Michael James Michael James, a native and longtime resident of Massachusetts, now lives and maintains a studio in Lincoln, Nebraska, where he is the Ardis James Professor and the department Chair in Textiles, Clothing & Design, College of Education and Human Sciences, at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln. There he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in textile design and quilt studies, and is a Faculty Fellow of the International Quilt Study Center, the largest publicly held collection of quilts in the world. James earned his MFA degree in Painting and Printmaking from the Rochester (NY) Institute of Technology in 1973, and his BFA in Painting from the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, which in 1992 conferred on him an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree for his work in the area of studio quilt practice. A Fellow of the American Craft Council, James's work is included in numerous collections, including those of the International Quilt Study Center at UN-L, the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, the Museum of Art and Design in New York City, the Mint Museum of Craft & Design in Greensboro, NC, the Indianapolis Art Museum in Indiana, and the Newark Museum in New Jersey. He is a recipient of several National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist Fellowships, including a USA/France Exchange Fellowship, as well as grants from the Boston Artists Foundation. His work is the subject of the monograph Michael James Studio Quilts published in 1995 by Editions Victor Attinger, SA, in Switzerland, and he is the author of two classic guidebooks to quiltmaking and design, The Quiltmaker’s Handbook (1978) and The Second Quiltmaker’s Handbook (1981). He has written and lectured widely on non-traditional quiltmaking and led workshops on quilt design throughout North America and in Europe and Japan. |
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