Where Have All the Flowers Gone

Amy Ahlstrom is an urban quilter creating modern pop art.

Inspired by the street art, signage, and graffiti in city neighborhoods, Amy takes digital photos of found images, sampling and remixing them into urban quilts. Using hundreds of digital photographs, she designs collages by computer, makes paper patterns, and hand-cuts and sews quilts. The resulting quilts, made of silk and cotton and stretched onto frames, are tactile visual postcards of urban environments. They re-imagine the urban landscape and re-invent quilting as a pop art medium.

Based in the Bay Area, Amy has designed urban-themed pop art based on images of San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, and Berkeley as well as from her trips to Tokyo, Kyoto, New York City and Chicago. Amy holds a Master of Fine Arts in Fiber from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Fiber from Northern Illinois University. She has exhibited widely throughout the Bay Area.