Artist Nancy Moore sent us a Holiday Greeting she drafted that we wanted to share
(with her permission):
May we have the courage
to stand up
for what is good and true
and the fortitude
to create our own happiness.
Dare greatly,
and often!
Wishing you a bold, bright, better-than-expected 2025!
Tom, Rhonda and Roberta
We are wishing you love, laughter and lots of art for the holiday season and a few flashback images from holidays past.
We’ve had a busy year! We are so grateful for all those who have visited browngrotta arts in person and online.
We are lucky to have such talented teams at Juice Creative Group and One + One Solutions to help us with outreach.
We are privileged to work with such an extraordinary group of artists and present the work of so many others.
You all have kept us going — creating concepts and content — even in challenging economic and artistic times.
We’ll keep moving forward in 2025. See Japandí Revisited: shared aesthetics and influences at the Wayne Art Center in Pennsylvania through January 25, 2025 and join us at browngrotta arts in Wilton, Connecticut for Field Notes: an art invitational, May 3 – 11, 2025.
Wishing you happy and healthy holidays,
Tom, Rhonda & Roberta
Wendy Wahl had two 2024 book recommendations to share. “Many years ago, while at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, I discovered Mysteries of the Alphabet by Marc-Alain Ouaknin (Abbeville Press, 1999).
I was as interested then as I am today in the world of alphabets and their origins. This compact book is a compilation of signs, symbols, and pictograms that have been a part of the evolution of letters and their meaning over the past 3,500 years.” In 2021, Wahl made a piece called Equine Calligraphy, composed of hand-gathered and manipulated horsehair stitched to paper with strands of the same hair. She found a category for this kind of work when she came across Asemic: The Art of Writing by Peter Schwenger. The book is a survey of contemporary asemic writing and its place between art and recognizable script. [Cliff Notes version — asemic means writing without language.] The book was ecstatically reviewed: “vital and fateful;” “engaging and groundbreaking.” https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/aia-reviews/asemic-writing-peter-schwenger-cy-twombly-roland-barthes-1202688046/.
“I was excited to realize that browngrotta arts’ artist Marian Bijlenga‘s artwork was used for the book’s cover,” Wahl wrote. browngrotta arts carries a book by Bijlenga, Written Weed, containing collages by the artist made of dried leaves, grasses, and seeds. The images are like handwriting, Chinese characters, the letters of an alphabet.
Gyöngy Laky is another artist who is interested in alphabets and messaging without recognizable forms as in the work Notes to Self. Author David Roth, says “her use of language is decidedly postmodern, seen in how she presents symbols and signs as inherently porous and unstable, subject to all the forces that influence perception and thought.”
(“The Architecture of Thought,” David M. Roth, in Gyöngy Laky, Screwing with Order: assembled art, actions and creative practice, arnoldsche, 2022).
Heidrun Schimmel creates “pages” of stitches that appear to be writing, but are not.
Caroline Bartlett has explored text/nontext works, too.
These books and artworks offer novel ways to explore how art, words and communication combine.
It’s that time of year again, when we share artists’, and our, recommendations for a good read. For those of us who have sworn off televised news, magazines, and blogs, an inspirational, aspirational, transporting title for a good curl-up may be just what the season needs!
Dawn MacNutt, in Canada, gets first place with Timeless Forms, the art book and autobiography that she has been working on for a few years. Timeless Forms intersperses over 100 images of MacNutt’s sculptures and textiles, with stories of her life: from growing up in rural Nova Scotia during the Second World War; through her studies at Mount Allison University under the guidance of Alex Colville; to marriages, motherhood and finding, in her 40s, the courage to throw herself into art full time. “Writing about her unique artistic journey with humor and empathy,” the publisher writes, “MacNutt finds joy in the face of loss and resilience in the face of adversity.” The book is officially published by Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery where MacNutt will have a retrospective show in January 2025. Timeless Forms (MSVU Art Gallery and Owens Art Gallery, Halifax, Canada, 2025) is available for preorder on our website.
The lives of other artists were of interest for Polly Barton in New Mexico. She had two favorite books this year: The Slip: The New York Street the Changed Art Forever by Prudence Peiffer (Harper, New York, 2023) was one. “I wanted more about Lenore Tawney,” she writes, “but I loved the descriptions of the artists, their connections, the slip and the whole sense of period in NYC artistically and politically when I was born (1956) and living there.” The Vanishing Man: In Pursuit of Velazquez by Laura Cumming (Chatto & Windus, London, 2016) was the second. “It is beautifully written and a deep dive into the life of Velazquez, a painter I really did not know. Just reading good writing about art was a treat.”
In Germany, Heidrun Schimmel read Parade by Rachel Cusk (Farrar,Straus and Giroux, New York, 2024). Chosen a “Best Book of the Year” by The New Yorker and Vulture, Schimmel says,“it’s a novel for artists!” She also recommends the two-volume catalog for the 60th Biennial of Arts, Venice, Italy, Biennale Arte 2024: Foreigners Everywhere. The editor, Adriano Pedrosa, says it’s “a celebration of the foreign, the distant, the outsider, the queer as well as the Indigenous” that focuses “on artists who are themselves foreigners, immigrants, expatriates, diasporic, emigres, exiled and refugees―especially those who have moved between the Global South and the Global North.”
