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Biography

Working as a fiber artist for twenty years, as well as a curator, lecturer, teacher and published writer, Gayle Pritchard received a BA-Honors degree from the highly competitive College of Wooster, where she was the college's first double-major student. She majored in German and Psychology, with a double-minor in art and French. Pritchard was a Rotary Scholar at the Universities of Tour and Paul Valéry in France. She pursued additional post-graduate art training at the Quilt Surface Design Symposium in Columbus and in the continuing education program at the Cleveland Institute of Art. Fluent in three languages, her work has been widely exhibited in galleries and museums across the US and in Denmark, Japan & Australia.

Highlight exhibitions include those at the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Ohio Designer Craftsman Best of '94 (special mention award), and Visions, a traveling fiber exhibition which opened at the Museum of San Diego. International traveling exhibitions include Ohio to Nagoya and Signatures in Fabric. Commissions include The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Quilt, the Smithsonian Craft Archives and, most recently, artwork commissioned for the Peter B. Lewis building (designed by architect Frank Gehry) in Cleveland, Ohio. She is featured in the 1997 Encyclopedia of Living Artists, was named Teacher of the Year by Professional Quilter Magazine, and Cleveland Magazine's "90 Most Interesting People". She has made several television appearances, both locally and nationally, including CNN. Historian Robert Shaw published her work in The Art Quilt, a history of contemporary quilts in America. Her work was included in Crafting Personal Shrines by Carol Owen and in Quilts of the Ohio Western Reserve by Ricky Clark. She was named an "Ohio Treasure" in 2000 by the State of Ohio at the annual CityFolk festival.

Gayle has curated the biennial Artist as Quiltmaker exhibits since 1999. The exhibit is a nationally recognized venue for art quilts held at the Firelands Association gallery in Oberlin, Ohio and is one of the oldest such exhibition venues in the country. She also co-curated Threads of Freedom: The Underground Railroad Story in Quilts in Oberlin in 2001, and hosted the symposium, Pathways and Perspectives, a panel discussion about the history and future of the art quilt movement. She has taught workshops and lectured widely on various subjects related to her medium.

Pritchard's first book, Uncommon Threads: Ohio's Art Quilt Revolution, published by Ohio University Press, is available in stores and on Amazon.com.