Every artist sees the world a different way: Picasso had his cubes, Dali had his clocks, and Pollock had his drips and drops and swirls. Anne Bossert sees stripes. The Fort Collins fiber artist and woodworker grew up in Illinois amid green and gold channels of corn, an emerald tide of soybeans, and the black strips of Highway 17 and Interstate 55. “Driving to my grandfather’s farm,” she recalls, “the stripes would appear and disappear, appear and disappear.”

Today, the 43-year-old translates the tapestry of her childhood into functional art: colorful coffee tables and cabinets comprised of strips of dyed fabric and wood. This month, her transformation of ordinary objects into art is on display at the Foothills Art Center in Golden.

5280 August 2013
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“I don’t want to make a thing that would just be another object in someone’s house,” Bossert says. “A person’s home is a portrait of who they are. If I can enable someone to express who they are, I like that.”

Bossert fell into her unique craft in 2001. After working a string of unfulfilling jobs, she enrolled in Colorado State University’s fiber arts graduate program, where she studied the craft of dying and weaving fabric tableaus. Along the way, she discovered that Baltic birch plywood absorbed dyes particularly well, and that the colors highlighted the wood’s grain in stunning stripes.

To give the art a purpose, too, Bossert applied her dying technique to furniture—and displayed her fabric creations within coffee tables and cabinets. “I’m all about use and function. That harkens back to my farm girl days,” Bossert says. “There are a lot of quilters in my matriarchy.” And now a celebrated artist, too. annebossertart.com

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ON DISPLAY

What: Threads of Change, Anne Bossert’s art-as-furniture exhibit
Where: Foothills Art Center, Golden
When: Through September 1
Don’t miss: The Atomic Egg Side Table