On Wednesday evening, Ann Cofta — one of the artists featured in “Urban Escapade,” an exhibit up in the Ely Center of Contemporary Art’s Digital Grace gallery now through Feb. 8 — let an audience virtually into her New York studio to show how she represented the cityscapes around her through improvisational uses of traditional fiber art practices. The idea, she revealed, began when she inherited fabric scraps from a quilting friend.
“What can I do with these little tiny pieces?” she recalled thinking.
The visit to Cofta’s studio was part of a weekly series of studio tours ECOCA began in April 2020. “In a time where we are all physically distanced in sharing our creativity, ECOCA offers a platform with our Studio Tour series to peer into the current challenges, new endeavors, and innovative creative spaces that have been forged from current circumstances,” the accompanying statement reads. The tours, which ECOCA posts on Instagram every Wednesday at 4 p.m., “take a look into the lives of artists and the spaces within which they create their latest works.”
The collected tours have by now grown into a robust archive of painters, sculptors, photographers, filmmakers, and mixed-media artists from across the city, region, state and beyond.
On Wednesday, Cofta walked viewers through the creation of her pieces, starting from sketches and fabric swatches and scraps.
She described the way she cut the fabric as “improvisational,” using a rotary cutter and scissors. The sewing on the machine was done similarly — “no pins,” she said. “I keep adding on and combining pieces,” she said. That is, until she takes them apart again. “What happens with some frequency is that I’m not happy with the composition and the color combinations.” So she spends “a lot of time,” she said, “reconfiguring things.”
“I keep combining bits and pieces until there’s something of a balance and it feels right to me. I’m exploring ways to capture the city the way that I see it. All the energy, the diversity, the changing color of the sky.” Once the overall composition has taken shape, she said, she adds details, like water towers, that snap the piece into focus as a cityscape.
At last, she said, she’s ready to make her piece into a quilt, sewing her piece together with batting and a backing. “The hand-sewing, the quilting, is what really gives it the texture and dimensionality that it would not have without that.” It makes it “unmistakably handmade.” When it’s done, she stitches her signature into the back.
Her earlier pieces placed her cityscapes in a frame. In later pieces, the buildings began to break out of the frame, and lately she has found herself making cityscapes that could fill an entire wall.
“There’s something I find very grounding about the structures throughout the city — the bridges, buildings, smokestacks and water towers. They orient us so that we have a sense of where we are and where we’ve been.” Cofta said. Her studio is in a building that used to see the manufacture of lighting fixtures. “I’m drawn to those connections to the past — to the people who worked in this very space and gazed out these windows each day.” Cofta’s studio tour, meanwhile, served as a reminder for how arts organizations are innovating their way through the pandemic, and perhaps connecting us to the future.
ECOCA’s next studio visit is on Jan. 27, featuring artist Sascha Mallon. Visit the archive of previous tours on ECOCA’s website.
Cofta's work is lovely in its composition and content, and it reminds us of the beauty in the everyday. I love that she works with cast-off scraps from quilters' larger projects, and that she takes the time to hand-stitch the final project - a skill everyone (or every woman, anyway) used to practice, and that few people still have the time and patience to undertake.
Props to the Ely Center and to the Independent for featuring Cofta's unique work!