briX Magazine and a Brick of Art

 

A few weeks ago I peddled the old Schwinn over to Joe Cunningham's quilting studio on Market Street in San Francisco to catch up with a fellow Flintoid. He handed over the ultimate Flint artifact, a "brick" of postcards created by Michigan artists for briX magazine. With its lowercase b and uppercase X, it was a publication that was pushing the boundaries of art, ideas and punctuation in eighties Flint. A self-described "collection of art & ideas," it was published thrice yearly by the Art Army Press for project ARTSOURCE/Greater Flint Arts Council.

"In this issue of briX we decided to invoke the adage: 'A picture is worth a thousand words,'" wrote Guest Editor Christopher R. Young. "To do so we changed the magazine format to that of a series of postcards to be packaged as a unit in the form of a brick. This not only provided a workable and convenient format, it also gave us a clever visual pun, a unifying theme to rally our imaginative energies around."

(Does everything, even art, have a tinge of militancy in Flint, where it takes an "art army" to "rally" our imagination?)

Here are a few samples from the collection that definitely capture the mood and feel of Flint in the midst of its free fall.

Thom Bohnert, Flushing, Self Portrait, 1988

Kenneth A. Hannon, Flint, From the series Greetings from Flint, 1988

Madeleine Barkey, Flushing, Untitled, 1988

Kenneth A. Hannon, Flint, From the series Greetings from Flint, 1988

Pat Keating, Grand Blanc, Fish: It's only art, 1988

UPDATE: A photo of the elusive briX Magazine, courtesy of Tim "East Side" Lane.

Flint Photos: Jim Cunningham's Retirement from Buick

When Jim Cunningham retired from Buick, they gave him a starter motor mounted on a plaque, like the thousands he had bolted on to engine blocks every week for 32 years at Factory 36. Thanks to Joe Cunningham for the photo of his father.

Joe the Quilter

I've always wondered how someone becomes a professional quiltmaker, and I know many readers have as well. Lucky for us, Flint Expatriate Joe Cunningham, who now lives in San Francisco, is here to tell the tale. Take it away, Joe...

I was born at McLaren hospital in 1952 and graduated from Swartz Creek High in 1970. Played guitar all over mid-Michigan in the ‘70s. Had a band called Two Steps Higher that acted as a sort of house band at the old Rusty Nail for a couple of years. I used to run the amateur night at Doubie's. Had a band in the early '80s called The Suttle Family, played a lot at Hat's Pub and other places downtown.

I got started making quilts in 1979 when I had returned to Flint after a couple of years on the road and a friend of mine, Larry...Larry...what the hell was his last name? Oh, right Larry McCarthy, an artist who used to live in lofts downtown, told me he knew a woman who needed a guitar player for some folk gigs she was doing. (Larry was a wonderful artist who made grotesque landscapes of faces, etc. with a ball point pen.) Anyway, the woman—Gwen Marston—had a house full of boxes of quilts. She had a grant from the Ruth Mott Foundation to document the collection of Mary Schafer from Flushing, a great quiltmaker, collector and historian. She liked doing the documentation and collecting all the info on the quilts, but dreaded writing the actual catalogue.

I myself had just finished my only year of college, studying English. I wanted to be a writer. So I offered to write the catalogue. "Fine," she said, "But first you would have to learn about quilts." So I read all the available literature: only about a half a dozen books at that time had any scholarly content. Then one night she came over to my apartment—in a house owned by the infamous John Kotarski—and brought me a small quilt, a thimble, and needle and thread, and showed me how to do the actual hand quilting, so I could write with conviction.
We played some gigs together; I wrote the catalogue; then I started to sit at the quilt frame with Gwen and quilt. Then I wanted to make my own quilt. Then I had the idea of becoming a professional quiltmaker. You don't need a license, a diploma, nothing. Just a business card. We got some gigs talking to quilt groups, then I wrote some magazine articles, then I got a book contract, then the next thing you know, we were professional quiltmakers. We bought some land and built a house up on Beaver Island and started the annual Beaver Island Quilt Retreat, attended by quilters from all over the world.

I returned to Flint in 1989 to start a musical production company with the late great John Johnson, a local composer and musician who died in a car wreck with Bruno Valdez in Feb, 1991. Gwen and I then moved back to the island. We split up, then I went off on my own and ended up in NYC for a year, then in Vermont, as host of a radio show. In late 1993 I was hired to move out here to San Francisco to write all the materials for some international exhibitions of quilts from the ESPRIT quilt collection. It was just a five-month job, but here I met Carol LeMaitre and got married and started a family. Now I travel all over the country to perform my one-man musical, Joe the Quilter, and teach classes. I wrote an essay for the upcoming quilt show at the deYoung Museum and will be doing some lectures, seminars and docent training for the exhibit.

To learn more about Joe and his work go here.
And find out about Gwen Marston and her work here.