Dated 2006
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Purchase made possible through James Foundation Acquisitions Fund, 2007.024.0001

Jan Myers-Newbury is an artist known for her geometric, pieced quilts using hand-dyed fabrics. Her quilt Depth of Field: A Plane View was included in the "Twentieth Century's 100 Best American Quilts," organized by Quilter's Newsletter Magazine in 1999. More recently her work has included her own hand-dyed shibori fabrics—textiles embellished by shaping and securing before dyeing.

This piece, "MOOG," was included in the exhibition "Perspectives: Art, Craft, Design & the Studio Quilt."

Michael James, co-curator of the exhibition, describes "MOOG" this way:

"Jan Myers-Newbury moderates the hard assertiveness of the square and rectangular subdivisions of her surface by using the soft, water-like 'flow' of her tie-dyed fabrics. These fabrics very visibly reveal the intuitive and cumulative process out of which they developed. She works dye color as a watercolorist might, taking advantage of its tendency to disperse through the hills and settle into valleys of her tightly bound fabrics."

Myers-Newbury herself revealed that the origin of the name is from the Moog synthesizer, an electronic keyboard instrument invented by Dr. Robert Moog in the 1960s.

She says:

"I recall that Moog synthesizers had vertical bands of colored lights (white and red, mostly) that run up and down as the music changed. Maybe I am imagining this.... but that's what I remember."