CityView Magazine

22 | Winter • 2009 Local Artist F or Ann Flaherty, it started with a pesky art requirement and a hurting grandson. As an adult, she went back to school to study issues of diversity. When her then three-year-old grandson was teased about his own identity, those issues hit home. The result was Denzel Soup, an art quilt celebrating all sixteen cultures running through her grandson's veins. "It was my first statement in fabric, and I was hooked from there," she said. After Flaherty was done clipping and stitching, a fabric garden emerged where ancestors from the likes of Peru, Ireland, and Puerto Rico stood side by side. Back then, original photos had to be sent off to Colorado for transfer onto cloth. Her work remains image-based, so she's glad home technology has caught up. Flaherty's art quilts are reactions to both private battles and international events. "I'm a born advocate," she said. Her quilted response to the 9/11 terror attacks was shown among the 365 pieces at America from the Heart, a national exhibit-turned- book. From there, it was chosen as 1 of 100 to travel and 1 of 20 to show in Manhattan's Hudson River Museum. Her subjects range from a dear friend's hollyhocks to the scandal that faced her childhood church. She even sewed her own brain scans into a series now hanging in Boston Medical Center. In December, Flaherty will be five years cancer free. On her first trip after recovery, she stopped at a canal and saw branches dipped into the water. "They looked like people dancing," she said. She snapped a photo and later played with it on the computer, working to get it just right and print a custom pattern for her piece, Just Dance. No matter what seemingly tragic event brings her to the sewing room, Flaherty always manages to transform image to art, pain to hope. Her response to another hurting grandson has offered comfort to thousands of military families. At eighteen-months-old, her grandson was having a tough time dealing with his father's deployment. "He was having tantrums and not eating," she said. "My daughter noticed he was taking photos of his father from the living room By Anne Collins Local f iber ar tists Ann Flaher t y and Jeanet te Brockelsby buck quilting tradition for scenes of hand- dyed fabric, upholster y cord, and the occasional rec ycled wrapper. Above | Above Their creations truly are works of art as anyone who has seen these quilts can attest, including "Under the Watchful Eye of Queen Charlotte," by fiber artist Deborah Langsam. OUTSIDE THE PAT TERN THINKING

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