Heidi Parkes: Soft Magic
March 6–June 8, 2025
Heidi Parkes, Magical Thinking Attempt No 10, Courtesy of the Artist
This exhibition presents the artist’s mid-career retrospective.
Parkes is celebrated for her delicate hand stitching and innovative improvisational quilting techniques. This exhibition traces her artistic journey, highlighting her profound connection to textiles from the early stages of her craft to her most recent works. She is well-known for her Diary Quilts, personal reflections on her daily life expressed through fabric.
For Parkes, quiltmaking embodies the transformative power of creativity. She believes it can cast a spell, influencing real life. By drawing on principles of sympathetic magic and the Law of Attraction, she combines material significance, diagrams, labor, repetition, artifacts, and symbols to create powerful narratives. Her work often resembles an evidence board, as she filters her genuine and tender aspirations through a lens of abstraction, inviting viewers in while keeping her privacy intact.
Parkes approaches her craft with a lighthearted spirit, aiming to create beauty reflecting everyday life's fleeting nature. Her quilts undergo hand-stitching at nearly every stage, including piecing, appliqué, embroidery, and quilting, to achieve the softness that defines her quilts.
The exhibition will also showcase works by artists who have significantly impacted Parkes's practice, including Anne Wilson, Diana Guerrero-Maciá, Amanda Nadig, Shawna Doering, Vanessa Freund-Baden, and collaborators Zak Foster, Luke Haynes, Joe Cunningham, and Stephanie Fortin.
The catalog “Heidi Parkes: Soft Magic” is now available for pre-sale! You may purchase it here.
WMQFA’s Atrium and Staircase presents a selection of works by Heidi Parkes’s students from her 2024–25 yearlong class, “Quiltmaking with Heidi Parkes: Aesthetics Curiosity, Efficiency,” and her Travel Diary Workshops in Japan and France. The artists featured include Selina Toedter, Eleanor Kagan, Sarah Lind, Barbara Cameron, Aimee Walker, Malini Fuangvuthi, Claire Voelkel-Sedlmeir, Emily Zarse, CJ Juska, Robin Romain, Twinkie Chan, Faith Hale, Sherri Ramsey.
Join us for related programming throughout Heidi Parkes: Soft Magic.
Heidi Parkes - Quilted Tank Top, Thursday-Friday, March 13-14, 2025, 10:00 AM–4:00 PM.
Panel Discussion with Heidi Parkes, Roderick Kiracofe, Luke Haynes, Amanda Nadig, March 15, 3:00–4:30 PM.
Opening Celebration, March 15, 5:00–7:00 PM. Free and Open to the Public.
Heidi Parkes - Framed Quilts, Saturday, April 13.
Heidi Parkes - Diary Quilts: Documenting, Manifesting, and Storytelling with Stitch, Monday - Friday, May 12-16, 2025, 10am-4pm each day.
Heidi Parkes will be sewing in the exhibition space for a 3-day Artist Residency during her Soft Magic exhibition, March 19–21, from noon–4pm.
This residency will allow Heidi to sew while inspired by the quilts in the exhibition. It will also allow museum attendees to ask questions and see her process. Portability is one of Heidi's favorite aspects of hand sewing, and she'll be creating some of her small framed quilts while activating a 'mobile studio.' Heidi will be engaging with our Fiber Friends group on Thursday, and will be working with youth at the museum on the Monday prior. Join Heidi to make a framed quilt of your own in her April 13th workshop here at WMQFA.
Heidi Parkes: Soft Magic exhibition and catalog, along with related programming is supported by Susan Graham Wernecke and an anonymous donor.
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