Asked by Janis Stemmermann of Russell Janis Projects in Williamsburg to curate the pairing of 14 chairs and 14 artist print fabrics, hand printed by Stemmermann. The next logic step was to respond to the prints and patterns with a series of “soft constructions.

 This exhibition highlights the vibrant and provocative conversations that the faculty and students of the School of Design participate in while interrogating textiles. The field of textiles is a wellspring of inspiration to both the fashion, product and interior design program’s material explorations and theoretical thinking. 

As they work outside of the academic structure of a traditional textile program, the students and faculty at the School of Design bring energy, focus and a pragmatic naiveté to the subject of textiles. The exhibition will illustrate this conversation through student course work and selected professors’ theoretical and professional endeavors relating to textiles.

Curated by Annie Coggan

Photos by Annie Coggan 

Saturday, September 15 – Sunday, September 30 

Monday – Saturday, 11AM-6PM Textile Arts Center 

505 Carroll Street, Brooklyn NY 

Artist Residency Show Textile Arts Center, Brooklyn, 2012

I set about the task of how a stitch becomes a room and the issues of scale and all associated connotations. I read and studied the work of historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, her book The Good Wives in particular.  I was fascinated by the idea that an 18th Century woman on a Maine homestead could occupy a world of repetitive arduous tasks as well as make vibrant leaps in her imagination via needlework. The rooms (the small models in the exhibition) are embroidered embodiments of this idea; some are flights of flowers and landscape and others are endless lists of tasks and obligations. The chair is a final homage to this woman’s life with vibrant mapping of flowers and flora and a sitting room within a chair.

Photos by Caleb Crawford

2006, Irondale Center for the Arts, Brooklyn, NY
 

The Fort Greene Association (FGA) hosted Fort Greene Modern, an exhibition curated by Annie Coggan at the Irondale Center for the Arts, one of the grand, iconic, and hidden spaces of Fort Greene. The juxtaposition of modernism in the context of this historic space embodied the house tour theme. Focusing on modern projects and built works, projects varied in scale from individual residences to institutional projects.  

Fort Greene will be home to projects by some of the defining architects of the 21st Century, who seek to reinvigorate the neighborhood with a series of cultural facilities for longstanding institutional residents such as the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Long Island University as well as for a growing base of independent resident artists. Traditionally, the FGA has celebrated 19th Century architecture. As the neighborhood diversifies architecturally, the Association is subsequently shifting its focus to raise awareness of the importance of modernist projects, and to redefine ideas about historicism and context. The question posed by this exhibition is to inquire if and how contemporary architects working in the neighborhood consider these issues in their process.

Photos by Caleb Crawford

Installation at A/D: B Project Space in Brooklyn
Curated by Catherine Morris 

The book Writing a Woman’s Life by Carolyn Heilbrun was the inspiration for a series of works collectively called Lady Furniture. Heilbrun posits that a written biography is perhaps not the medium best suited to describe a woman’s life. This furniture is an attempt to investigate the built form of women’s lives. These pieces are tributes to admirable women in the arts. These women’s lives and their relationships were researched through biographical and anecdotal material. The form of the furniture has been an attempt to distill their accomplishments, their relationships, and their relationships to their work.

Love Seats for Virginia Woolf was the second series of Lady Furniture. Love Seats is a biography of Woolf, illustrating the relationships with those closest to her: Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Vanessa Bell, and Vita Sackville-West. These people were Woolf’s extended family, and these pieces describe their dependency on each other to get work done – to get better work done. Her relationships were very egalitarian. That is why the chairs are all white and why there is no bigger and smaller seat.

The exhibition creates a series of rooms for each of the pieces through the use of color. The color was derived from an examination of Charleston, the house shared by those in the Bloomsbury group. The application of color questioned the traditional boundary of wall and floor, and defined the space of the furniture without resorting to the construction of walls.

Photos by Caleb Crawford

4th Annual One Night Stand exhibition 2010 at the Ole Miss Motel, Oxford, Mississippi
Curated by Erin Austen Abbott

Annie's work that was exhibited was:
The Homage Series and Varina’s Flight Chair from the exhibition, Julia and Varina 

Photos by Caleb Crawford

School of the Visual Arts, New York, 2013

Throughout the last twenty years there has been a constant and lively debate proclaiming the floor plan drawing as “dead” and the computer rendering as the new tool for spatial visualization. The SVA Interior Design curriculum has engaged in this debate and has artfully taught the purpose, tactics and logic of a plan drawing and has worked with cutting edge technology to develop students' skills in digital design. This exhibition shows student work and attempts to illustrate the clear and timely pedagogy that SVA has crafted in order to master the plan drawings for the built environment and understand the power and future of three dimensional rendering.

Photos by Lucas Thorpe

May 2005, Toda Studio, New York, NY

un_seated is an exhibition of concept chairs and their development processes that I curated in 2005. The exhibit featured a unique collection of chair concepts within various stages of their design and production process. All the chairs in the exhibit are functionally and conceptually derived and are supported by documentation of the processes which led to the forms displayed.

The content of this exhibition is analogous to the influence that the prefix “un_” confers to what is standing behind it. A general characterization of un-ness encompasses concepts and ideas that are defined by being something other than the category with which they are assumed to belong.

un_seated featured the work of New York designers Mark Naden of TODA, Chris Pommer, Lisa Rapoport and Mary Tremain of Toronto-based Plant Architect Inc., and Annie Coggan and Caleb Crawford of Coggan + Crawford Inc.

Coggan + Crawford’s piece, yama/niyama, was originally developed for the Iyengar Institute but was not installed due to budget restrictions (and, I suspect, loss of nerve).

Yama and niyama are concepts of the yoga sutras, which are a kind of equivalent to the ten commandments, but they are “thou shalt nots” and “thou shalts,” as opposed to the completely proscriptive “thou shalt nots.” This pairing translates as exertion and rest, a “becoming” and a “being.” This was a response to a functional requirement: a vestibule that needed a wall for security and a bench so that people could remove and put on their shoes. It takes its form from a movement from one yoga pose to another – urdva hastasana (standing, arms reaching upwards) to utkatasana (a pose much like sitting in an imaginary chair). This bench expresses this constant state of being and becoming.

Edward Muybridge is an obvious precedent, as is the craft of boat building.

yama/niyama was ultimately built by Caleb Crawford and a small group of students from Pratt without whose help this project would not have materialized. The project started as a concept but developed into a unique material experiment: the wood is bent in three axes as well as twisting up to 90 degrees.

Photos by Caleb Crawford

Pratt Students from the 2016 and 2017 class of Soft Construction exhibited work for New York Textile Month in September 2016 and September 2017.