Joseph L. Kagle, Jr. Peace Essays

Peace is like making a quilt: you choose the different patterns that please and interest you as the artist, you fit them together by placing them side by side for comparison and then you unite the divergent pieces. That is also the peace process. We can learn much about the method of constructing peace from making a quilt.

Making a quilt from life

Combining our experiences with others a personal style

    After working all January and February on new ideas and images that started as collages in the late months of 2004, I took three of my art pieces, some sticks that I had modeled and pre­pared as elements in the works (photographing the sticks, duplicating them at my outside stu­dio — Kinko's — and then assembling them against the parallax view of color patchwork seen from the sky).

     Then I took the working collage/sketches to a dinner at a friend's house.

     In a before-dinner-show-and-tell, I explained what I was thinking. Later, as the others looked at the work for the first time, one friend said:

     "That work is like the quilts that women have been doing for centuries."

     She was right. I have written about the need for a "woman's way of thinking" in the 21st century in political parameters.

     Women take the stuff of life and assemble it as a working home, a meal, quilts for design, color and use and as a way to bring divergent elements of a relationship together in a caring, functioning "family." I have said publicly and privately how much this way of thinking is needed in our time.  We need a president of the United States who thinks like a woman. Make that, we could use a woman as president.

Sewing pieces together

    I have seen how another friend, the late mayor Mae Jackson, brought pieces of our community together. We have had enough of leaders who divide society into warring fac­tions of deeply felt positions. To have a quilt of a community, city or nation, we must have a leader who can sew together the pieces of "red states" and "blue states," Republican and Dem­ocrat, conservative and liberal, men and wom­en, straight and gay, Christian and Islamic, black, white and all the other colors that make up America.

     It was a revelation to hear that my own art­work is an outcome of this way of thinking. The work functions as a "quilt" of color, sys­tems of seeing, divergent objects living side by side and getting rid of "old, useless paradigms," such as everything must fit one way of seeing our modern world.

    A collage-thinking sys­tem says, "All things can be used and may work together while they still retain their own unique­ness and wonder."

    Still thinking about the evening with friends, the next morning I ate my breakfast — a roll from Shipley’s Donuts, an apple from Wal-Mart and a banana from H-E-B. As I mashed them up into something that can be swallowed, it came to me that we used collage living every day.  We take the stuff of life and, by small adjustments, mold it together into energy for life while we subtract the waste that is not needed for the family of my bodily parts.

    This is how human beings live. It is only in our jobs that we separate how we function. For most men, everything must have a plan. For women, it must have a purpose (like sustaining the family unit through love). Sure, some men think in the latter way and some women have adopted the opposite persona.

     I have come to my own juncture thinking of the world as a quilt of seemingly divergent ele­ments to be arranged as working parts. As I am asked to work in other countries, this "quilt-like tapestry" has emerged as my style. I take elements of American culture that are universal: freedom, the worth of the indi­vidual, a work ethic and thinking "out of the box." Then I wed these into the culture that hires me to come in and make it all work together.

    What surprised me in our evening with friends is that I have taken this approach and introduced it into my own artwork. I now see all life as a quilt in the making.