If Wikipedia is to be believed, Pop-Up art exhibitions began in 2007 in New York City. They now occur all over they world. Pop-ups are generally temporary events, less formal than a gallery or a museum, often using unusual spaces. Their popularity has boomed since the oughts, including Banksy’s Dismaland which collected work by 58 artists in a rundown seaside town in the UK in 2015, Yasoi Kusama’s room that exploded with flowers in Melbourne, Australia in 2018, the Museum of Ice Cream (not technically a museum) currently in several locations including Miami, Boston and Singapore, and The Color Factory in New York City, Houston, and Chicago. Pop-Ups are often immersive, interactive, and collaborative like Meow Wolf in Santa Fe, which began in 2008 as a small collective of artists sharing an interest in publicly displaying their works and developing their skills. Meow Wolf now aims to “redefine the paradigm of art and storytelling to make a positive difference in the world.”
Fast forward to 2024: browngrotta arts has its own Pop-Up of sorts at JUICE Creative Group in Norwalk, CT. JUICE handles our social media, website development, event planning and other miscellany. It has loads of clients coming into its business and rental studio space each week. Now, select Juice visitors are able to view (and acquire) JUICE Art, a specially assembled group of works from artists who work with browngrotta arts.
In curating the collection, we were mindful of the JUICE ethos. It’s a brand and digital agency based in the US, with team members all over the world. JUICE takes pride in the team of brand experts, designers, marketers and tech geeks it’s built, and the vibrant creative culture it has fostered. To reflect that creativity and energy, we suggested works like Grethe Sorensen’s Out of Focus that references pixels from printing, Warren Seelig’s mechanical sculptures, Small Double-Ended and White Wheel, Gyöngy Laky’s playful Beach Sketch, made of electrical tape wrapped branches and Electricity/Energy by Mariette Rousseau-Vermette, a tapestry that incorporates wire.
Printed pages are another theme; the agency produces a lot of textual content. There are collages made of books and newspapers by Toshio Sekiji; works by Wendy Wahl of encyclopedia pages, and an interesting work by Mercedes Vicente that mixes string and spiral notebook pages and “hints” at writing. Photography, too, was a theme. In a room clients use, we placed a textile triptych made of photo images of Japanese tile roofs that are fragmented, silk screened, and metal-leafed made by Glen Kaufman along with works of paper by Gizella Warburton. On a floor of offices, there are photographs of fiber sculptures by Federica Luzzi, White Shell Tongue 1 and 2 beside a graphic tapestry by Gudrun Pagter.
In deciding what to display, we also collaborated with the JUICE team, including some works by artists they chose. John McQueen is a favorite of several team members. We included Intimate Domain, which includes a tree made of repurposed plastic surrounded by a frame made of small branches and cable ties and also Treed, a depiction of a tree where the drawing creeps off the page an onto the frame. Another popular artist was Canadian painter and ceramist Claude Vermette. There are two of his large canvases, one triptych and one small water color hung throughout the space. Also on the team’s list, works by Keiji Nio, Jo Barker, Dorothy Gill Barnes, Jiro Yonezawa, Chiyoko Tanaka and Jennifer Falck Linssen.
For us, a Pop-Up is a Good Op. The JUICE space looks better, clients and staff appreciate the work, and we get more eyeballs for some great works of art!
News Flash: Artists Get Good Press
Over the last few months, the artists browngrotta arts represents have received mentions and more from the press, print and online. The November/December issue of Craft from the UK, included an image of Sounding by Lawrence LaBianca and Donald Fortescue in, “Craft’s quick fix,” by Glenn Adamson, which discusses the use of the humble cable tie by contemporary artists.
Lawrence LaBianca in the Aspen Sojourner
Then, in its Holiday issue, Aspen Sojourner printed a lengthy piece about LaBianca’s artist-in-residency at Anderson Ranch, “Ranch Hands: A day in the life of an Anderson Ranch artist-in-resident,” by Hilary Stunda http://softarchive.net/blogs/d3pz4i/aspen_sojourner_usa_holiday.882867.html.
Surface Design Winter 2012
The Winter 2012 of Surface Design,devoted four pages to Kyomi Iwata’s new work in kibisio, a by-product of silk spinning production in Japan, previously considered a waste material http://www.surfacedesign.org/publications/sda-journal. The same issue reviewed New York Fiber in the 21st Century at Lehman College Gallery and featured Tom’s photo of Norma Minkowitz’s King of the Hill and referenced Nancy Koenigsberg’s Light and Tempest, as “challeng[ing] the idea of flatness vs. sculptural, a middle ground that fiber works can uniquely occupy.”
Dail Behennah Grid Dish, 40:40 Forty Objects for Forty Years
The UK’s Craft Council included Dail Behennah’s Grid Dish as one of its 40:40/Forty Objects for Forty Years. You can see all 40 objects at: http://onviewonline.craftscouncil.org.uk/4040/.
Korean Foundation Newsletter 12 2011
The December 2011 issue of the Korea Foundation Newsletter featured a profile of Jin-Sook So in conjunction with coverage of the exhibition of Swedish craft art that she curated in Seoul late last year http://newsletter.kf.or.kr/news/news_201112/eng/sub_02.html. In the piece, “Encounter of Swedish Crafts and Korean Sensibilities; Textile Artist Jin-Sook So’s Views of Contemporary” So explains how Sweden and Korea influence her work. “I’ve lived in Sweden for 30 years and have traveled all over the world to create works and hold exhibitions, but my roots remain in Korea. Although I didn’t intend it to be, Korea and Korean sentiments have served as the spirit and inspiration that have motivated me. As time went by, it became even more evident, and I believe they will remain the roots of my work in the future.”
New York Spaces October 2011
So’s work of steel mesh, Untitled, was also included in the “Art Now” column of New York Spaces last October.
Textile Forum December 2011
Photos of work by three artists represented by browngrotta arts were featured in the December 2011 issue if the ETN textileforum. These included shots of Merja Winquist’s, Winter Garden, her large, on-site installation at the Sofia Paper Art Fest in Bulgaria, Anda Klancic’s lighted work, Aura FM, at the 2011 Como Miniartextil exhibition in Italy and Grethe Sorenson preparing for her Traces of Light exhibition at the Round Tower in Copenhagen, Denmark through March 11, 2012.