At the Tuckahoe Equestrian Center in Queen Anne on May 24, the Eastern Shore Jousting Association held the Mid Atlantic Joust Tournament. People came with campers and RVs to settle on folding chairs and watch some enthusiastic horse riders tilt at small rings with their handmade, steel-tipped lances. The participants were named Knight of the Little Woods or Maid of Rabbit Hill Road or something else equally colorful.

When the announcer called out, “Ride, Dear Maid (or Sir Knight), ride,” the competitor galloped down the 80-yard dirt track beneath three arches, from each of which was suspended a metal harness ring wrapped with white cord. The rider had eight seconds to charge through the arches and try to spear the metal rings that varied in size from 1/4″ to 1-3/4″ in diameter, depending on the skill level of the knight or maid.

One of the announcers for the event was Karen Callahan, the secretary of the ESJA. She had started riding in horse shows as a child.

“A lot of my family members would joust,” she explained, “so I started going to the different tournaments held on the Shore to watch them and support the state sport. I would participate in different skits put on by the members at the tournaments back in the late 80s, early 90s. In 2015, I started jousting in the Leadline Class here locally and on the state level.”

Callahan is involved with an activity that has a storied tradition. Jousting is, in fact, the oldest equestrian sport in the world. Its creation is usually credited to a Frenchman named Geoffori de Pruelli. It spread from France to Germany and then England between the 10th and 12th centuries. During the Middle Ages it was used in waging war, but with the invention of gunpowder the art of jousting a man from his horse became an outmoded battle strategy.

The tournament field became a place of sport, and the knights turned their lances to the more sophisticated task of spearing small metal rings, making jousting a civilized game of skill and sportsmanship. When Cecil Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore, founded the colony of Maryland on the shores of St. Mary’s County in 1634, he introduced jousting there, and tournaments became a favored pastime of the settlers. This sport has survived wars and flourished in times of peace.

Over the past 100 years jousting has evolved from private contests to public competitions aiding civic and church organizations and raising funds for Civil War monuments. Rather than just being popular among the “landed gentry,” the sport is now enjoyed by suburbanites, city dwellers, and rural landowners.

In 1950 some dedicated jousting enthusiasts founded The Maryland Jousting Tournament Association, which was instrumental in establishing riding rules adopted throughout Maryland. The organization has members in every corner of the state as well as neighboring states and the District of Columbia.

During the February 1962 session of the Maryland General Assembly, the Honorable Henry J. Fowler, a St. Mary’s County member of the House of Delegates, introduced House Bill No. 80, which would recognize jousting as the Official State Sport. It was passed through both chambers of the Maryland Legislature, and on April 6, 1962, Governor J. Millard Tawes signed the bill into law to become effective on June 1 of that year.

On December 11, 1969, a group of local jousters met at the Queen Anne Fire House for the purpose of organizing the Eastern Shore Jousting Association; officers were elected and a membership fee of $1.00 was established. At a February 2, 1970, meeting, the purposes of the organization were defined and a standard set of riding rules were adopted. It represented riders from Caroline, Kent, Queen Anne’s and Talbot Counties.

The first ESJA Championship Tournament was held on September 27, 1970, at Herman Callahan’s field off Route 404 in Queen Anne. The first banquet was held at the Talbot Agricultural Center on November 14. ESJA holds nine tournaments from May to September, and they also participate in local parades. The banquet is held at the close of every jousting season.

Members of the ESJA, approximately 28 families, proudly promote jousting on Maryland’s Eastern Shore as well as in Delaware and Virginia. They show a genuine interest in the Associations well-being and that of jousting itself. Karen Callahan is among them, helping with fundraising and promotion.

“Jousting is a fading sport as not many people participate anymore,” she said, “so I try and promote it as much as possible to educate people.”

Indeed, the audience at Queen Anne on May 24 was not large, and the atmosphere was at times sadly quiet. There wasn’t the pageantry of old, and the riders’ outfits were not elaborate or stylish. Rather than horns announcing the triumph of a knight or maid, country music blared over scratchy speakers when someone lanced the rings. But it was obvious that the skilled participants loved what they were doing, and a good time was had by all. It’s a tradition worth maintaining.

It started in 1986 in a tight-knit fiber cohort at Cranbrook Academy of Art. That’s where Anne Lindberg and Piper Shepard first met—two young artists drawn to textile, space, and the possibilities of working with their hands. Nearly forty years later, they’re showing side-by-side at the Academy Art Museum (AAM) in Easton. Their solo exhibitions, seen and unseen by Lindberg and Fields, Voids, and Translations: Works on Paper and Textiles by Shepard, occupy separate spaces but feel in conversation—with each other, with the building, and with those stopping by to look.

“When I came to the museum last fall,” said Lindberg, “I was encouraged to make the project in a fairly narrow, two-story space at the north end of the museum. And so it became quickly apparent to me that if I built something in that space, you would see part of it on the first floor, and you would need to go to the second floor to see the rest of it. So quite literally, it’s seen and unseen.”

