Not Your Grandmother’s Quilts

For the textile artist Adam Pogue, necessity has always bred invention. “I didn’t have money, and I wanted to decorate my place,” he says, so Pogue, 41, began crafting things for his Los Angeles apartment, upholstering a sofa in a Japanese boro-style hodgepodge of thrifted denim, knotting a rag rug for the floor and making curtains to use as room dividers. By 2015, Pogue, who in college studied architecture and sculpture, was wondering if he might make something more of his sewing projects. On nights and weekends, he had begun piecing together a quilt, what he describes as a “Bauhaus-y” composition in bright colors like magenta, yellow and blue. When he shared the project on Instagram, the response prompted him to quit his day job. Quilts, he recognized, are “universal, something that I could put my aesthetic into, that other people could love and use.”

He also showed the piece to Roman Alonso, the co-founder of the Los Angeles design firm Commune. “It was obvious that Adam is an artist,” says Alonso, who commissioned Pogue to create curtains for the dining room of his Los Feliz home, requesting that they resemble stained glass. Pogue immediately thought of the Korean tradition of bojagi — patchworked squares of cloth joined with hand-sewn sealed seams. A quilt is typically layers of fabric with batting in between, but bojagi can be a single, translucent sheet, finished on both sides; hold it up to the light and the seams echo the lines created when panels of stained glass are soldered together. After learning to replicate the technique on a machine, Pogue delivered three panels comprising a Tetris matrix of shapes and erratic pops of color — bojagi by way of Frank Lloyd Wright, with a little of Kazimir Malevich to boot.

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These days, Pogue sells patchworked quilts, ottomans and pillows through Commune, sometimes incorporating vintage textiles that Alonso finds on his travels. Pogue also has a hand in several of the firm’s projects — making curtains for the restaurant of a forthcoming museum in Los Angeles; creating window panels for the Ace Hotel in Kyoto, scheduled to open next year; and appliquéing a giant wraparound sectional in Japanese indigos for a client’s San Francisco residence. He still works out of his home, a loft in downtown Los Angeles filled with furniture he’s made, including a Donald Judd-inspired plywood daybed. And he remains thrifty, upcycling old kimonos donated by a neighbor or using an old mailbag procured from an Army Navy surplus store. When he does buy fabric, he’ll dye it with saved onion skins.