Monthly archives: July, 2018

Collaborations: Creativity x 2

Artist collaborations account for some of the greatest pieces ever made. For example, the 1874 collaborative exhibition between Monet, Renoir, Morisot, Cézanne in which the called themselves the “Société Anonyme des Artes” helped establish the artists in the art world. In fact, it was a snide remark by art critic Louise Leroy of the show, which he called ‘The Exhibition of Impressionists” that established the impressionist style and movement (Financial Times).

Dail Behennah’s Studio Work-board. Photo: Dail Behennah via In.Dialogue

“History has proved time and again that two creative minds can sometimes be better than one,” explains Nadja Bozovic of Agora Gallery. “Even today, artists are increasing collaborating with each other and with creative professions from other fields.” Laura Ellen Bacon and Chris Drury have both collaborated with or inspired creators in different fields, Bacon with composer Helen Grime and Drury with poet Kay Syrad. Historically, many renowned artists have collaborated with their significant others. Artists and couple Debra Sachs and Marilyn Keating were the focus of a collaborative exhibition at the Stockton University Art Gallery in 2016. Collaborations between couples, which require much trust and respect, fuse the differing talents, ideas and creative energies of the individuals. In the end, artists don’t see collaborations as a way to create masterpieces, instead, artists see it as a way to force themselves into uncomfortable territory and break old habits while also breaking new ground. Several of browngrotta arts’artists have been part of these fruitful arrangements, including:

 

Dail Behennah and Jessica Turrell

Dail Behennah and Jessica Turrell started a joint adventure with their collaborative blog, In.dialogue. Through the years Behennah and Turrell have had numerous conversations about their work. They originally thought that they would create a body of work on a common them, but the more they explored the idea the more they realized it was the conversation around their work they valued the most. “Trust is an important aspect of a project,” Turrell explains “we need to be able to challenge and support each other in the sometimes difficult  process of thinking and talking about our work, and of pushing ourselves to do something new.”

Laura Ellen Bacon's Woven Space at the Chatsworth House. Photo: The Chatsworth House Trust

Laura Ellen Bacon’s Woven Space at the Chatsworth House. Photo: The Chatsworth House Trust

Laura Ellen Bacon & Helen Grime

Composer Helen Grime’s piece Woven Space was inspired by the work of Laura Ellen Bacon. Grime was inspired by the way in which Bacon’s sculptures embrace, surround and engulf architecture and natural landscape. Grime’s Woven Space comes from Bacon’s 2009 willow sculpture in the Chatsworth House gardens. Grime did not set out to create a literal musical representation of Bacon’s work sculptural work, instead, she worked to parallel the intertwining limbs of Bacon’s sculptural work with her score.

Debra Sachs and Marilyn Keating:

Debra Sachs and her partner Marilyn Keating held a collaborative exhibition at the Stockton University Art Gallery in 2016. The exhibition, titled Going Solo and Tandem, featured individual and joint work the couple produced over the course of 30 years. Sachs and Keating, who met in the early 1970s during their time as students at the Moore College of Art in Philadelphia, are both influenced by their surroundings. Keating, who primarily works with wood, creates depictions of kites, birds, bugs and dogs. Sachs, who mainly works in the form of abstract paintings and three-dimensional pieces, takes a more design-oriented approach to her work. “It’s more about colors and shapes of landscapes,” explains Sachs. “For Marilyn, it’s more about fish and whatever kinds of things you can find. More Narrative stuff. She can make a bird on a band saw. Those are skills I don’t even have.” Though their influences and methods are quite different, the two are able to meld their style when working together. Typically, Keating builds the structures and Sachs designs and paints the structures’ surface.

Sounding, Donald Fortesque and Lawrence LaBianca, 2008. Photo by Lawrence LaBianca

Sounding, Donald Fortesque and Lawrence LaBianca, 2008. Photo by Lawrence LaBianca.

Chris Drury & Kay Syrad

In May, Chris Drury collaborated with Kay Syrad to host a five-day art.earth intensive. Throughout the intensive, titled “Context and Form: Art and Writing,” Drury shared how he works with form, including whirlpool, vortex, fractal and wave patterns.  In order to work with such patterns, Drury explores and investigates how the earth unfolds these specific aesthetic forms. Syrad, a novelist and poet, had collaborated with Drury on a number of art-text projects. Participants immersed themselves in the landscape by walking, collecting and working on pieces during short lectures, shared conversation and studio time.

