Lucinda Breeding

Pat Kumicich got the inspiration for her award-winning quilt Just Quit! while she was in France a few years ago.

“I noticed all these packets of American cigarettes with foreign-language labels on them,” said the Naples, Fla., fiber artist. “When I got back home and started translating them, I noticed that it seemed like they were more concerned with what smoking does to your skin than what it does to the rest of you.”

Kumicich started playing with the labels and the cultural riddles around smoking and addiction and turned them into a quilt that earned the Best of Show award at the 41st annual Visual Arts Exhibition at the Center for the Visual Arts, 400 E. Hickory St. Hers is the first fiber selection for Best of Show in the annual exhibit.

Just Quit! is a 36-inch-by-50-inch quilt that has a figure’s face with a cigaretteclutched between two fingers and lips.

Made in neutral shades (grays, black, white and even dusty pinks) Kumicich’s quilt is both true to the craft of quilting — with strong, confident stitching — and contemporary. The artist used transfers to affect some of the color and the text; the quilt is textured with phrases such as “I’m dying for a smoke!” and “Smoking ages the skin” and “second hand smoke is deadly” all over the piece. Some of the work was stenciled directly onto the fabric.

Before she began quilting, Kumicich was a needlework enthusiast. Her daughter got her to try quilting, and before long, Kumicich was spending lots of time on the craft.

“After a couple of years, I realized I was tired of making other people’s patterns and started making my own,” she said. “So I started doing my own abstract patterns. Then, after [Sept. 11, 2001], I realized that I wanted to make my quilts more personal.”

Kumicich was traveling when the terrorists struck and was rattled by the sight of armed military personnel stationed at airports.

“A lot of my work has dealt with war in general,” she said. “I guess I wanted to inject a little humor into something fairly serious, too. My work right now has to do with the financial crisis.”

Much of her work involves women’s issues. In fact, most of the figures she uses in her quilts are female. The trip to France got her thinking about controversies around smoking, and how vanity sometimes trumps health.

“I really thought that was ironic,” she said. “We can be so oblivious to the addiction involved. We’ll see someone smoking and we think ‘just stop it!’” For some people it’s just not that easy. And when you’re the one smoking, you’re not always thinking about your health. You’re living in that moment of gratification.”

Kumicich said she was surprised and thrilled to win the exhibit’s top prize. She has work on exhibit in Louisiana, Virginia and Florida. She recently had a quilt in an invitational show in Taiwan. She has a quilt dealing with homelessness getting ready to go on a worldwide tour.

She said she didn’t deliberately choose to quilt about women’s issues in a medium associated with women.

“I like that I’m using such a soft medium to deal with a hard subject,” she said. “I don’t write, but they say to write what you know. All I know are my own feelings. Most of my work is self-portraiture.”

The exhibit ends at the closing of the gallery today at 5 p.m. Admission is free.

LUCINDA BREEDING can be reached at 940-566-6877. Her e-mail address is cbreeding@dentonrc.com .