Barbara Kibbe
Built for Dreaming. Monotype. h: 14 x w: 11. 2024.
Dream 2. Monotype with metal leaf. h: 10 x w: 8. 2023.
Monotype. h: 10 x w: 8. 2024.
Fear and Longing. Monotype. h: 11 x w: 14. 2024.
Mountains Got the Blues. Monotype. h: 9 x w: 12. 2024.
Dream 3. Monotype with metal leaf. h: 10 x w: 8. 2023.
Dream 1. Monotype with metal leaf. h: 11 x w: 14. 2023.
Monotype. h: 10 x w: 8. 2024.
Monotype. h: 9 x w: 12. 2024.
Monotype. h: 9 x w: 12. 2024.
I am an art quilter and I am a printmaker, but I was a printmaker first. It’s fairly common for me to see a texture in nature or in the built environment and want to ink it up. I have had these urges concerning bits of pavement, monuments, packing materials, and the soles of shoes as well as wood grain, leaves and petals, roots, and body parts. I confess that I indulge the urge rather frequently.
I use a range of techniques and materials in my work. I print on silk, linen, cotton, Evolon, Lutradur, Remay, and various interfacings as well as fine art papers. In a single work, I often combine techniques, using my Takach press for monotypes, dry point, collagraphs, and lino. I also make use of screen printing and abstracted digital images. I sometimes use stitched fabrics as “plates”, inking up compositions that reveal the underside of quilts and garments including the fibers and lines of stitching. Scale is relative as the most intimate prints suggest broad landscapes. In larger works, I will often fuse and/or stitch prints or fragments of prints onto a fiber background.
Barbara graduated from college in 1974 with a BA in Art and a special concentration in printmaking. In those years, she lived in New York and haunted SoHo on the weekends, wandering from gallery to gallery. She was deeply influenced by the structure and balance in the work of Jasper Johns, the bold design of Louise Nevelson, the humor of Jim Dine and Paul Klee, the rich and often luminescent color of Helen Frankenthaler and the mastery of printmaker Gabor Peterdi.
Following art school and in search of a livelihood, Barbara went to law school. During her law school years, she gave time to New York Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts (VLA) authoring several articles and taking on the role of Associate Editor for VLA’s journal “Art and the Law.” In 1978, Barbara became the Executive Director of Bay Area Lawyers for the Arts (now California Lawyers for the Arts) and left her beloved New York for an adventure on the “Left” Coast.
Along the way, she discovered the visual and tactile richness of art quilts and she now revels in the expansive vision of large scale work that is both printed and stitched.
Barbara is past Chair of the Exhibitions Committee for Studio Art Quilt Associates, Northern California/Nevada Region and a member of the leadership team for Citizen Joy, a coalition of artists across the country, making and presenting work that celebrates democracy.
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