Lawrence LaBianca and Donald Fortescue

In 2011, Lawrence LaBianca collaborated with Donald Fortescue to create Sounding for the Milwaukee Art Museum’s exhibition The New Materiality: Digital Dialogues at the Boundaries of Contemporary Craft. The artists selected for the exhibition were established American crafts artists who blended traditional craft materials (i.e. fabric, glass, wood, metal and clay) with digital technologies, therefore, blurring the boundaries between the traditionally established categories of craft, art and design. Sounding, which happened to be one of the largest pieces in the exhibition, explored the relationship between technology and nature. In making Sounding, Fortescue and LaBiance were inspired by Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. The artists’ fascination with Moby Dick came in part from “its detailed evocation of the bygone crafts of sailing and whaling and the struggles of men at sea.” The two lowered a cabriole-legged table into the ocean near Pillar Point in Half Moon Bay with a hydrophone and left in in the ocean for two months to record the ambient sound. “Sounding provides a direct link to the living oceans surrounding the Bay Area through sight, sound, smell, and touch. In both form and concept it also links to the historical, literary, and metaphorical oceans of Moby-Dick,” explains LaBianca


Art Acquisitions: Part 1

Over the course of the last year many browngrotta arts artists have had pieces acquired by institutions all across the globe.

Untitled, monofilament, Kay Sekimachi, monofilament, 57” x 14” x 14”, circa mid-70’s

Untitled, monofilament, Kay Sekimachi, monofilament, 57” x 14” x 14”, circa mid-70’s

Kay Sekimachi – Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

A hanging sculpture of monofilament, Untitled, was acquired, through browngrotta arts, by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Sekimachi made only 20 monofilaments during the span of her entire career. Untitled is the Museum’s fourth piece by Sekimachi. The Museum’s other pieces include Haleakala, Leaf Vessel #203 and Hornet’s Nest Bowl #103.

Kyoko Kumai –  Oita City Museum of Art

The Oita City Museum of Art, Prefecture, Japan acquired Kyoko Kumai’s  Way of Water・Grass. Additionally,  Kumai’s piece, Air, has been acquired by the Manggha Museum of Japanese Art. Technology. Air is currently featured in the Manggha’s exhibition Kyoko Kumai. Air, which is part of The Buddhism Project – a series of events, exhibitions and lectures that seek to

Examine historical and cultural role that Buddhism has played in the countries of the Far East, as well as its influence on the culture of the West. Kyoko Kumai. Air. Will be on display through August 26th.

Matrix II-201011, Chang Yeonsoon, indigo dyed abaca fiber, 26.75” x 26.5 “x 10”, 2010. Photo by Tom Grotta

Matrix II-201011, Chang Yeonsoon, indigo dyed abaca fiber, 26.75” x 26.5 “x 10”, 2010. Photo by Tom Grotta

 

Ane Henriksen – Danish Arts Foundation

The Danish Arts Foundation, Copenhagen, Denmark acquired two works By Ane Henriksen. The pieces acquired, Business Sky and National Tartan – DK were both part of Henriksen’s solo exhibition Jens Søndergaard with the touch of Ane Henriksen at the Heltborg Museum, Thy, Denmark.

Chang Yeon-Soon – Art Institute of Chicago

The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois recently acquired Chang Yeon-Soon’s Matrix II-201011 through browngrotta arts. Matrix II-201011 was featured in browngrotta arts’ exhibition Stimulus: art and its inception. Yeon-Soon’s Matrix 132570 was also acquired by the Racine Art Museum, Racine, Wisconsin.

Red Horizontal Line, Gudrun Pagter, 280 cm x 240 cm x 0.5 cm, sisal and flax, 2016. Photo: Danish Arts Foundation

Keiji Nio – The Musées d’ Angers

The Musées d’ Angers, Angers, France has acquired both Keiji Nio’s Red Area and Code d’accés. The Museum, which is located in the historic centre of Angers on an ancient medieval site, consists of several buildings from various epochs.

Gudrun Pagter – Danish Arts Foundation

The Danish Arts Foundation, Copenhagen, Denmark has acquired a piece from artist Gudrun Pagter. The piece, Red Horizontal Line, is now on display at the Aalborg University, Institute for Architecture and Media Technology.

Dona Look – Museum of Wisconsin Art

The Museum of Wisconsin Art acquired one of Dona Look’s baskets. The basket, which is made from white birch bark and waxed silk thread was a gift of Dennis Rocheleau and the GE Foundation. This is the Museum of Wisconsin Art’s third acquisition of Look’s work.

