Nancy Cook Smith was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1950. Her pediatrician discovered early that she had been deaf from birth, and at age three she was sent to an institution for handicapped children. At seven, she enrolled at Clarke School for the Deaf in Massachusetts, where she learned Alexander Graham Bell's auditory-oral method — lipreading and spoken language — under the school's philosophy that deaf students would fare better in a hearing world if they could communicate on its terms. The approach left her navigating two worlds from the outside: she didn't sign, so she didn't fit neatly into the Deaf community; her disability meant she didn't fit seamlessly into the hearing world either. Yet she turned that outsider position into a lifelong creative edge. As she has said of her deafness: her eyes became her most important tool, and that acute visual attention runs through everything she has made.
At seventeen she transferred to a regular high school — a move she has described as genuinely difficult — and went on to earn a BFA in Textiles from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1974. After graduation she relocated to Southern California and built a handwoven fashion label. Her strong work ethic and keen eye for pattern and style quickly distinguished her: her pieces were sought after by Hollywood figures including Lauren Bacall, Anne Bancroft, Carrie Fisher, and Meryl Streep, and appeared in productions such as Tootsie and the television series Moonlighting. Her work was also sold at the Smithsonian.
That successful career in fashion eventually gave her the freedom to pursue a longer-held ambition. "I've always wanted to be a painter," she has said. "I guess my work with these tapestries is, in a way, painting with fabric." Smith no longer makes clothing; today her practice is devoted entirely to creating fabric collages — one-of-a-kind works assembled from a mix of found and acquired textiles.
When she roams the alleys of her Santa Monica neighborhood, the gaze she trained over thirty-five years as a textile artist picks out what others discard: curtains, upholstery fabric, worn dish towels. These alley finds are combined with choice materials she has collected over decades — silk, linen, heavy cotton — bringing the discarded and the beautiful into meaningful cohesion. "I want these materials to be appreciated, as they come with a history of their own," she has said. "Store-bought fabric or alley trash — in the end it's all threads."
Smith describes her collages as "conversations" — visual interactions between the textiles she finds, procures, and orchestrates into formal arrangements or psychological landscapes. She favors floral and organic imagery, accessible to a broad audience and offering what she calls a "huge palette." The sum of her cutouts is anchored by a geometry that provides a sturdy scaffold for a variety of visual metaphors and concepts, and each piece is ultimately a way of sparking a dialogue between artist and spectator.
"The move from creating one-of-a-kind textiles to creating unique tapestries has allowed an expanded vocabulary to enter my work," Smith has written. "I have been making fabric collages for years. Now I'm ready to share them with the world."
Nancy Cook Smith lives and works in Santa Monica with her husband, the artist Peter Tigler.
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