Unveiling of the Statue of Liberty

For me the most important thing is the creativity, the invention, the imagination, not perfecting the thing and making it right.

--Katherine Westphal

Katherine Westphal assembled this patchwork quilt from snippets of fabric printed with designs she created for the commercial textile industry. The image is a riff on American artist Edward Moran's patriotic painting of the Statue of Liberty's 1886 dedication, in which the statue towers above a harbor crowded with boats and American flags. Westphal's Lady Liberty seems appalled as she gazes at the chaos below, a comment perhaps on the meaning of liberty at the height of the civil rights movement.

Westphal, who described herself as a "free spirit," spent eight years designing fabrics for the apparel industry and taught for over a decade at the University of California, Davis. In the late 1950s she began making quilts and was soon transferring images from her own photographs and mass media sources to fabric in clever transformations of conventional quiltmaking practice.