William Morris, pillar of the arts-and-crafts movement in the 1880s opined, “There is only one real dye: indigo.”

Transformations: dialogues in art and material this May 9 – 17th at browngrotta arts will feature works from Japan, Korea, Venezuela, the UK, and the US that incorporate indigo. Every culture that discovered indigo seems to have felt the transformation as something more than chemical: the cloth goes into the vat one color and emerges another, steeped in a blue that belongs simultaneously to sky and sea and shadow. The plant’s leaves are dark green, and the mystical blue color is unveiled through a fermentation process — when a dyed article is exposed to air, the color transition occurs, starting from yellow to green, and ultimately resulting in the well-known indigo shade. 

What connects the artists in Transformations  who work in indigo — across continents and generations and very different formal concerns — is a relationship with the material that goes beyond color preference. Each has submitted to the discipline the dye demands. Indigo is not a paint you squeeze from a tube. It requires a living vat, careful chemistry, patience, and what practitioners often describe as ritual. It is a dye that demands discipline to use, with some indigo textiles taking thousands of hours to produce, requiring prolonged concentration akin to a meditative state. 

Hiroyuki Shindo discovered the dye as a student: he first encountered indigo while at Kyoto City University of Fine Arts in Japan in the late 1960s, when an older artisan told him he was the last of 14 generations of indigo dyers. Shindo was determined to prevent the art form’s extinction. Over decades, Shindo maintained indigo vats in Kyoto and developed a distinctive technique entirely his own. He developed his own system, utilizing wide flat troughs in which he laid small stones, watching carefully as the indigo was drawn slowly into the fabric, creating gradations of hue — from nearly invisible shadows to areas of nearly black — through a combination of natural process and his own invention. The white of the cloth, Shindo insisted, was as important as the dyed portions.

James Bassler took a journey to indigo. In 1960, a voyage home from a civilian job in England via a cargo ship through Asia proved transformative. On this journey he witnessed the importance of world crafts and their essential role in cultures — a spinning and weaving demonstration in Bombay and the dyeing processes of Indonesia and Japan. Bassler has since explored the wedge-weave structure of the Navajo, shibori from Japan, and the scaffold weave of pre-Columbian cultures in his textile work. Indigo is threaded through decades of his practice. In works, such as Cumbe, he has used indigo-dyed silk and linen warps in combination with an array of other natural fibers — ramie, sisal, pineapple, nettles — creating textiles that feel like accumulated knowledge made visible.

Japan and paint were Polly Barton’s route to indigo. As a young artist, she worked as a personal assistant to abstract expressionist painter Helen Frankenthaler, from whom Barton says she gained “permission” to build up layers of color in her own work. In 1981, she moved to Kameoka, Japan to study with master weaver Tomohiko Inoue, living in the religious heart of the Oomoto Foundation. Barton has spent over four decades exploring ikat, the ancient technique of binding skeins of yarn in calculated patterns before dyeing, which produces the distinctive blurred, feathered color transitions characteristic of the form. Indigo is central to her palette. Her work uses indigo alongside pigment, sumi ink, soy milk, and metal and silver leaf — materials that she layers to create luminous, meditative surfaces.

One of the foundational figures of American fiber art — and one of its great iconoclasts — Ed Rossbach taught for nearly three decades at the University of California, Berkeley, where he created works in almost every known textile technique during his five-decade-long career, experimenting with labor-intensive techniques such as Andean discontinuous warp weaving, Native American coiled basketry, European lace, and Indonesian ikat. Indigo appeared in his work as part of his deep engagement with global textile traditions. He used the dye not as an element in a restlessly curious practice that moved between the ethnographic and the anarchic — making a basket from plastic, a hanging from newspaper, a piece from tundra grass. Indigo was part of that global inventory, a dye he understood as one of humanity’s great shared materials.

Yeonsoon Chang takes indigo into the realm of philosophy. The Korean artist is known for creating ethereal works of starched indigo and was named Artist of the Year at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul in 2008. Chang’s signature material is abaca — a fiber derived from a species of banana plant — which she subjects to an elaborate 12-step process that includes starching, In her Matrix III series, she dyes the abaca fabric with indigo blue over thirty times, creating tightly stiffened material that pays homage to its disciplined creation. The Matrix series, she has said, illustrates the Asian perspective of the human mind and body as unified rather than separate — and the repeated dyeing, the compulsive labor, the rigid geometry are all in service of that idea.

