Our Spring exhibition, Transformations: dialogues in art and materials (May 9 – 17) opens at browngrotta arts, Wilton, Connecticut, in less than a month. For those of you coming by car, there are interesting art stops you might want to make on your way. Below are exhibition suggestions in Westport, Bantam, Greenwich, and New Haven, Connecticut. See you next month!
Rina Banerjee: Take me, take me, take me … to the Palace of love
Through September 13th
Yale Center for British Art
1080 Chapel Street
New Haven, CT
https://britishart.yale.edu/exhibitions-programs/rina-banerjee-take-me-take-me-take-me-palace-love
In an art journey that include Transformations’ exploration of materials at browngrotta arts, in Wilton, CT, Rina Banerjee’s Take me, take me, take me … to the Palace of love at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, CT would be an appropriate add on. It’s an amalgam of materials. Banerjee’s structure reimagines the Taj Mahal, a grand 17th century Mughal mausoleum, in ephemeral industrial materials: a frame of copper and steel is encased in vibrant pink plastic, creating a translucent ghost of the opulent marble façade of the original. The interior of the sculpture reveals an antique Anglo-Indian Bombay chair hovering above a globe, and a chandelier composed of expendable goods—pink foam balls, plastic beads, and artificial birds. As the gallery notes: “These objects challenge our ideas of value, pointing to a global system that produces things to be alternately fetishized or quickly thrown away.” The piece tells two stories, like the Taj does, as a somber tomb and a monument to love.
WRIT and WEFTED:
Sally Van Doren, paintings and drawings; Nancy Koenigsberg, woven wire sculptures
Through June 21st.
Daphne:art Gallery and Advisory
55 West Morris Road
Bantam, Connecticut
By appointment: daphneadeeds@gmail.com
In reviewer Julie Durkin’s words, the exhibition pairs, “two artists who both work at the boundary between language and material.” Sally Van Doren is a poet who works with illegible handwriting. Nancy Koenigsberg “draws” with wire — nets and mats, cubes and chains — that suggest fascinating interior and shadow lives.
extraORDINARY things
through June 17th
Flinn Gallery
Greenwich Library
101 West Putnam Avenue
Second Floor
Greenwich, CT https://flinngallery.org/events/extraordinary-things/
Four artists — Qingjun Huang, Carole Kunstadt, Cheryl R. Riley, and Rob Strati —reimagine domestic items into vessels of memory, metaphor, and identity through photo essays, altered appliances, heirlooms, and keepsakes.
Art, Jazz + The Blues
through June 7th
Museum of Contemporary Art
19 Newtown Turnpike
Westport, CT
Art, Jazz + The Blues, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Westport, CT explores the intersections between visual art, jazz, and the blues, musical forms deeply rooted in African American traditions, drawing from the rich holdings of the Westport Public Art Collections (WestPAC). The exhibition centers on Giants of the Blues, a sweeping series of seven group portraits by Westport native Eric von Schmidt (1931–2007) honoring blues, jazz, and folk musicians from the 1920s to the 1960s. Complementing von Schmidt’s paintings are over fifty artworks from the WestPAC collection depicting musicians, inspired by musical themes, or exploring the resonances between musical and visual forms. A selection of important loans from ACA Galleries, The Brubeck Collection at Wilton Library, Eric Chiang, Michael Cummings, Fairfield University Art Museum, Housatonic Museum of Art, Tudor Maier, Mark & Ellen Naftalin, Larry Silver, the Westport Library Collection, and private collections deepen the conversation. As the jazz great Charlie Parker once said, the show invites visitors to “hear with your eyes and see with your ears.”
Last but certainly, not least: Transformations: dialogues in art and materials (May 9 – 17). Schedule your visit here: https://browngrotta.com/exhibitions/transformations-dialogues-in-art-and-material
Art: Antidote to an Edgy Election
No matter on what side of the political divide you sit, it’s been a long 16 months. And for some of us, the next 16 months will likely feel even longer. In our house we’re hunkering down – old movies, dinners with friends, letter writing and getting to all those to dos, like organizing our art books – and a news ban, at least for the next few weeks. We’re also aiming for an art fix. We are going out in search of what’s inspired, exhilarating, thought provoking. The markets are holding steady; why not invest in art? Surround yourself with what brings you joy. Here are four works that brought us feelings of peace, gratitude, tolerance and awe.
Lenore Tawney, The Path, Tapestry. Photo Tom Grotta
Lenore Tawney’s The Path II, is meditative and reflective of a passage she marked in a favorite book: “[t]he spiritual path, the path of purification, of emancipation, of liberation, is a path where we change our inner nature.”
37ts Vertical to Horizontal and Vice Versa, Toshio Sekiji. Photo by Tom Grotta
Mariyo Yagi, Nawa Axis for Peace Project 2014
In his “fugue weavings” like Vertical to Horizontal and Vice Versa, Toshio Sekiji, imagines a harmonious confluence of disparate cultures, languages and nationalities, so different than the facts on the ground. Mariyo Yagi’s art is infused with concern about the Cosmos. “Art is committed to the energy of human life,” she says. In creating her sculptures she has been informed by the study of nawa –– which means a spiral cord, which for Yagi provides a link between earth and heaven and all living things, creating a spiritual loop from DNA to the cosmos. Enlightening and innovative, Anda Klancic’s work combines creative use of machine-embroidered lace technique with experience from other disciplines, including photography. In Aura, Klancic says, “I wanted to show the vital energy in the human species: that the light, connected from man to the earth and the universe, has the rhythm of breath, of life.”
Anda Klancic FiberOptic, textile sculpture
Have you other works to recommend? Let us know.