Zwack's Quilts: Soft Medium, Hard Subject

Annemarie Zwack and two of her quilts, which reflect her opposition to the Iraqi war. The quilts are made of painted sheets of cotton. (By Rusty Keeler)

Annemarie Zwack was a painter. Oil on canvas felt like a dignified medium, something her friends and family could understand. But a few years ago she started feeling drawn to fabric arts. Down-home, crafty things like quilting.

She tried to repress the urge. She mentioned it to her husband, Rusty Keeler, but he didn't realize the extent of the attraction until he caught her in the act.

"I remember coming home one day and seeing her with a box of fabric spilled all over the dining room and she was sitting in the middle of it," Keeler says. "She was just kind of celebrating fabric and all the textures and colors and patterns."

Zwack, 32, a Fairfax native who now lives near Ithaca, N.Y., surrendered to temptation and switched media. A show of her quilts hangs at the D.C. restaurant Busboys and Poets. But don't expect floral borders and butterflies: Zwack has created a series of antiwar quilts.

A two-panel quilt called "Standard of Us" depicts tanks rolling over dead bodies and naked prisoners with nooses around their necks. In the quilt "Witness," two wide-eyed figures stand in front of the burning remains of an Iraqi city.

Not the most cuddly subject matter.

"I like the contrast of working in a soft medium to talk about war and bloodshed and things that aren't soft," she says. "In some ways, I think it makes it more accessible."

"Witness" is the closest in size and shape to a traditional quilt. Three of the others are in the shape of Iraq and one is only 14 by 13 inches. They aren't sewn patchwork-style, either. Zwack paints large sheets of cotton, then sews them together into a quilt.

Ancient works of Mesopotamian art inspired her protest quilts. Images of lions on the quilt "The Nature of Empire" are based on stone carvings found on a king's palace wall in northern Iraq.

Zwack says she chose that image, and others, as a reminder of the history of the region and to convey a sense of mourning for the destruction of the land and the people. The name of the show is "Where the Wheel Was Born." She took a class on the history of the Near East at Cornell University in preparation for creating the quilts.

Zwack comes from a socially conscious family. Her sister is a union-side labor lawyer in Washington. Her parents, a former priest and a nun, worked as missionaries in east Africa.

Zwack and Keeler practice what they call "intentional living." They try to grow their own food, or at least know the farmers who grew it. In 2001, Zwack ran for the Ithaca Common Council as a Green Party candidate (she lost, but got 41 percent of the vote).