COOS BAY — It’s an odd path for a traveling art exhibit: From Birmingham, England, to Gauteng, South Africa, to Coos Bay.

After appearing for three or four days at quilt festivals in its first two host cities, “Transformations 2008: Icons and Imagery” will spend more than two months at the Coos Art Museum, the only U.S. location on its schedule.

The exhibit, an annual project of Studio Art Quilt Associates, features 32 quilts by artists from the United States, Europe and Australia (none are local). It is one of three fiber art exhibits opening today at the museum.

Despite its international scope, there is a local connection. While the exhibit was juried by Rudolf Smend in Germany, the curator for it is Jeannette DeNicolis Meyer, a Portland artist who was part of a local exhibit two years ago, the last time the museum was overtaken by quilts. Meyer will give a tour of the exhibit at 2 p.m. Saturday.

There’s a lot of variety in styles used. Art quilts often look like they could be paintings, but some here look more like print-media collages or ink drawings.

“Fiber is a malleable medium,” Meyer wrote. “A quilter can paint with dye on various fabrics (as a painter paints with paint on canvas or linen — both fabrics by the way); can print with silkscreens or the computer just as a printer who works on paper can.”

Quilts differ, however, from canvas, paper and other two-dimensional media in that they are inherently three-dimensional, composed of three layers of fabric held together by stitching, which Meyer calls the fourth layer.

For this year’s exhibit, artists were asked to reflect on the meaning of “icon.” Their choices of subject matter range from celebrities and the 9/11 attacks to storm drains and fingerprints.

“I think it’s interesting how widely this definition of ‘icons’ was interpreted by both the contributing artists and the juror,” Meyer said in an e-mail.

Two European artists focused on American musicians. “Slowhand-Old Friend II-You Got That Rainbow Feel” by Annedore Neumann of Germany is a tribute to Eric Clapton that looks like it could be a corkboard on the wall of a dedicated fan, adorned with hundreds of pictures of Clapton and guitars, album covers, ticket stubs and other memorabilia. Jette Clover of Belgium recreated a wall pasted with posters for a concert by John Coltrane, in “Trane Ride.”

Bonnie J. Smith of San Jose, Calif., chose a lesser-known icon: her mother. Her quilt gives “Patricia L.” the Marilyn Monroe treatment, with the same image of her repeated 54 times in various colors.

“It seems a fitting choice to employ an historically feminine medium to transform a mother into an iconic image,” Meyer said.

Guitars and other musical instruments also appear in “When the Saints & Sweeties Go Marching” by Deborah Snider of Grand Junction, Colo., an immensely detailed, octagonal-shaped collage quilt. With alternating panels populated by caped holy women and showgirls, the piece takes on what is known in women’s studies as the virgin/whore complex.

In “New Icon Wall” by Eszter Bornemisza of Hungary, 12 haloed saint figures serve as outlines for line images of city maps, highway junctions and microchips.

“I think she has some interesting things to say about the place of technology and the modern world in our lives and in our art,” Meyer said.

Other exhibits

A few artists featured in “Transformations” also appear in “New Focus: Art Quilts in Small Format,” on display in the upstairs atrium. Another annual exhibit, this is similar to the 2006 edition “Fine Focus” that was shown in the same space two years ago. While the quilts downstairs are about 3 to 5 feet on a side, these artists apply many of the same styles of art quilting to 52 napkin-sized pieces confined to 12-inch squares.

There are landscapes, such as Anne Eckley’s “West Texas,” which is stitched over a base painting, and portraits, such as Pam RuBert’s “Surprise.”

June Underwood of Portland uses multiple layers in “The High Note,” which depicts a Montana nightclub on a backdrop quilt, with trees and birds in the foreground on a sheer layer.

While most artists use the full allowed space, Jane Dunnewold uses a much smaller portion in “Marking Time,” featuring a series of hash marks, leaving room on the mounting canvas for lines of handwritten text. Similarly, Robin Cowley’s “In Sight: Book of Colors” is a doughnut shaped color wheel with an accordion fold.

A third exhibit, “Of Needle and Pen,” features five Portland artists who are members of the group STiTCH, which focuses on telling women’s stories through needle and thread as well as written words.

In a new partnership with the Coos Historical & Maritime Museum, an auxiliary exhibit features sewing artifacts and needlework items from the historical museum.