The long drive up Middle Line Road, past stone walls and hay fields, leads to the studio where Ann Bromberg weaves in the Chilmark hills. “This was all open fields when we bought this cabin forty years ago,” Bromberg says of the gallery and home where she and her companion Dick Potter live. “This started out as just a summer camp, and we insulated it. Fields with sheep and views down to the water, with people on the beach. Now it’s all woods. We came to Chilmark in 1965. We had to finish it ourselves, put the decks on, redid the kitchen.”

Light enters the Bromberg-Potter place from skylights and walls of glass. “The architect really understood about a small space in a beautiful environment. We added the second floor and the living room. . . . You have to stand in the bathroom to see a lot of my work,” she says, smiling. Small weavings line the hall to the bathroom, with the emphasis on a vibrant sunflower and larger hangings woven in Chilmark years ago.

Bromberg works and lives in Brookline and Chilmark, with a loom in each studio. She has served as an art teacher in Rome and in the United States, a barterer for weavings in Istanbul, a gallery manager in Ohio, and interior designer in Boston. She holds a real estate license. But nowadays she weaves for corporate clients and individuals, and the art and craft of weaving takes all her time: conceiving of the scene, sketching it, creating a watercolor, threading the loom, and setting the treadles for the patterns. She usually weaves four to six hours a day. It can take months to complete a piece. “The part I hate is threading the loom,” she says. “That’s tedious because it’s not creative. It’s a job. Not the weaving.”

One living room wall is dominated by a woven triptych of Squibnocket Ridge. She sketched the scene that overlooks Squibnocket Pond, photographed it, and wove the panels. “I knew what I wanted to do when I saw it. I took a lot of license with the trees,” she says. She points to the center panel. “Basically the background is that area with the broken road. I did this in February 2002, but I finished it in ’03, with the sketch work in ’01. The weaving was a year.”
A triptych of Boston covers a second wall, with the Charles River in the foreground. “I stood over in Cambridge and had to go to several locations, with the Zakim Bridge and the Science Museum and Back Bay on the right, and when I stood in the middle I did Beacon Hill with the gold dome in the middle panel.” She spent nine months weaving the panels, which include the Kenmore Square Citgo sign. Of the silver building, 111 Huntington Avenue, Bromberg says, “This building is the newest, right behind the Prudential. I think it’s gorgeous. I did it with the kind of material I thought it looked like to me, which is silver because it shines magnificently.”

Bromberg started weaving in 1967, but didn’t sell her first piece until 1976. Since then she’s sold nearly seventy hangings, many massive, some petite. She was commissioned to do a weaving for a synagogue in Wyoming, Ohio, and she wove panels for the entrance hall of American Chain and Cable Corporation in Trumbull, Connecticut.

With her reputation firmly established, Bromberg earns between $100 to $1,000 per square foot. “I’m not in this business to get rich. This is what I really want to do. I’m honored when people buy pieces, but I do it when I want to do it. Most of my pieces are sold through word of mouth or people I know.”
Some weavings have met unhappy fates.

In the 1970s, the Turks built an office in Tehran. As Bromberg tells it, “This [photograph] is a Turkish flag. I sold it to the Shah of Iran’s wife’s cousin. Someone saw this and asked, ‘Do you think that flag still exists?’ They said, We bet they burned it, because it was a symbol of the shah.

“When I first moved to Boston, I did this sixty-foot frieze at the accounting firm of Coopers and Lybrand. It was entitled ‘Seasons of the Year.’ That’s another piece of work we’re not sure of its duration,” because, Bromberg says, Coopers and Lybrand was involved in the Enron scandal.  

Her five-foot Macomber loom is already threaded for her next project. A portable loom, which made the trek to Rome, sits nearby. “I have a new project in my head. My goal is to prepare a three-panel piece of New York City. It could be two years, three years. I’ve set my loom up already.”  

Ann Bromberg’s business is an enterprise where the net worth is not written on the bottom line, but in the love of the loom, the attention to detail, and the intrinsic value of the project. A master artist works among the fields and trees on Middle Line Road.