Alice Beasley
Alice Beasley has been a fabric portrait artist in the San Francisco Bay Area since 1988. Her work has been exhibited in many venues throughout the United States including the American Folk Art Museum in New York and the Smithsonian Anacostia Museum as well as abroad in Madrid, France, Japan and Namibia. Her work has been purchased or commissioned by a number of individuals and public entities including the County of Alameda, Kaiser Hospital, Highland Hospital and the Sunnyvale Medical Facility.
She was one of 44 artists that participated an exhibition at The Textile Museum at George Washington University in Washington, D. C. called “Stories of Migration: Contemporary Artists Interpret Diaspora,” April 16 through September 4, 2016. Her piece for that exhibition, “Blood Line”, was featured prominently in National Public Radio’s coverage of Stories of Migration.
Her piece, “Feeding Time at the Swamp”, is currently being shown at the New England Quilt Museum in their “Threads of Resistance” exhibit. This exhibit is a juried exhibition of fiber art created by the Artist Circle Alliance to protest the Trump administration’s actions and policies.
Artist Statement
“Fabric is my chosen medium of expression through which I create realistic portraits of people and objects. I find color, light, shadow, line and value in the pattern of ordinary household fabrics. From these I snip small pieces which I arrange and fuse into a figurative composition. As such the work grows from within rather than being applied to the surface of a canvas by paint, pencil or similar drawing tools. When the image is complete, I sew it together with the stitch line constituting the final “drawn” line.”