Piecing Her Message Together
Deise is a full-time attorney with the federal judiciary. After Swarthmore, she went on to earn a law degree at the University of Pennsylvania.
But her award-winning creative and critical work, calling for a confrontation with America’s culture of guns, violence, fear, and loss, comes from a different part of Deise’s life.
Her medium is quilting.
A delicate, tough, and time-intensive textile art, quilting is deeply associated with American female creativity. In 2022, the Modern Quilt Guild awarded First Place for Handwork to her American Album Quilt (2018). The project is profiled in Quilt out Loud: Activism, Language, and the Art of Quilting, out this year from C&T Publishing, as exemplary “Text without Letters.”
School shootings and other indiscriminate murders of innocent civilians in public places grab headlines and the public’s attention, Deise says. “Yet the majority of mass shootings on United States soil — 57% — are domestic incidents,” she says. “And women and children are the most frequent victims.
Subverting the medium of the quilt is critical to the power of her artwork, Deise says.
Quilts carry associations with care, security, warmth, and family history. But often the “American” home and family that they function to evoke is idealized.
To illustrate, she points to Comfort Quilt for a Lockdown Drill (2018). The “comfort quilt” evokes a romanticized version of America. Employing this traditional form, she presses viewers with the dissonance of American schoolchildren practicing preparations to meet murder by gun.
Family Fire (2020) similarly subverts form and message. The block quilt is a traditionalist composition, evoking a notion of home as stable and secure. By stitching guns into homes, Deise asks viewers to confront the alarming rates at which American women and children are killed in domestic shootings.
“The mere presence of a firearm in the home, regardless of who owns it, corresponds to a 500% increase in the likelihood that a woman will be killed by a domestic partner,” says Deise, pointing to a peer-reviewed study.
At Swarthmore, she double-majored in art history and theater where her education fostered practices of experimentation and cultural critique.
Making art can be a painful struggle, says Deise, who is raising two school-aged children with Matchbox husband Erich Deise ’97.
It also takes guts.
“If you’re making artwork that matters and has meaning,” she says, “putting it out into the world is an act of supreme courage.”