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Art Assembled: New This Week May
May was quite a busy and exciting month here at browngrotta arts. We ended April and kicked off May with our annual Art in the Barn Exhibition, Blue/Green: color/code/context. The exhibition attracted a record-breaking crowd that swarmed from all areas near and far. In addition to the opening itself, we hosted “Art-Ocean-Energy” a fundraiser for Ports of Cause as well as an IDCEC accredited presentation “Material Matters: Integrating Art Textiles and Fiber Sculpture in Architecture and Interior.” We also published our new catalog Blue/Green: color/code/context. The catalog–our 48th volume–features work by 57 artists from over 15 countries. Blue/Green: color/code/context is available for purchase on our online store and Amazon.
To kick off May’s New This Week we shared Ulla-Maija Vikman’s Reflect. Made by hand-painting viscose yarn and linen, Vikman’s Reflect falls freely into space and forms varying color surfaces as air flow causing the uniquely painted fibers to move. Vikman found combining the color blue with textiles very interesting because of the way in which they juxtapose each other. “Textile is material and tactile. Blue is immaterial, airy and spacious,” explains Vikman.

Changing Tides, Wendy Wahl, Encyclopedia Britannica pages, 27” x 42” x 1.75”, 2018. Photo by Tom Grotta
Next up we had Changing Tides by Wendy Wahl. Made of 275 pages of 1988 Encyclopedia Britannica Annual of World Data, Changing Tides continues a series Wahl developed from her interest in expressing our station in time through the use of materials that have been a part of a particular collective consciousness. Wahl cut the encyclopedia pages into seven sections, for each of the continents, and thoughtfully scrolled and compressed into 1,925 whirls to symbolize the reality of rising water around the globe.

Blue Wave, Ferne Jacobs, coiled and twined waxed linen thread, 19” x 17.5” x 6”, 1994. Photo by Tom Grotta.
Lastly, Ferne Jacobs’ Blue Wave. Jacobs, who began making sculptural baskets in 1970, uses waxed linen to create intricate, coiled designs that evoke organic forms. Jacobs’ commitment to fiber sculptures grows out of a fascination that thread can be made solid, that by using only her hands and thread, she can create a form that can physically stand on its own.
Recap: Whirlwind Art Week in Wilton at browngrotta arts

VIP-opening, photo by Carter Grotta
We had record crowds in attendance and a record number of sales at browngrotta arts in Wilton last week for Blue/Green: color/code/context. At our VIP preview event on Friday, we hosted our clients, collectors and art appreciators and our event sponsors from Litchfield Distillery, venü Magazine and Country Club Homes.
Saturday we hosted 10 artists from the exhibition (Keiji Nio and family all the way from Japan, Kiyomi Iwata from Virginia, Pat Campbell from Maine, Lewis Knauss, Nancy Koenigsberg, Polly Barton and Tamiko Kawata from New York, Wendy Wahl from Rhode Island and Dawn MacNutt from Nova Scotia) and loads of visitors, too. Sunday and Monday we were busy all day.

Surface Design Association Talk. Photo by Carter Grotta
Tuesday we hosted a good crowd of appreciative and knowledgable members of the Surface Design Association.

Mae Colburn presentation of Helena Hernmarck work at the Architecture and Designer Talk. Photo by Carter Grotta
Wednesday was educational — we presented Material Matter: Integrating Art Textiles and Fiber Sculpture into Interiors and Architecture with the help of Mae Colburn from Helena Hernmarck’s studio and some interior shots from Walter Cromwell at Country Club Homes. Those in attendance were eligible to get Continuing Education Credit from the Interior Design Continuning Education Council.
Thursday brought the Westport Arts Council Board and patrons another educated and interested audience.

Ports of cause fundraiser. photo by Harrison James O’Brien
Friday was Art•Ocean•Energy, an immersive art experience for supporters of Ports of Cause, a 501(c)3 driven to promote, inspire and accelerate innovative and sustainable solutions and practices that reduce the impact luxury living and everyday lifestyles have on our oceans. Those who joined us on Friday, heard Tom speak about our artists’ dedication to sustainable art and art practices and

Arthur Bavelas talking at Ports of Cause fundraiser. photo by Harrison James O’Brien
Arthur Bavelas, Founder of the Bavelas Group Family Office & Family Office Insights of New York City, speak about How sustainable innovation is driving the blue economy while benefiting our oceans and natural resources. A lively discussion followed. Saturday was a full day as was Sunday. Sunday evening we concluded our 10-day annual opening with a informed and engaged group from the Aldrich Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut. Hope we’ll see you at browngrotta arts in 2019 at one or more of our annual events. In the meantime, you can find us online at browngrotta.com; talking about events and acquisitions and other art stuff at arttextstyle.com and on Facebook, posting items and images on Twitter and Instagram and videos on the browngrotta arts YouTube Channel.
First Look: Blue/Green: color/code/context, April 28th – May 6th at bga, Wilton, CT

