Striding Lines: The Unique Story Quilts of Rumi O’Brien by Bobbie Malone (review)

Striding Lines is a beautiful compilation of essays and quilt images that reveal the remarkable work of Rumi O’Brien, a Japanese American quilter who lived for half a century in Madison, Wisconsin. Author Bobbie Malone was inspired to research and write the book after viewing O’Brien’s quilts in an exhibition of her work mounted in January 2017 at Madison’s Ruth Davis Design Gallery at the University of Wisconsin. In her thorough and captivating text, Malone describes O’Brien’s background and the influences in her life that are so evident in her work. O’Brien was born in Tokyo in 1937, the third of seven children, most of whom grew up to be visual artists; they all inspired each other’s work. O’Brien’s father was an illustrator of Japanese comic books for children; his images reflected his attention to detail and love for the “cheerfulness of children.” O’Brien’s mother was a tireless and proficient homemaker: her frugality and make-do aesthetic, which included regularly reusing fabrics, influenced O’Brien’s use of tiny scraps. O’Brien and her siblings spent their formative years in a natural setting outside Tokyo, from which they could view Mount Fuji.

O’Brien left Japan in 1956 to pursue her education in the United States. She studied watercolor at the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis, and she also remained active in the textile arts she had learned while growing up. She was proficient in weaving and knitting, in clothing design and fabrication, and in the creation of fiber craft human figures made from Japanese fabric scraps. O’Brien gave these figures as presents, honoring the Japanese tradition of gift-giving. She ultimately wrote a book in Japanese to teach others how to make them. Shortly after her arrival in the U.S., O’Brien became acquainted with American patchwork quilts; thus, she discovered that America, like Japan, had its own textile folk craft tradition.

While healing after a foot injury, she started experimenting with quilt-making. Her first quilt, entitled The Journey Home (1984), recounted the memory of how she hurt her foot during a long walk home. She created a small appliqué figure, based on the origami design of a human form and pieced from Japanese indigo-dyed fabrics, to animate the block-style quilt’s repeating hill-shaped landscape blocks. The figure, also found in kimono patterns and woodblock prints, became O’Brien’s signature design motif: a semi-autobiographical figure that moves sequentially through most of her quilts, having adventures and unfolding stories. The inspiration of her father’s comic book art is visible in her quilts. So are the echoes of serialized travel narratives found in Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints. (Ukiyo-e images convey qualities of floating and transitoriness.)

A confidence-inspiring “Best in Show” award at the Wisconsin Historical Society’s sixth annual quilt show, for her first quilt, helped to propel O’Brien into a two-decade career as a quiltmaker. The quilts presented in Malone’s text comprise a unique body of work. Some are whimsical, sometimes fantastical, as in I Love Jello, It Jiggles (2001) and Making Friends with Fish (1987). Others relate the story of mundane tasks or errands, such as Chasing Moles (1989) and Pauline and Gil Dug a Pond; It Took a Whole Summer (2002).

A family crisis midway through her quilting career led O’Brien to use her needlecraft, as women have done for centuries, to express and deal with her grief. She created a series of quilts that depart from the happy adventuresome qualities of her earlier work. The signature figures that inhabit these quilts wear pained expressions and struggle against harsh, confused landscapes. The quilts Pain (1993), Crisis (1994), and Digging Down Deep (1995) tell the story of her family crisis and the ways in which she worked through it. Their aesthetic is reminiscent of South African memory...