Anna Conklin never took any studio art classes at Stanford. But the American history major relished learning about pioneer women who created beautiful quilts from tobacco sacks and can labels, and slaves who stitched intricate escape routes into their quilts. Now Conklin is carrying on that artistic tradition herself.
After graduating in 1994, she steered closer to the art world, studying in Florence and teaching art to teenage girls at a health clinic in San Francisco. It was her decision to pursue a master’s degree at the California College of Arts and Crafts that brought quilts back into her life. Inspired by a textile course, she completed three quilts for her thesis, dedicated to her grandmother. In one piece she included her grandfather’s baby socks, her own childhood nightgown, her father’s gardening glove and, from her grandmother, buttons and a lock of hair.
Last October, Conklin and a friend started their own business, Magpie Decorative Painting, in San Francisco. They paint children’s murals and furniture and do faux finishing—“making stuff look like faded plaster on Italian walls or wood graining or stone,” Conklin explains. But quilting, or “painting with fabric,” as she calls it, is her passion.
As her thesis did, Conklin’s creations commemorate people and their milestones. In the quilt pictured here, a piece in memory of the victims of September 11, she chose vibrant colors and used silk exclusively because, she says, “silk, like each of those lost lives, is precious, valuable and as strong as it is fragile.” Conklin left the edges unfinished, “to lend to the feeling of rubble, of things falling apart, of the people who were left behind falling apart, of unfinished lives.”
—Leslie Talmadge, ’86
