Photo by Jackie Alpers Tucson-area fiber artist Kathleen Sharp is literally all wrapped up in her work—colorful art quilts.

Quilt maker Kathleen Sharp’s collage creations marry her aptitude for narrative and her love of textiles

Deft with a needle and thread, Kathleen Sharp turns the fabrics she passionately collects into colorful quilts. But if you’re imagining puffy patchwork coverings that you wrap yourself up in on a chilly eve, think again.

Her collage, or art quilts, are the kind you “wrap your head around.” Thought-provoking, the color-rich pieces are filled with a bounty of symbols, including iconic fish, water, amphora, jugglers, goats, votives, and architectural theater-like spaces where, she says, “viewers might wander and wonder at will.

“My work is a narrative. It always tells a story,” Sharp explains. But people may not see the “story” right off, and can and do interpret it in their own fashion, she is quick to point out.

The Tucson-area artist’s wall-hung creations—which can range in size from 10 inches to 10 feet wide—have a surrealistic quality, those who know her work agree. On one collage quilt, for example, a ballerina on a pointed toe juggles large balls. To some viewers, the theme may simply amuse, but to Sharp, the spheres being balanced by the dancer represent possible threats to the environment, a premise that is echoed in many of her motifs.

“My concern for the environment can be simply stated,” says Sharp. “It’s to avoid fouling our own nest and that of future generations.”

Her distinctive art form—laden with serious messages and plain fun alike—caught the attention of the Smithsonian Institution, which included Sharp’s work in two exhibitions that traveled across the country, one of them for four years. And kudos have come to her from both textile collectors and fellow artists.

Notes Arizona mixed-media artist Barbara Brandel, a Phoenix Home & Garden Emerging Artist: “Kathleen’s art quilts are always beautiful and inventive. Inspired by the big issues, the personal and the mythological, she works in layers of cloth and content. I admire her method of deep examination of subject and her quest for the correct materials to make her statement. She is an explorer at the forefront of the narrative art quilt movement.”


Sharp often is asked to teach others her artistic mode of expression, and has done so through collage quilt seminars in the U.S. and in France, where she and her husband lived for three years.

While she has had an interest in a variety of art mediums over the years, her original vocation was in the mental health field, as a community relations specialist and co-therapist in children’s play therapy groups. Her creative leanings won out, and Sharp left that career in the 1970s to pursue some avenue of studio art.

But what that art would be, she did not know, and recalls asking herself, “What have you always wanted to do?” Her answer: “Make a quilt.”

Not knowing how to sew at the time, and with no art-oriented goal yet in mind, she learned some basic sewing skills and studied with a noted quilt historian. “I got some fabric and thought about making a quilt to sleep under, but it just took over,” Sharp remembers with a laugh. “It” was the same creative urge that steers her collage quilts today.

Instead of sewing a quilt for her bed, she found herself making an art quilt at a time “when the words ‘art quilt’ were not even known,” she remarks. “I had pieced together a night scene with two figures from an opera on a horse.”

Kathleen Sharp works on Balancing Act.

Acting on a suggestion from fellow members of an art group, she entered that first quilt in a juried show in Washington, D.C. “A couple bought it to have as their engagement gift to each other,” she recalls. “And a Washington Post art critic mentioned my name.”

Sharp has received much attention for her art genre in the three-plus decades she has been exploring it. Her works have been shown at numerous museums, are in private and corporate collections in the U.S. and abroad, and in those of many health-related institutions in northern California, where she lived before relocating to Arizona in 2004.

It was in a health-care setting that dentist Melinda Reynard first saw Sharp’s work. Involved in a serious car accident, Reynard was undergoing physical therapy and was captivated by a Sharp art quilt that hung at the site. Worried that her injuries would prevent her from returning to her dental practice, the creative woman contacted the artist, saying, “I love your work. If I can’t do dentistry, can you teach me what you do? I want to learn, and I want to own a piece of your work.”

She did study with Sharp in the artist’s Arizona home studio, and she also recuperated enough to go back to dentistry. Reynard purchased an art quilt titled Mirage, but had to wait a while to get it and present it to her fiancé. “It had been on display at the airport in Phoenix,” she relates.

It was Peggy Hazard, a former assistant curator at Tohono Chul Park galleries in
Tucson, who told staff at the Phoenix Airport Museum about Sharp’s art quilts, and the artist was subsequently given a one-woman exhibit at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. “Kathleen’s work is exceptional in its design, expression and also in its technical aspects,” Hazard says.  “She is using fabric as a medium to create sophisticated art—she is painting with fabric. I find her subject matter very compelling. There is a kind of surreal aspect to it.”