Piece by Piece - Page 2

On top of making art, Schulze teaches it, in a manner that avoids what she sees as the sins of academic arts education, which she says is inimical to artists developing their own style.

"It's getting the artist doing what the professor wants, making your artwork look like the professor's," she says. Schulze, who has only taken art courses in passing, is proud that Gore Vidal told her that she is not self-taught but rather an "autodidact."

Schulze loves traveling, noticing details—signs, torn posters on weathered walls, shop windows—which she often photographs, and then collects and later incorporates into her art.

Most of her traveling is to teach workshops. "I think last count was 19 countries I've been to teach," she says. Upcoming is a visit to South Korea. She is a favorite in China, where she has visited to teach "at least eleven times" since 2000. She recalls a stint in Shandong.

"Little children would call me the panda, because I have white hair," Schulze says. "I was the 'American panda,' and I thought it was the sweetest title I could have."

"I don't teach what I do. I teach them how to think," she says. "I'll teach them how to use materials in their own way."

"I sort of protected them from being so influenced by me, by not showing any of my work until near the end of the workshop."

It's not clear that students could create the work that Schulze makes even if they tried. They could parrot her techniques—she has pioneered using photocopiers and glue to transfer images onto fabric.

But could students get to what is essential in Schulze's art—an exploration of the passing world as she experiences it, photographing it on the fly, collecting images and combining them in ways that suggest visual diaries?

A recent series of works, 'Me, Myself and I,' is frankly autobiographical. Another moving series, 'Winter of Loss,' from 2019, was created in response to her husband's death after his years of suffering from memory loss.

In person Schulze is a grand storyteller, and she is a poet as well. It's not surprising her work suggests narrative.

About Schulze's art, Corsini says: "There's a lot of playfulness in it. There's a lot of depth in her work, how she manages to create this amazing, complex patterning.

"And yet it's also very simple. It's refined, it's sophisticated. She definitely has her own view of how the world is."

"And [her roots go] back in the '70s, that's when the Art Quilt movement started. So she's definitely on the forefront, because before that, people were making very traditional quilts or they were making quilts that were done from kits or following patterns, as opposed to inventing what it is that you wanted to express."

"Joan is a really important artist, and I'm calling her an artist rather than a fiber artist because I think she's transcended [the medium]," Corsini says.

It's not surprising that Schulze is best known for collage, because her career itself is a collage. "In little bits and pieces, I made this career," she says.