30mb Dutch Blue (Oval), Marian Bijlenga
camelhair, fabric, stitched
35” x 35”, 2006, photo by Tom Grotta
For this year’s Art in the Barn exhibition, we asked artists to enter a blue or green period of their own and send us a work that conveyed one of the many meanings, connotations and moods of these colors. The result is Blue/Green: color/code/context, an exhibition of remarkably diverse works from more than 50 artists from 15 countries. Marian Bijlenga of the Netherlands, for example, has created an enigmatic wall work inspired by Dutch blue china fragments. The work is inspired, she says, by the patterns of Chinese porcelain and the Japanese philosophy of the reuse of broken tiles and her collection of Dutch blue shards, collected in Amsterdam.
Yasuhisa Kohyama has created, Kaze, a ceramic with a grey-greenish cast, hand built and wood fired in an anagama kiln. “With the properties of the shigaraki clay and its inclusions of feldspar and silica, the high heat, the atmosphere in the kiln and the falling of the wood ash on the pots all present, warm colors as well as attractive markings can be captured on the surface of the clay,” Kohyama explains. “The blue-green and red-orange colors develop in the mid-section of the kiln; In the back of the kiln, a heavily reduced atmosphere creates rich dark gray and brown colors.”
The Green Horizon is the striking abstract tapestry created by Gudrun Pager of Denmark for the exhibition. “Perhaps it is the horizon between heaven and sea, or between heaven and earth – or the line between heaven and earth?” Pagter muses. “The thin, horizontal line is made with many shades of blue and green thin linen. The main color is blue, but the thin, green horizon is essential to the whole picture.”
Encylopedia Britanica pages are the material Wendy Wahl uses to express our station in time, recognizable as they are as a part of a particular collective consciousness. Wahl’s Changing Tides is made of 275 pages of the 1988 Encyclopedia Britannica Annual of World Data, the only book in Wahl’s collection of EB volumes that contained blue paper. The pages were cut into seven sections, for each of the continents, contemplatively scrolled and compressed into 1925 whorls to symbolize the reality of rising water around the globe. These four are just a sampling of the more than 70 works that will be on display in the Blue/Green: color/code/context exhibition and in the companion catalog, which will be available at www.browngrotta.com after April 28th. To visit Blue/Green: color/code/context, here are the details: Saturday, April 28th, 1-6 pm: Opening and Artists Reception
Art Lives Well Lived: Katherine Westphal and Ethel Stein
We lost two fine artists and friends this month when Ethel Stein passed away at 100 and Katherine Westphal died at home in Berkeley, California at 99.
Six years later, Ethel’s work received the wider recognition it deserved. We were thrilled to attend the opening of her one-person exhibition, Ethel Stein, Master Weaver, at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2014. “Ethel Stein is an artist who only now, at the age of 96, is beginning to get the recognition she deserves from the broader public,” the Institute wrote. “Stein’s great contribution to weaving is her unique combination of refined traditional weaving techniques, possible only on a drawloom and used by few contemporary weavers, with modernist sensibilities influenced by Josef Albers, who trained in the German Bauhaus with its emphasis on simplicity, order, functionality, and modesty.” There were photos of her at work, a video and a dinner after with family members and supporters of the museum and crowds of visitors to the exhibition — a well-deserved tribute.
These artists and their lengthy careers, raise the question, is fiber art a key to longevity? Ethel Stein continued to weave even after she was discovered and lauded at 96. When we visited Katherine Westphal in Berkeley in 2015 we found her still drawing or painting every day in a series of journals she kept, something she continued to do until just a few weeks before her death. Lenore Tawney died at 100, Ruth Asawa and Magdalena Abakanowicz each at 87. Helena Hernmarck tells us that she knows several fiber artists who are 100. So those of you who are practitioners — keep it up!
Text/iles: On Art that Includes Words and Text.
January 21 – May 6, 2018
Written languages are just one of the many ways human beings attempt to communicate with one another. In Text Message: Words and Letters in Contemporary Art, currently on exhibit at the Racine Art Museum in Wisconsin, contemporary artists, recognizing the power and complexity of the written word, utilize text—individual letters or words—to explore theoretical, social, symbolic, and aesthetic concerns.

