photos by Jeff Greenwald, except where noted

The insistent whir of an HQ Stitch sewing machine is a sound like no other. It fills Joe Cunningham’s San Francisco quilting workshop—a smallish room, stacked with fabrics, behind his sunlit gallery—and he raises his voice to be heard.

“It’s not that different from some regular machine. But while a lot of domestic machines have fancy stitches and programs, this doesn’t have any of that. All it does is go forward, very fast. And that’s all I need: a straight stitch. I don’t use any fancy stitches, so this is perfect for me.” 

Prior to meeting Joe, I—like many men—had but a vague idea of what a quilt actually is, much less how to create one. Patient and confident, with the affability he displays in his online teaching programs, Joe walks me through the steps.

“A quilt is three layers,” he explains. “When you look at a quilt laying on a bed, the color design that you see is called the quilt top. Underneath that, there’ll be the quilt backing. And between those two layers is stuffing—batting—of some kind or another. And the stitches that hold those three layers together is called the ‘quilting.’ So you quilt your quilt, right? It’s a verb as well as a noun. You have to quilt your quilt to make it quilted.”

The colorful, complex quilts hanging on the walls of Joe’s Market Street gallery are spontaneous; he doesn’t sketch their designs out first. “I work directly with the cloth,” he says.

“So you think of your cloth as your paint,” I suggest.

“You could think of it that way,” he nods. “I think of it as my cloth.”

Joe Cunningham began making quilts in 1979, in his hometown of Flint, Michigan. He was 27. It came about serendipitously: In an attempt to impress his then-girlfriend, he joined her in a quilt-making project, inspired and mentored by the revered (by quilters) Mary Shafer. “You can find her in the Quilters Hall of Fame,” Cunningham affirms.

Along with their efforts to find a home for the 350 quilts in Shafer’s archive, says Cunningham, “we apprenticed ourselves to this older woman.” For several years they worked under Shafer’s direction, imitating early quilting styles. “Mary believed that if you’re going to make quilts, you had to study quilt history, and learn all the techniques involved in quilt-making. You had to be an engineer, to figure out patterns and how to make them work together. And you had to be an artist, to do it all artfully.”

His process seems, at first, counterintuitive. He starts with a theme for his quilt; personal, political, or abstract. He then selects the fabrics he thinks might bring his idea to life. “But if any of those fabrics look like they go together in a ‘nice’ way, I replace them—so I end up with things that weren’t made to go together.

“I don’t want color harmonies that are familiar to me,” he says. “And the ones that seem like they go together are ones that I’ve seen before.”

Joe begins by cutting out pieces of cloth, ironing them flat, and sewing them together. He pairs an orange pattern with a mint-green fabric, turning the patches this way and that.

“I see what starts to develop. I could sew this together and continue this green line… I like that. Or I could do something that would require another piece. But I’m always looking for straight seams.” Joe fixes the orange/green piece to his design wall—a flat, white surface—to begin a sort of storyboard. “I can pin things up there and see how they’re working together; what my subconscious likes.”

The techniques of quilt-making are thousands of years old—possibly dating as far back as 3400 BCE. But historically, the finished product was almost exclusively for rulers or the wealthy. “It’s such a labor-intensive way to make a blanket,” says Cunningham, “that it was never used for common people.”

Quilted bed coverings from India became fashionable European imports in the late 1600s and 1700s. There were just a few basic styles. In India, they were made by servants and slaves—but in Europe (especially England and France), quilts became part of a tailor’s repertoire. “It was a commercial thing,” says Cunningham, “and was initially done by both men and women.”

All of that changed during the American Colonial period when women—primarily during the westward expansion—discovered quilting. Though their days were defined by intense labor, women realized they could sit down together for hours around a quilting frame, and kibbitz while cutting and sewing.

By the mid-1800s, quilting had become an almost universal practice by American women.

“They changed the whole idea of what a quilt was: from a commercial thing to a gift, made for somebody that she loves, or for charity,” says Cunningham. “It became a wide-open field of creativity. That was completely different than anything that had happened anywhere in the world before.”

“When an American woman makes a quilt, it’s her birthright,” observes Cunningham. “But it’s a completely freakish thing for a man to do. There’s no context for a man.” Men have one advantage, though: “It’s easier, in the very beginning, to just go your own way; and do whatever the hell you want.” While women, he says, “have to overcome the whole weight of the tradition on them.”

In 2010, Joe authored a book titled, “Men and the Art of Quiltmaking.” I wondered if there was something the 30 men he profiled had in common.

“No,” he said. “Nobody I know of has found a common denominator. They come from all classes, races, and ethnicities. There’s a high number of gay men among male quilt-makers. But yesterday, I met this straight accountant for a large ad firm; he makes blankets and quilts, and it’s totally out of the blue.”

We have a look at the quilts hanging on the gallery walls. Though Cunningham—like many abstract artists—has a foundation in formalism, his works are a dizzy, dazzling display of irony and introspection.“

Two-Party System” is an array of red and blue rectangles, offset by a black-and-white chessboard. Stitches evoking a jungle are hand-quilted throughout. “But though the jungle stitches hold the three layers together,” says Cunningham. “They only read subliminally—because there’s so much busyness on the front.”

“And what’s your rationale,” I ask, “in hiding a jungle on the back of this quilt?”

“Well, the two-party system is a jungle.”

Another quilt, the “Mariupol Triptych,” evolved out of Cunningham’s friendship with several Ukrainian artists, and an invitation to mount a solo show of his quilts in Kyiv in 2020—an opportunity stymied first by Covid-19, and then by the Russian invasion in 2022. “And so I did the thing that I always do when I’m moved: I made a quilt about it.” The Triptych is Cunningham’s answer to Picasso’s “Guernica”: an anti-war statement in red, green, and pink, swarming with black crows.

Some quilts, though, are almost comical—like “Facial Recognition,” where a portrait of his wife, Carol LeMaitre, emerges from a whirlpool of seemingly random colors.

“These fabrics don’t go together,” he says. “But once I put Carol’s face on there, you don’t see the background at all. We are so keyed to facial recognition that the insanity of the background doesn’t even register.”

Though he might not use any “fancy” stitches, Cunningham’s work has found a worldwide following. His online quilt-making courses draw thousands of viewers, and his own vision is reaching beyond the boundaries of 6×6-foot squares. Shortly before we met, Cunningham had returned from Cape Cod’s Cahoon Museum of American Art for the opening of his solo show, “Quilts for These Times.” As an on-site, Cristo-like installation, he covered the Museum with a quilted patchwork of recycled spinnaker sails.

And though his creations now sell for as much as $13,000 each, Cunningham has never lost sight of the primary purpose of quilts: “I’m trying to make a blanket that will warm you against the coldness of the universe,” he says, “and will also look at home on the walls of a museum.”