“seen” 2025 graphite, Flashe, acrylic and colored pencil on mat board 60 x 70 inches by Anne Lindberg

Her installation consists of thousands of fine chromatic threads stretched from wall to wall, forming a diaphanous field of color. From a distance, it looks like light or film. “Lots of questions come about,” she said. “Is this light? Is this paint? What is it? And eventually, you do discover what it is and what it might mean to you.”

The same rhythm lives in Lindberg’s graphite drawings. “There are thousands of lines tightly stacked together,” she said. “My arm is moving from one side of the board to the other. So it’s almost as if each of those lines is a breath. They often take me more than one breath, but they’re an expression. And then I lift the pencil, return to the start point again, and carry on with another one.” She describes it as rhythmic, paced, and slow. “We’re also aware when we breathe—of a big breath or a short breath. So the metaphor of the breath makes a lot of sense to me.”

Like Shepard, Lindberg is interested in how a viewer first encounters the work with their body. “The drawings and thread installations greet you through your gut first, your physiology. And then maybe later you start asking analytical questions—what am I looking at?”

That physical, sensory entry point is something both artists lean into, even if their methods differ.  For Shepard, it begins with familiar material. “There’s something so accessible about textile,” Shepard said. “We all know it so well—we wear it every day. So that ubiquity, that accessibility, allows me to connect with the audience.”

Shepherd’s panels—some as tall as a doorway—are hand-cut with surgical precision. “It’s a subtractive process,” she said. “Yet at the same time, I’m making a work that becomes present through what’s taken away.” Cutouts become lace, and lace becomes architecture. “I’m working with the kind of in-between space of light and shadow, of presence and absence, of the haptic and the optic.”

Once the form is complete, she adds a layer of graphite. “I start with drawing in order to create the imagery or the pattern that I’m making,” she said. “Then, by layering it with graphite, it’s the suspended drawing in space you’re experiencing.”

“Thicket”, 2023, 13’ x 10’, handout muslin, gesso, graphite, aluminum armature by Piper Shepard

Although both artists were trained in fiber, they have since moved beyond their traditions. “We’re making work with textile materials or in textile ways,” said Lindberg, “but not in traditional ways.” She sees this exhibit as part of a larger shift: “The place of textiles in contemporary art has changed, certainly in the time that we’ve made work. We’ve watched that change, and that’s been rewarding and exciting.”

Their shared history makes the exhibit feel like more than just a pairing. “We’ve been in conversation since graduate school,” Shepard said. “Even if we weren’t in the same place, we’ve always been talking. There’s just a long-standing dialogue between our work.”

Besides the dialogue, they’ve also collaborated formally in the past—at the Kansas City Art Institute, where they both taught in the ’90s, and later on exhibitions that combined Shepard’s textile printing with Lindberg’s printmaking. One early piece involved a sculptural base and three large textiles. “The middle one we worked on together,” said Lindberg. “Piper made one, I made one, and the third we made together.” In another collaboration, they used cameras to photograph landscapes, then each transformed the imagery into large-scale environmental work—Shepard through silk screen printing and Lindberg through carved wood.

Even now, they still approach space the same way. “How do we want people to experience the work?” Shepard said. “How do they move through it? How does the architecture shape their experience?” That kind of thinking, she added, “has been a part of our conversation since 1986.”

It’s also a part of their lineage. Their mentor at Cranbrook, Gerhardt Knodel, urged them to think about textiles on a larger scale. “He understood that textiles can have an impact at scale,” Lindberg said. “They don’t have to be intimate. They can be architectural.” She referenced historical examples like the “wild man tapestries” that stretched across castle walls. “He showed us those and said, ‘You can work this way.’”

That respect for size and for the women in the field who shaped it continues to ground both artists. “We had really strong women role models,” said Shepard. “Olga de Amaral, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Joyce Scott, Anni Albers—people who believed in textile as a serious form. I’m forever grateful.”

For Shepard, Anni Albers remains a constant touchstone. “She was the first textile artist to have a solo show at MoMA,” she said. “She wrote an essay in 1957—The Pliable Plane—and it’s still one of the most important texts for anyone thinking about textile and architecture,” Lindberg added that even the campus of Cranbrook was steeped in that legacy. “It was designed by Eliel Saarinen,” she said. “And his wife, Loja, was a weaver. Her work is everywhere—on the walls, under the windows, in the chapel. We were encouraged to sit under it, touch it, and be around it. It was part of our education.”

Their exhibitions in Easton may be solo shows, but the friendship is threaded through both. “We don’t see each other as often these days,” said Lindberg, who lives in the Hudson Valley. Shepard is based in Baltimore. But their work remains in conversation—on the walls, in the air, and across the space between.

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Lindberg: seen and unseen runs through Fall 2026
Shepard: Fields, Voids, and Translations runs through October 12, 2025
Academy Art Museum

Both exhibitions are located at the Academy Art Museum, 106 South Street, Easton, Maryland. For more information, visit academyartmuseum.org.