The Art of Peggy McGeary

One week ago today, Hoboken bright light and quilter-extraordinaire Peggy McGeary left this world. She was 79 years young.

“Peggy was a genius quilter,” [Hoboken artist Liz] Cohen told The Jersey Journal, “She made extraordinarily beautiful pieces of art with fabric. Her pieces also told a story.”

Bob Foster, director of The Hoboken Historical Museum added, “Peggy was a long-standing member of the Hoboken arts community and her dedication to quilting and her love of fabrics was legendary. She will be missed."

In fact, in May 2007, The Hoboken Historical Museum hosted a retrospective of Peggy's work called "Memories in Needles and Thread." A featured piece was her "Hoboken 150th Anniversary Quilt" which encapsulated our city's history.

The May-June 2007 Hoboken Historical Museum Newsletter describes the art and craft of Quiltress McGeary, a bit of biography and process that produced her magnificent anniversary quilt.

MAY-JUNE 2007 NEWSLETTER- HOBOKEN HISTORICAL MUSEUM

"When the Hoboken cultural affairs office put out an appeal to the arts community to develop works to commemorate the city’s sesquicentennial in 2005, textiles artist Peggy McGeary was inspired by the rich subject matter of the city’s multifaceted history to try to capture the city’s story and spirit in needle and thread. The result of her inspiration, the Hoboken 150th Anniversary Quilt, will be on display with examples of her other work in the Upper Gallery of the Hoboken Historical Museum starting May 13 through July 1.

Although McGeary has been an accomplished seamstress since learning the art in a 4-H sewing club as a girl in rural Pennsylvania, she’s relatively new to the art of quilt making.

Textiles have long been a creative outlet for her: “I enjoy the tactile qualities and the unlimited color ranges of working with fabric,” she says. For years, she has made clothing, tote bags, and home décor items that are sold through local boutiques.

She caught the quilting bug in 1999, and taught herself how to make them by reading everything she could on the mechanics and traditions of quilting. Historically, quilters have used their medium to capture family and community memories, reusing pieces of fabric that have meaning to the quilter. McGeary also used modern techniques, including ink-jet transfer of photographs and computer-typeset words, to make quilting the perfect medium for the sesquicentennial project.

She tackled the project by researching the city’s history through the Museum’s resources and the Hoboken and Jersey City libraries. She also leaned heavily on conversations with people around town—especially historian Jim Hans—and many of the people she’s met in her nearly 30 years as a Hoboken resident.

“It was hard to choose what to include— this city has a lot of history!” McGeary says.

The more she talked to people, the more her ideas of what to include changed. But that suits her style. Unlike some traditional quilters, McGeary doesn’t like working in symmetry and matching corners; she prefers improvising her designs, using color rather than motif, and designing as she goes along. “Quilting awakens my intuitive sense of color, texture and light, and best expresses my artistic vision,” she says.

She visualized the project as a 76" square with a 48" inner square with four rows of four squares composed of strips of cloth imprinted with words of historic Hoboken events, people and icons. The outer border is a more fluid arrangement of photos and historic Stitching 150 years of history into a 76" x 76" square of cloth facts sewn onto a faintly patterned background piece of cloth.

She commemorates not only the historic public buildings, such as the Erie Lackawanna train terminal, the Library, and City Hall, and famous sons like Frank Sinatra, but also activists, artists, and small businesses—many of which were still operating—that make up the rich texture of Hoboken’s history.

The resulting quilt “reads like a book,” McGeary says, and consequently, she was invited to display the quilt at the Hoboken Public Library in its 2005 Sesquicentennial exhibit. Before that, the quilt debuted at a group exhibit celebrating the city’s 150th Anniversary at the 720 Monroe Street artists’ studio building.

McGeary has done other work that captures Hoboken’s spirit, including a beautiful quilt in rich hues called “Autumn on the 11th Street Island,” which interprets the view from her window at the apartment where she lived for 27 years until a fire forced her to move last year. She remembers when the beautifully landscaped island separating Hoboken’s widest cross-street was threatened with conversion to parking spaces—several of her neighbors banded together and pleaded with the city to plant trees and allow them to place Belgian block borders and plant shrubs and flowers around them. Winner of the Governor’s Award at the New Jersey Quilt Convention in Edison in 2006, she has also displayed her work in numerous solo and group shows since 2000.

Much of her work incorporates traditional ethnic fabric designs from Africa and Indonesia and hand-painted fabrics. She has also recently completed several quilted wall hangings as a tribute to the Gee’s Bend quilters, a celebrated group of southern Alabama women who carry on traditional quilting styles and patterns. The Museum show will kick off with an opening reception from 2–5 p.m. on Sunday, May 13 [2007]. "

"MEMORIES IN NEEDLES AND THREAD"

Peggy McGeary, artist