Before attending a meeting at the Cal EPA building in Sacramento I had the opportunity to tour the building’s eight fabric collage displays. On various floors of the 25-story building, framed art pieces made by Merle Serlin, depicting different scenes of the California landscape can be found. Two members of Cal EPA staff escorted Roberta Firoved, CRC Industry Affairs manager, and myself through the tour.
The first collage on the third floor depicts the see canyon in the Monterey bay area incorporating shades of deep blues, greens and purples.
The second exhibit on the fifth floor depicts the beautiful Central California coastline.
The third display on the eighth floor is an aerial of Delta farmland. The patchwork of the fabric is really representative of the piecing together of the fields in this area tied together by water flowing through the center.
The fourth piece on the twelfth floor is a close up shot of California’s renowned redwoods. The details on this display are perhaps the most spectacular. Several different fabric patterns are utilized to capture the texture and life of these grand and majestic trees.
The fifth fabric collage hangs on the seventeenth floor. This collage was one of my favorites – the rolling foothills of the Central Coast inland. This area is very familiar to me as it surrounds the Cal Poly campus.
The sixth exhibit on the nineteenth floor shows the Joshua Tree National Park.
The seventh display on the twenty-first floor is of beautiful Lake Tahoe. This fabric collage presented a particularly interesting point of view. Instead of an aerial of the large lake, the artist chose to show a close up of some rocks on the edge of the lake. Again, through various fabrics and careful hand stitching, it’s a work of art.
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The final and possibly most grand of the pieces hangs on the twenty-fifth floor. This collage is of breathtaking Mt. Shasta. Another of my favorites, this quilt (see right) looks the most like a painting or picture than any of the eight artworks. These fabric collages are truly spectacular. The artist used various colors, patterns and textures of fabrics held together with intricate hand threading. Up close one can see the careful detail that that adds to a work of art that looks more like a painting from a distance.
The CRC office also has a quilt by this artist depicting Sacramento Valley rice fields.
An unforeseen opportunity of my internship with CRC has been to experience local cultures of many of the cities and small towns of the Sacramento Valley. It has been my pleasant surprise that agricultural lands have often been the subjects of many of these art displays. Rice country, and agriculture in general truly can be seen in all aspects of Northern California communities.
Maddie Dunlap is a senior agricultural communication student with a minor in agribusiness at California Polytechnic State University – San Luis Obispo. She is the eighth generation of Dunlaps born and raised in Colusa County agriculture.
When Maddie isn’t studying hard at Cal Poly, she enjoys traveling throughout California, Giants baseball and attending county fairs.
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