America. Wagon Wheel demonstrates the singular power of folk vernacular to provide incisive sociopolitical commentary on a landmark episode in American history.
In her installation at CAM, the artist reimagines the Underground Railroad’s coded visual language. For example, while the exhibition’s eponymous “wagon wheel” quilting pattern traditionally features a wheel surrounded by radiating spokes and ostensibly carried the hidden directive of packing one’s belongings for an epic journey to freedom, von Brandenburg alters it by zooming and then cropping it. The resulting object toes the line between sociopolitical imperative and colorful abstraction, obscuring the quilt’s originally subversive function.
Wagon Wheel
January 16–April 11, 2015
Contemporary Art Museum St Louis
3750 Washington Blvd
St Louis
MO 63108
United States