The Arts in Education
Paula Nadelstern:
Unique Quilter Exhibit at
American Folk Art Museum
Paula Nadelstern’s exhibit is not to be missed. The enormous, versatile and creative energies of the artist are only surpassed by the richly colored threads and kaleidoscopic designs in her quilts.
From the Bronx to Australia, from New Zealand to Acapulco, from little towns to big cities, Nadelstern has been asked to teach and demonstrate her talents. She has also written books on her passion.
Paula Nadelstern is a native New Yorker, born and raised in the Bronx, where she still resides. The two- bedroom apartment she shares with her husband and, until recently, her daughter has also served as her studio for more than twenty-five years. For much of that time her workspace was constricted to a 42” round kitchen table where she plied graph paper, transparent gridded templates, C-Thru ruler, compass, and sewing implements.
Nadelsern’s first quilt was stitched in 1968 for her bed in her college dorm room. It was not until 1987 that her interest in all things kaleidoscopic was sparked. Kaleidoscopes focus the responses of eye, mind and heart to a tiny window of colored fragments. Paradoxically, this microcosm fills the vision to the exclusion of all else. The resultant universe of constantly shifting color, light, and pattern is unpredictable yet orderly in its immutable bilateral symmetry. Nadelstern’s process requires that she telescope her own field of vision down to the minutest design elements embedded in complicated fabric patterns. The intimate comfort she has cultivated with the intricacies of kaleidoscopic imagery belies the almost unfathomable complexity of her technique and composition, but it has freed her to recognize the potential for entirely new relationships in the imaginative recombination of bits of fabric.#