The Venezuelan partnership of Eduardo Portillo and María Dávila may have traveled the furthest — literally and conceptually — to arrive at indigo. Working together since 1983, they have been dedicated to exploring the intricacies of the material production of textiles, traveling extensively in China and India to study the traditional techniques of indigo dye making, silk sericulture, and hand-weaving. Indigo became central to a pivotal body of work rooted in place and longing. Looking for blue in their mountain landscape and realizing they could only find it in the sky, they merged their previous projects — the silk, the vegetable fibers, the natural dyes — into a series called Azul Indigo, exhibited in 2012, recreating the hours of the day: sunrise, noon, sunset, night, and the night’s shadows — their interest in blue shifting with the intensity of light according to the hour.

That labor-intensive nature of indigo, paradoxically, is part of its appeal for contemporary artists working in an era of infinite digital speed. The vat slows you down. It insists on process. It connects you — through fermented indigo leaves and wooden mallets and resist-tied threads — to every dyer who has stood at a vat in Kano or Kyoto or the Carolina Lowcountry, watching cloth transform in the air. William Morris was right. There is only one real blue dye. And in the hands of artists like these, its presence is spell binding.

Join us to see their work at Transformations:dialogues in art and material (May 9-17). 

Each March, New York becomes a global gathering place for collectors, curators, and lovers of Asian art. Asia Week New York (March 19 – 27, 2026) brings together the world’s foremost galleries, auction houses, and museums for 10 days of exhibitions and cultural programming. Here’s a guide to museum exhibits – https://asiaweekny.com/asia-week-march-2026-museum-exhibition-guide/ – from Chinese Porcelain at the Frick, to Hindu Devotional Prints, 1860–1930 at the Met, to a solo exhibition of work by Choong Sup Lim at the Korean Cultural Center. 

At browngrotta arts, it might as well be Asia Week all year long as we have a glorious group of contemporary textile and ceramic artists from India, Japan, and Korea whose work we promote. Asia Week 2026 gives us a good excuse to highlight a select group of their works. Whether you’re a seasoned collector or simply curious, it’s a great time to explore works from these countries in depth.

First up, are stitched and resist-dyed textiles from India by Neha Puri Dhir. Her works explore negative and positive space, reflecting ideas of balance and contrast. The textured surfaces, shaped by stitches and dye migration, add a tactile depth, emphasizing the labor-intensive process she undertakes.

browngrotta arts also promotes singular ceramics, sculpture, basketry, and wall works created by more than 20 artists from Japan. Among these works are ceramics by Toshiko Takaezu and Yasahisu Kohyama. We also show vessels and sculptures by several inventive basketmakers including a group that has studied with Hisako Sekijima — Norie Hatakeyama, Kazue Honma, Noriko Takimaya, Tsuruko Tanikawa, and Masako Yoshida — as well as Shoko Fukuda, Jiro Yonezawa, and Kosuge Kogetsu. Remarkable weavers are also represented, including Hiroyuki Shindo, Masako Nakahira, Jun Tomita, Chiyoko Tanaka, and Naomi and Masakazu Kobayashi.

Five Korean creators of innovative art textiles made of steel, paper, velcro, silk, and ramie are among those whose work we highlight. The effects of light and color in Jin-Sook So’s works of stainless steel reflect her years living in Korea and Sweden. Yong Joo Kim has reinvented velcro as a fabric to create evocative sculptures while Young-ok Shin explores ramie with great impact. Yeonsoon Chang transforms the “softness” of fiber, and transcends the material’s limitations with structures made of abaca fibers and Teflon-coated, glass-fiber mesh to which she attaches gold leaf. Sung Rim Park uses knots of paper, determining the shape and size of each knot based on the meanings and symbolism it holds. While the knots and fibers works that result may appear delicate, they have the power to shape space. 