 


In Praise of Older Women Artists

Simone Pheulpin at The Design Museum of London. Photo: Maison Parisienne

Last year, Artsy took a look at why old women had replaced young men as the “new darlings” of the art word. Its twofold explanation: as institutions attempt to revise the art-historical canon, passionate dealers and curators have seen years of promotion come to fruition and these artists have gained attention as blue-chip galleries search for new artists to represent among those initially overlooked.

Artsy points at Carmen Herrara, Carol Rama, Irma Blank, and Geta Brătescu and others to make its point. Mary Sabbatino, vice president at Galerie Lelong, is quoted as saying,  “They’re fully formed artists, they’re mature artists, they’re serious artists. They’re not going to burn out as sometimes happens with younger artists…and normally the prices are far below the other artists of their generation, so you’re offering a value to someone.” Barbara Haskell, a curator at the Whitney Museum in New York, says museums everywhere are realizing that “there’s been a lopsided focus on the white male experience” in art history, and are working to correct that.”

Primitive Figures Bird and Insects, Luba Krejci,
knotted linen, 40.5″ x 44.5″ x 2″, circa 1970s. Photo: Tom Grotta

Among the women artists working in fiber who belong on a list of those achieving belated recognition include Ruth Asawa, Sheila Hicks (mentioned in the Artsy article) Kay Sekimachi, Lenore Tawney, Ethel Stein, Simone Pheulpin, Sonia Delauney, Luba Krejci, Ritzi Jacobi and Helena Hernmarck. The international contemporary fiber movement was initiated by women who took reinvented tapestry, took it off the wall and drew global attention to an art form that had been synonymous with tradition to that point. Luba Krecji adapted needle and bobbin lace techniques to create, “nitak,” her own technique, which enabled her to “draw” with thread. In her use of line as “sculptural form,” Ruth Asawa,” provided a crucial link between the mobile modernism of Alexander Calder and the gossamer Minimalism of Fred Sandback, whose yarn pieces similarly render distinctions between interior and exterior moot,” wrote Andrea K. Scott last year in The New Yorker.

 

Damask 5, Ethel Stein, 1980-89. Photo by Tom Grotta

These artists continue their explorations though their seventies, eighties and nineties. An example, Kay Sekimachi, who created complex, elegant monofilament weavings in the 70s and 80s, bowls and towers of paper after that, and continues, at age 90, to create elegant weavings of lines and grids that are reminiscent of the paintings of Agnes Martin. After having received the Special Mention Loewe Craft Prize and exhibited at the  Design Museum of London, this year, Simone Pheulpin continues to create innovative work in her 70s, work that is part of the 10th contemporary art season at Domaine de Chaumont sur Loire and part of the exhibition “Tissage Tressage” at the Fondation Villa Datris.

Behind the Scenes: Pickup at Norma Minkowitz’ Studio

This week, we stopped by Norma Minkowitz’s studio to pick up a few new pieces. Minkowitz, who has worked with browngrotta arts for over 20 years, is not afraid to let her imagination run wild. Minkowitz’s studio, which was built by her husband Shelly, is a place like no other.

Norma Minkowitz in her studio.

Immediately upon entering you are exposed to a vast array of Minkowitz’s work. Pen and ink drawings, crocheted wall hangings and figures, collages and three-dimensional mixed media sculptures are scattered throughout the studio. Crocheted birds in various stages of progress sit in flocks on tables and shelves. Various sized models of heads peer down at the happenings beneath them. The heads, some of which are models of Minkowtiz’s own head (some shrunken and some enlarged), are used to create pieces such as Victim.

 

Below the heads sits Minkowitz’ “cabinets of curiosity.” The contents of every cabinet drawer are a surprise. In one drawer, crocheted dead birds and the molds that were used to created them sit beside horseshoe crab skeletons. Whether you find doll heads with crocheted bodies or small animal bones, you are sure to stumble upon oddities of all sorts.

A few steps over in the other side of Minkowitz’s studio, a wall of shelves holding various spools of thread spans the width of the room. Underneath, drawers house hundreds of bundles of thread in every color imaginable. Minkowitz incorporates detailed embroidery in much of her work, carefully choosing the colors and types of stitches for each piece. For example, while working on Русское сердце (Russian Heart), a piece inspired by her mother, Minkowitz carefully selected a color palette that mirrored the colors her mother wore throughout her life.

 

The uninhibited and personal nature of Minkowitz’s work make not only make it eye-catching, but incomparable. To see more of Minkowitz’s work visit http://www.browngrotta.com/Pages/minkowitz.php