2 Laws, Barbara Brandel, Sampler (Jacket), 1995, dyed cotton, silk, and wool
Photo by Jon Bolton, Racine Art Musuem.

Bird Brain, John McQueen, woven willow twigs, waxed string, 2002, photo by Tom Grotta. On close inspection, the names of various birds are legible.
The exhibition includes works that use words, letters, and script to convey meaning. Tangible three-dimensional objects made of fiber, clay, polymer, paper, and metal along with two-dimensional works on paper underscore how contemporary artists recognize the power and complexity of the written word. John McQueen and Gyöngy Laky are among the 77 artists whose work is included. The exhibition ends on May 6, 2018. For more information, visit: https://www.ramart.org/content/text-message-words-and-letters-contemporary-craft. To pique your interest, here are some images of art by various artists who incorporate or reference text in their work.
HeArt-ists: Creative Couples
Ed Rossbach/Katherine Westphal: Ed Rossbach and Katherine Westphal were both innovators — he a maker of nonfunctional art baskets; she in her work with xerography and art quilts. The pair loved to travel and images and influences from those visits appear in their work in various ways. Images from the American West, including bison and feathers, appear in both Rossbach’s baskets and drawings and in Westphal’s wall hangings of tapas bark. Westphal made color photocopies of photos she took on their travels through Europe, Asia and the Middle East, and with a heat transfer process, inserted these images into her quilts and wearable art. Rossbach took photo images and reconstructed them with stitching and pins.
Kay Sekimachi/Bob Stocksdale: Kay Sekimachi and her late husband, woodturner Bob Stocksdale, collaborated to create an entire series of work, exhibited across the US as Marriage in Form. Sekimachi used his turned wood vessels as a form to shape her own ber vessels from hornet’s nest paper. Sekimachi applies a base layer of Kozo paper to a wood form, then laminates the hornet’s nest paper. The resulting objects appears delicate and ethereal but is actually stiff and stable.
Claude Vermette/Mariette Rousseau-Vermette: For several decades, this couple worked in separate studios, in different media, in different ways. Yet, as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Baie St. Paul, Quebec noted when mounting a posthumous retrospective of Vermette’s paintings, ceramics and sculpture and Rousseau-Vermette’s tapestries, they shared “a common spirit, strong affinities and correspondences, links of course emotional and intellectual, the same historical and sociological context and the crossing of an important period of time.”
Books Make Great Gifts, Part 2

From Tapestry To Fiber Art The Laussane Biennials 1962-1995. Pictured works by Mariette-Rousseau Vermette, Cynthia Schira and Lenore Tawney
Two January arrivals to review and one fav from last year to highlight: We were delighted to receive our copy of From Tapestry to Fiber Art: The Lausanne Biennals 1962-1995 by Giselle Eberhard Cotton and you can order it now from browngrotta arts. The book contains many never-before-published images from the Biennials and insightful essays, as well.
Another newly published title we’ve enjoyed is Artisans of Israel: Transcending Tradition by Lynn Holstein (Arnoldsche Art Publishers). Intriguing portraits of dozens of artists are featured, from a Bedouin ceramist, Zenab Garbia, who use cross-stitch patterns in her works, to Russian emigre, Aleksandra Stoyanov who creates evocative tapestries, to Gali Cnaani, whose grandparents emigrated to Israel from Romania and Slovakia and who creates hybrid textiles from meticulously modified items of used clothing. The book features studio photos and portraits of workshops and design brands.
Both Heidrun Schimmel and Gyøngy Laky had high praise for The Box Project: Works from the Lloyd Cotsen Collection, edited by Lyssa Stapleton (Cotsen Occasional Press, Los Angeles, 2016). “This catalog itself is an art object! The essays answer very important fundamental questions in textile art and the photographs are in high quality,” writes Heidrun Schimmel. “At the risk of being shamelessly self-promoting,” Gyöngy Laky also recommended the catalog/book that accompanied the unusual, traveling exhibition, which includes Laky’s and Schimmel’s work among that of many other artists.
Happy New Year: to new beginnings, fresh starts, rewrites and resurrections
Mariyo Yagi’s works, including A Cycle, Infinity, resonate with her nawa principle: spiral energy of movement and human beings together creating a metaphorical rope, all pulling together. What better sentiment for the New Year? We at browngrotta arts wish you all an awesome and abundant year. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDSqnF_Wjac
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Adela Akers Art Textiles Basketry browngrotta arts Carolina Yrarrázaval Chris Drury Dona Anderson Dorothy Gill Barnes Ed Rossbach Fiber Sculpture Gyöngy Laky Heidrun Schimmel Helena Hernmarck Hisako Sekijima Jane Balsgaard Jennifer Falck Linssen Jin-Sook So Jiro Yonezawa John McQueen Kay Sekimachi Kiyomi Iwata Kyoko KumaI Lawrence LaBianca Lenore Tawney Lewis Knauss Lia Cook Lizzie Farey Magdalena Abakanowicz Marian Bijlenga Mariette Rousseau-Vermette Mary Giles Mary Merkel-Hess Nancy Koenigsberg Nancy Moore Bess Naoko Serino Naomi Kobayashi Norma Minkowitz Randy Walker Ritzi Jacobi Stéphanie Jacques Sue Lawty Tamiko Kawata Tapestry Wendy Wahl Yasuhisa KohyamaAbout browngrotta.com
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