Pictured here are just a sampling of the Asian artworks at browngrotta arts. Visit our website to see the entire group, by name, or filter by country: Yeonsoon Chang, Neha Puri Dhir, Shoko Fukuda, Norie Hatakeyama, Kazue Honma, Matsumi Iwasaki, Kiyomi Iwata, Yong Joo Kim, Naomi Kobayashi, Masakazu Kobayashi, Yasuhisa Kohyama, Kosuge Kogetsu, Kyoko Kumai, Maki, Nakahira, Nio, Park, Hiroyuki Sato-Pijanowski, Toshiko Sekiji, Hisako Sekijima, Kay Sekimachi, Naoko Serino, Young-ok Shin, Hiroyuki Shindo, Jin-Sook So, Toshiko Takaezu, Noriko Takamiya, Chiyoko Tanaka, Hideho Tanaka, Tsuroko Tanikawa, Jun Tomita, Mariyo Yagi, Jiro Yonezawa, Masako Yoshida. 

There’s a moment in weaving — the Polish textile artist Lilla Kulka has described it — when the work surprises you. When the loom leads rather than follows. For Kulka, that surrender to process is fundamental: “In the process of weaving, I am often surprised at the direction my work takes,” she says. It’s a quietly radical statement from an artist whose career has been defined by refusing the expected.

Born in 1946 in Kraków, Poland, Kulka came of age in one of the great centers of European textile art — a city where the Academy of Fine Arts carries a legacy stretching back to 1818, and where fiber art was being radically reimagined in the postwar decades. She went on to become a professor at that same institution, shaping generations of Polish artists in her unique fabrics studio.

Kulka’s work defies easy categorization, which is precisely the point. She creates art on the intersection between fiber art, painting, and sculpture, and has spent her career dismantling the hierarchies that place one above another. As she puts it: “Rather than locking myself within the bounds of any one artistic tradition, I have disregarded such artificial barriers to expression.” The results are monumental. Works like Traces (1979) — woven in sisal and handspun wool, stretching nine feet tall — pulse with human presence without depicting it literally. Her early figurative vocabulary evolved into something more elusive: human shadows, outlines, traces of bodies rather than bodies themselves. These were meditations on the great mysteries of life — pain, power, love, faith — rendered in the language of horizontal and vertical lines. 

What makes Kulka’s work particularly charged is its context. She has acknowledged that the political situation in Poland made it difficult to present all of her work publicly in the 1970s and early 1980s. That the work survived and circulated internationally is a testament both to her determination and to the peculiar freedom that fiber art, long dismissed as craft rather than fine art, sometimes enjoyed under censorial regimes.

Her materials speak their own language. Sisal, wool, cotton, steel — she juxtaposes materials with diametrically different connotations, sometimes combining industrial slabs of steel with meticulously handwoven gobelin tapestries. Softness and hardness. The handmade and the industrial. The personal and the structural. It’s a visual argument about what it means to live in a body in a political world. Kulka’s work will be included in browngrotta arts’ upcoming exhibition, Transformations: dialogues in art and material (May 9 – 17, 2026).

Kulka’s work spans tapestry, painting, drawing, interdisciplinary activities, and exhibition design, and she has participated in over 300 exhibitions across 17 countries in Europe, the United States, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, and Israel. She has shown at venues ranging from the Central Museum of Textiles in Łódź — home of the prestigious International Triennial of Tapestry — to galleries in Vienna, Düsseldorf, Chicago, and beyond. 

The enduring relevance of Kulka’s vision was celebrated in 2025 in Krakow in a three-venue exhibition, Tempus Omnia Revelat (Time Reveals All). A comprehensive catalogue raisonné of the same name was published to accompany the exhibition that includes over 300 pages of illustrations and essays. Included are a lengthy interview with the artist and excerpts from a 2003 review by Professor Magdalena Abakanowicz. “Lilla Kulka works in techniques that did not exist before,” she wrote. “The blindness of convention may label them as weaving, yet they are magical, multilayered, and thought-provoking objects, appearing today with particular clarity against the backdrop of society’s dependence on mechanical techniques.”

