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Charlotte
Cook-Fuller
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Charlotte Cook-Fuller was a professor at Towson University in Towson, MD from 1978-2000, teaching Nutrition in the Health Sciences Department. She edited twelve Annual Editions in Nutrition for Dushkin Publishing Group and chaired the University Assessment Council. She has been Professor Emerita since 2001.
She and her husband, Marchal, traveled both nationally and internationally, racking up a bird list of nearly 4800 species total. Volunteerism included transcribing bird data cards recorded between 1880-1970 for the US Government Survey and leading docent tours at Evergreen Museum and Library (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore). More recently she expanded an interest in historic mills, assisting in updating the roster information for the Society for the Preservation of Old Mills (SPOOM).
In the spring of 2013, Charlotte and her daughter Lynette, a painter, decided to collaborate, choosing several of their favorite San Francisco scenes as a starting point and working independently to create works based on the same images. Charlotte’s were fabric wall hangings and Lynette’s were acrylic on canvas. Already Charlotte had created several textile wall hangings that held places of honor in her home and in the homes of both daughters, Lynette and Kitty. Several two-person exhibitions resulted as well as a solo exhibit of Charlotte's textiles at the UCSF Women's Health Center in San Francisco. The Bodie series, a personal project featuring Bodie State Historical Park in California, was begun in the early pandemic years and completed in 2023. Currently, Charlotte is working on the third of four large fabric wall hangings for San Bruno Mountain Watch in Brisbane, CA.
The roots of this work trace back to 1949, when Charlotte’s love of San Francisco and California began. Her parents had moved from Illinois to Coachella Valley in 1948, and then to Hayward in 1949. There, her father contracted to put in new sewer lines, and Charlotte spent her senior year at Hayward High School. Ties to California seemed severed when her father died and her mother moved back to the Midwest. Years later, however, Lynette attended graduate school in Oakland and remained to pursue her art career. A shared admiration for San Francisco developed and Charlotte's creative passion took hold!
Each wall hanging takes over 100 hours, as the color and pattern for every shape - along with the braids and beads for accents - are carefully chosen. While some stitching is executed on the sewing machine, most is done by hand.
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