This Fall, in Continental Drift: Encounters, North and South, (October 17 – 25), browngrotta arts will explore art from North and South America from two different vantage points. First, we will be gathering works by significant artists from the US, Canada, Chile, Venezuela, and Colombia. Many of these artists are not just representative of their own countries, but have a connection to another region as well. Second, we will be including work by artists from in and outside North and South America who cite art, artists, or experiences from these continents as an influence.
7mbe Petites Ailes de Glace Blanc, Micheline Beauchemin, nylon, silk, silver, aluminum wire, lead wire, 30″ x 32″ x 7″, 1980-1985. Photo Tom Grotta
With the US currently elbowing its continental neighbors in a political context, it seemed an apt time to examine the gentler ways in which art and culture nudge one another and may wind up altered as a result. The term “continental drift” refers to the slow, tectonic movement of land masses — a process that both separates and reshapes. The exhibition draws an analog between geology and culture: artistic traditions, too, migrate, collide, and transform across the vast territories of North, Latin, and South America. This exhibition brings together works by artists from across the hemisphere. alongside works that bear the imprint of those traditions — whether through material, technique, imagery, or sustained encounter with place and people.
Among the artists from the Americas that will be included are renowned Canadian weavers Micheline Beauchemin and Mariette Rousseau-Vermette. Rousseau-Vermette exemplifies the migration of artistic influences from one continent to another. After graduation from the École des beaux-arts in Montreal in 1948, Mariette (then Rousseau, later Rousseau-Vermette) looked to the United States to further her education, unlike her fellow students who took their cur from Europe and travelled to France. She was inspired by a 1947 issue of Life magazine in which an article titled “Top Weaver” introduced her to the innovative Dorothy Liebes studio in San Francisco, where Rousseau-Vermette became an apprentice. “… [T]his magnificent woman was radically changing textiles in the United States, she was returning them to art,” Rousseau-Vermette said.
For Ferne Jacobs, an innovative American artist, whose work will also be included, a workshop with noted Colombian artist Olga de Amaral was one way in which she was exposed to avant-garde, structural approaches to thread that has led her to create dramatic fiber sculptures. Jacob uses ancient techniques in her work, including coiling, particularly prominent among Indigenous peoples of the American Southwest.
From Chile, Carolina Yrarrázaval cites her encounters with American artist Sheila Hicks as formative. Traditional textiles are another significant touchstone for Yrarrázaval. Throughout her career, she has investigated textile traditions across diverse cultures, with particular attention to pre-Columbian techniques.
From outside North and South America, we’ll be featuring work by artist Trine Ellitsgaard. Ellitsgaard grew up in Denmark. It was there she trained as a weaver, but for the last 20 years she has lived in Oaxaca, Mexico. Her work has a Scandinavian sensibility. There are influences from her adopted home to be seen, as well, including using black-dyed sheep’s wool skirts of the Chamula women of Chiapas in her works and other materials found there — horse-hair, palm, gold thread, plastic, paper, silk, sisal, seeds — deftly blending the organic and the inorganic. Other individuals whose work will be included in Continental Drift have cited artists from the US as having an impact on their art. For Hisako Sekijima and Jiro Yonezawa of Japan it was John McQueen. For Stéphanie Jacques of Belgium and Tim Johnson of the UK it was Ed Rossbach.
The practices of these artists, and the others who will be included, are an apt descriptor of the premise explored in Continental Drift. Each influence absorbed, each tradition studied, contributes another dimension to the tiers of weaving, years of research, and volumes of texture that distinguish these artists’ work.
We’ll be publishing a full-color catalog to accompany Continental Drift, with an essay by Sarah Parrish, Associate Professor of Art History, Plymouth State University, Massachusetts, Research Fellow, Fiber Sculpture: 1960 to the present, ICA, Boston. .
Join us in October! More information to come.