For those encountering her work for the first time, the invitation is open. As Kulka herself says: “The abstract content of my work cannot be easily explained by the titles of each piece. I invite each viewer to search for and find an individual meaning in my work.”

New this week in February was nothing if not eclectic. From Sue Lawty’s works of tiny stones to James Bassler’s reimagined yatra jacket. The works reveal diversity and intrigue.

Sue Lawty is recognized as one of Britain’s foremost contemporary textile artists. Her work encompasses weavings, constructed pieces, and drawings in both two and three dimensions, exploring rhythm, repetition, and interval. Lawty creates assemblages featuring thousands of tiny stones, like Coast, East Riding of Yorkshire 1-3, each smoothed by the sea and meticulously hand sorted, Whether making drawings and assemblages using tiny stones creating a kind of pixelated cloth, or weaving in linen, hemp, raphia, or lead, she talks of the “integrity of mark making intrinsic to particular thread or structure.” Lawtywill also be running an online workshop, Rhythm & Repetition in Woven Tapestry on Sunday, April 26  and May 3, 2026 on Zoom from 2 – 5pm GMT. To book your spot, visit the selvedge website HERE. 

The late Polish artist, Zofia Butrymowicz emerged as one of the pioneering East European textile artists in the 1960s. Butrymowicz excelled in the wool gobelin technique, utilizing handspun wools that were often rough and irregular to create striking and textured pieces. Color was a dominant theme for Butrymowicz. She frequently emphasized color, reflecting her deep interest in experimentation and new artistic expressions. Throughout her career, Butrymowicz’s contributions to the art world were celebrated globally. Her work was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s seminal Wall Hangings exhibition. Her legacy continues to inspire.

A leading figure in California’s celebrated fiber art community, Katherine Westphal was driven by boundless curiosity and creativity, exploring ceramics, quilting, fiber sculpture, photocopy collage, and wearable art with equal imagination and innovation. “Throughout her career, beginning with the batik samples she made for the commercial printed textile industry in the 1950s, [Westphal] incorporated images from her immediate world: street people in Berkeley, Japanese sculpture, Monet’s garden, Egyptian tourist groups, Chinese embroidery, images from newspaper and magazine photos, and her dogs…anything that struck her fancy wherever she happened to be at the moment – and she could put any or all of them into a repeat pattern.  Her wit and whimsy [were] legendary and her lively approach also inspired her husband [Ed Rossbach] to combine imagery onto the surface of his inventive baskets and containers,” wrote Jo Ann C. Staab in 2015 (“Fiber Art Pioneers: Pushing the Pliable Plane,” Retro/Prospective: 25+ Years of Art Textiles and Sculpture, browngrotta arts, Wilton, CT 2015.) Angels captured her interest in 1976 and resulted in the energetic embroidery Bicentennial Angels. The work is well worth a lookback in 2026, America’s semiquincentennial year.

For James Bassler, the inspiration for My Letterman Yantra was an exhibition commission. He was asked by Jack Lenor Larson to create a piece in response to one in George Washington University’s Textile Museum’s collection.  Bassler reviewed the museum’s digital images, doubtful that the dotted pixels on his screen, so far removed from their three-dimensional source, would prove inspirational.  But he was drawn to an image of a garment from Myanmar (then Burma), a shirt, embellished with yantras, auspicious signs and symbols, associated with cosmic powers that will bring good things to shirt’s wearer. As he is a runner, they reminded him of the race shirts he had been given over the years for participating in marathons, covered with logos and corporate symbols.  Why not, he thought, create a 20th-century version?  The Letterman Yantra is the result, with woven fabric, and embroidered designs that include rows of running “stick figures,” the number 262 and phrases to speed the imaginary wearer and runner, on. The curator pronounced the reimagined version a great success. Larsen wrote, “The two-sided jacket of James Bassler, with ikat-like patterning, is [ ] exceptional, created with a fugitive-dyed magenta yarn wicking into the adjacent areas. If wicking prints are extremely rare, his patterning of the back side, created by clamping and steaming together the patterned front and the plain back, is a unique and primitive form of transfer printing. Bassler has been successfully sourcing museums with varied and extraordinary results for a long time, and here he seems inspired to create a technique not yet in museums!”