EMILY KROLL
New York-based designer Emily Kroll was born so farsighted that she was prescribed bifocals at one year old. A former shoe designer for both Calvin Klein and Alexander Wang, and currently a consultant for Michael Kors, she recently embarked on a personal project whose origins—in a rare but welcome occurrence for any creative professional—were visualized in her sleep. “In the dream I was blowing up small details of photographs I had taken to make large-scale abstract compositions. They looked like huge magnified pixels. They were beautiful and reminded me of a hard-edged version of the way I see without my bifocals,” she explains. Kroll chose quilting as the medium to bring her color blocks to life.
Made by Amish residents of Sugar Valley, Pennsylvania, from the extra wools, silks, and neoprenes of various ready-to-wear collections, Kroll’s quilts represent a marriage of colorful Bauhaus geometries and traditional craftsmanship. Even after years spent working with meticulous Italian shoe- makers, she has had to adjust to, shall we say, the Amish pace: Each quilt is made over the course of up to three months. Correspondence happens not, of course, via e-mail or phone, but through a middle woman who must travel to the community to address any production points in person. “They kind of keep this quiet distance from the industrial world,” Kroll says. “The simplicity of life, and their value system—family and work come before everything else.”
Kroll first experienced quilts as art objects while walking through “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend”—a 2002 Whitney Museum exhibition devoted to the imaginative, free-form quilts made by residents of a largely impoverished Alabama town. As a New York designer, she does not pretend to any rural textile tradition. But when her thoughtfully- assembled textures are treated to the multi-generational pastime of skilled quilters, outsider Americana meets the gridded, color-focused Modernism of Josef and Anni Albers, Mondrian, and Klee. Her practice has grown to include an upcoming collaboration with the New York- and Chicago-based label Creatures of the Wind, as well as a single quilt design with Araks Yeramyan, made from fabrics from her Fall 2013 Araks collection. In one of Kroll’s latest quilts, white and cream form a back- drop for layered, Tetris-like blocks of navy, black, subtly-contrasting grays, and a single bright-yellow square. Hang it. Sleep with it. Just don’t spill on it.
Alex Wolf most recently wrote about the Outsider Art Fair for The Last Magazine. He has also covered the arts for Modern Painters, Art in America, and The New Republic; and recently rounded up the city’s tastiest bar burgers for the New York Burger Map, now available from All-You- Can-Eat-Press.
