COLLECTIONS (Selected)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art,NYC.
The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco,.
Cleveland Museum of Art.
Memphis Brooks Museum of Art.
The Wustum Museum of Art, Racine, Wisconsin
Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock,AR
North Carolina State Museum
Tennessee State Museum
The Fine Arts Museum of the South, Mobile, Alabama.

CORPORATE COLLECTIONS

Schering Plough Pharmaceuticals
Rhone-Poulenc Rorer Inc.Pharmaceuticals
Time-Life: Southern Living

ARTIST STATEENT

Inside/outside, open/closed, front/back, lose/tight, containers, walls, openings… words I’ve used to describe baskets. I’ve always considered my work to be “about” baskets as opposed to literal baskets, and after more than 25 years of basket making the definitions and boundaries are still changing.

My recent work, both the flat pieces and the “inside out baskets” grew out of a recent experience… an “aborted” basket, which I turned upside down, and inside out with its threads dangling… and gradually I fell in love with it. The idea of a vessel began to feel like a straight jacket. I wanted to open them up, flatten them out, let them take a deep breath. The back fascinated me because of its hint of the laborious design on the other side. There was a sense of humor about the back and I wanted to let that show. I had always regretted losing the richness of the multicolored ends when a vessel was neatly clipped and finished at its completion.

Perhaps it has to do with advancing years – the phrase “when I grow old I shall wear purple”. When I grow old I shall let my spirit come out and play. Who makes up the rules anyway?

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Patti Lechman is a Fiber Artist living in Memphis, Tennessee where she has taught in the Department of Fine Arts at Southwest Tennessee Community College (formerly Shelby State Community College) for more than 25 years. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in over 150 exhibitions since 1980.

Lechman was the recipient of a Southern Arts Federation/National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1994 and has traveled widely, organizing and fund raising for trips abroad with her inner city college students for the last six years.

Recent exhibitions include museum shows at the Arkansas Arts Center, Tennessee State Museum, Wustum Museum, Knoxville Museum, and the M. H. de Young Museum in San Francisco. Her work traveled to Helsinki, Finland for the Miniatures: 2000 Exhibition and was shown in the 12th International Biennial of Miniature Textiles in Szombathely, Hungary in 1998.

ARTIST”S STATEMENT.

The vessel, the archetypal female form has been central to my work for more than 25 years, whether the vessels were made of clay or fiber. Both materials are associated with Neolithic civilizations which produced vessels in clay and fiber to store and carry grain, water, wine…life giving substances. .

The pieces represent a life spirit for me, which is why mythologies, Hindu, Buddhist, Greek and Egyptian figure so strongly in my titles. Creation myths, stories of birth, death, beauty, evil, fire, sun and moon, sky and seasons, ideas central to all life seem to me a vital way to connect with who we are, where we come from, what we all share – our commonalities as humans..

I want my work to celebrate those ideas since I feel our ability to celebrate has been so damaged by contemporary angst, fear, mistrust and cynicism. Our spirit of joy and beauty must live in spite of the pain of existence. I make no apologies for wanting my work to delight visually. I hope it has grace and elegance, that it can make the spirit soar, maybe briefly, but joyfully, as a celebration of life and the resilience of the Human spirit.