Shelby Ward

Ancestry: Choctaw Freedman
Based In: Lenoir City, TN
Email: shelbyward.uwlaw@gmail.com

About the Art
"Community" is a series of quilts and quilted textiles that represent community and environmental stories. Influenced by modern design and minimalism, the artwork embraces modern aesthetics (negative space, asymmetry) and improvisation to present subject matter in a representative form. Composed of cotton fabrics, batting, and threads to emphasize interconnections among nature. The textile imagery includes narratives about land, water, air, pollinators, trees, built environments, and people. The familiarity and warmth of quilts invite people to comfortable exchanges with the subject matter. Environmental problems can be complex and intimidating. "Community" presents the subject matter of environmental problems in deconstructed and approachable form. Quilts are relatable media that most people have some kind of connection with. Through quilt-art, general audiences are invited to explore what environmental issues mean to them and to heal.

About the Artist
Shelby Ward is a Choctaw Freedman and modern quiltmaker focusing on environmental storytelling through her textile pieces. She has enjoyed collecting scrap materials and making new items since childhood. Shelby learned to sew from her mother and during home economics class in middle school. While in law school, she learned how to make quilts. One of her quilts was the highest fundraising item at the 2019 Heartwood Council Meeting, the annual meeting for a nonprofit organization focused on forestry issues. Shelby has been invited to teach middle school age youth how to make quilts. She is a member of the national and her local chapter of the Modern Quilt Guild. Shelby is a co-founder of the Oklahoma Freedmen Collective (okfreedmen.org) and a member of the Trail of Tears Association (Tennessee Chapter). In her professional life, Shelby is a public interest lawyer in the areas of environmental and animal law with a background in ecology. She lives in the Cherokee homelands of present-day East Tennessee.

Air & Water

textile - quilt, 2019

Inspired by the Cherokee National Forest and vivid fabric, this modern quilt celebrates air and water. Air and water are majestic parts of American forests. The blue and purple medium-scale prints showcase waves and birds of the air. The ombré purple colors of the corresponding air fabric represent the graduation of our atmosphere and its elemental changes in composition throughout. The subtle hue of the negative space harmonizes with the purple colors of the fabrics representing air.

Ushta

textile - quilted bag, 2019

Ushta is the word for the number four in Chahta anumpa. This piece is a custom-designed bag to hold locally harvested Eastern Red Cedar. The cedar and bag were gifted to a Chickasaw Freedmen friend. Shelby choose to use one whole diamond and three half diamonds in the bag design, because the place where the cedar grew had one parent cedar tree and three small cedar seedlings. Diamonds and half-diamonds are common in Choctaw designs.

Bee Spring

textile - quilt, 2020-2021 (in progress)

contact artist for purchase

This quilt celebrates native bee pollinators. Native bees do most pollination of plants—they pollinate 80% of the 250,000 flowering plant species in the world. The quilt fabric and block design are inspired by the native Mining Bee (Diadasia or Melissodes) that lives in Tennessee. The block design of this quilt is patterned after the underground nest design of Mining Bees. These nests have tunnels with branches on the ends of the tunnels. The turquoise and yellow colors reflect the warmth and life of springtime.

Nature & City

textile - quilt, 2017

"Nature & City" was made for a friend after that friend was diagnosed with cancer. Shelby’s friend is an environmental health advocate, so environmental themes are present to honor her friend’s work. The quilt incorporates features of the built environment and natural tree cover to represent connections across environmental domains. The wonky log cabin blocks are a testament to variation within nature and natural cycles that bring forth life. The central fabric of the blocks was shared by an environmental activist at a public interest environmental law conference.