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Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE)
203 N. Wabash, Suite 1720, Chicago, Illinois 60601-2417
312/870-6140 fax 312/870-6147
Lillian "Kay" Dawson is both an artist and an educator. These roles are constantly merging and diverging in her work.
She started working with CAPE as a parent organizing one of the original arts partnerships in 1992. Kay has since worked within this and other partnerships, and also as grant writer, administrator and artist. For the Fall 2002 issue of the Illinois School Journal, she wrote an article about the ten years of her CAPE partnership. Currently she is working with two teachers at Mark Sheridan Math and Science Academy on an action research project. Eighth graders are researching immigration and emigration to and within the U.S., in a quilting/performance/social studies project.
Kay is a textile artist with a BFA from the University of Kansas and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. She is an Associate Professor in Art and Design at Chicago State University, teaching all the fiber arts and weaving courses including natural dyeing, felting, quilting, tapestry, and most forms of weaving.
As an artist she works in both 2D and 3D, always in some way associated with textile patterns, structures, or concepts. Currently her personal artwork explores the complexities and possibilities of the networked twill, as designed for and woven on a 24-shaft dobby loom. She interfaces the pattern created by the loom with the painted and/or discharged warp prepared before weaving. In this work, Kay is essentially a landscape painter who weaves her canvas. Sometimes the canvas stands alone, and sometimes it is further dyed, discharged, quilted or otherwise marked or embellished. Having been raised on a farm in Kansas, to this day her work is influenced by the imagery of the sky, the patterning inherent in the fields, and the physicality of the atmosphere.
Kay has always seen a connection between the process of building cloth though weaving, and farming in particular the mark-making of working the fields, the growth of crops in these fields, and the impact of the weather on these fields. Weaving allows for additive color mixing, not unlike that in the sky and nature, and the painted warp allows for the accidental, revealing the hand of the artist against the mechanical production of the loom. Like farming, this work combines and reveals the hand of the maker, the nature of the raw material, and the mechanics of production.