“Quite amazing – wonderful escape!” Blair Tate in New York, said of Hugo Award Winner, The Three Body Problem trilogy by Cixin Liu (Tor Books, New York, 2019). Tate is now reading Timothy Snyder’s The Road to Unfreedom, Russia, Europe, America, (Crown Reprint, New York, 2019),”checking back in to this insane world we’re about to experience…..”
Polly Sutton in Washington also had a timely suggestion. She had just finished National Book Critics Circle Award Winner, All the Frequent Trouble of Our Days, by Rebecca Donner (Back Bay Books, 2022), a “disturbing” book, “so close to what we are going through.” It’s the true story of the American Woman at the heart of the German resistance to Hitler. One of her favorites books of the year was Where the Language Lives: Vi Hilbert and the Gift of Lushootseed by Janet Yoder (Girl Friday Books, 2022). Vi Hilbert revitalized her Salish language in the Pacific Northwest, where Sutton lives, written by one of her students at the University of Washington.
In April, Jim Bassler, who lives in California, went to visit friends in Oaxaca, Mexico. At the airport he bought, James, the US National Book Award Winner, by Percival Everett. “Loved it,” he writes, “and now want to get Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.” (Dover Revd. ed. 1998).
In Korea, Young-ok Shin had a full complement of books this year to recommend: Thinking through Craft, by Glenn Adamson (Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2007). which dispenses with clichéd arguments that craft is art, and persuasively makes a case for defining craft in a more nuanced fashion; The Living Reed: A novel of Korea (The John Day Company, Inc. New York, 1963) by Pearl S. Buck (who is the most translated American author); What a Plant Knows: Field Guide to the Senses, Expanded Edition by Daniel Chamovitz (Darun, 2012); Le Zubial Alexandre Jardin, (Alexandre Jardin et Editions Gallimard, Paris, 1997) about Jardin’s father who was a lover of women and life.
Marianne Kemp in the Netherlands is reading The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed the World by Kasia St. Clair (John Murray, 2020). In 13 episodes, the book tells a story of human ingenuity — from 30,000-year-old threads found in a Georgian cave to the Indian calicoes that sparked the Industrial Revolution.
On browngrotta arts’ list was The Secret Lives of Color (Penguin Books, 2017) also by Kasia St. Clair, which tells the story of 75 shades — from a brown that changed the way battles were fought to Picasso’s blue. And always, we recommend our catalogs for 2024, Discourse: art across generations and continents, 176 pages of art by 50 artists from 20 countries, with an essay by Erika Diamond, and Ways of Seeing: Exploring ways individuals envision and curate art collections, 150 works of art in 188 pages.
Enjoy!!
Five decades ago, Fiberworks in Berkeley, California, was a vibrant cultural hub that played a significant role in the burgeoning arts scene of the early 1970s. Situated in the heart of one of the nation’s most politically and artistically dynamic cities, Fiberworks became a space where fiber art, design, and social change intersected.
Founded in 1973 by Hungarian-born environmental sculptor, Gyöngy Laky, who served as its Director through 1977, Fiberworks was an internationally recognized art center, instrumental in redefining textile arts through the late 80s. The Fiberworks Gallery showcased textile art at a time when commercial galleries and museums gave it scant exposure. In 1975, the name was changed to Fiberworks Center for the Textile Arts, reflecting the increasing range of activities that included lectures, special events, international bazaars, and services for artists, together with a sweeping array of classes. The dynamism of creativity in Berkeley prompted internationally known textile designer Jack Lenor Larsen to refer to the Bay Area as “The Vatican” of this new movement in the arts.
Mija Riedel, who has researched Fiberworks’ history, notes that the nonprofit organization’s influence during its 15-year existence far exceeded its modest means. By the early 70s, Riedel explains, the San Francisco Bay Area was a rich and established focal point for textile art. Trude Guermonprez, a transplant from Black Mountain College, headed the Crafts department at California College of the Arts in Oakland. Kay Sekimachi, a student of Guermonprez, had gained recognition for her series of complex three-dimensional monofilament hangings. Katherine Westphal was a professor at UC in Davis. Ruth Asawa’s iconic wire sculptures – made with a technique learned from basket weavers in Toluca, Mexico – were the subject of a 1973 retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Ed Rossbach’s teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, had influenced Laky and other Fiberworks’ artists. His experimental approach inspired a new generation of artists to explore new ways of working with what, up to that time, had been utilitarian materials. Artists explored unconventional uses of fibers like synthetic materials, found objects, and even recycled textiles, challenging the boundaries between art and craft. As Riedel observes, Fiberworks drew on this community of artists and their energy, ingenuity and inventiveness. (Mija Riedel, unpublished research, cited in Gyöngy Laky: Screwing With Order, assembled art, actions and creative practice, 2022, pp. 32.) In our research at the Archives of American Art in DC in May, we were stuck by the long list of artists who taught at Fiberworks including Kay Sekimachi, Adela Akers, Daniel Graffin, and Katherine Westphal. The Center became accredited and eventually offered degree programs.
Fiberworks’ reputation extended well beyond California and the US, notes Riedel. Some of the world’s most-celebrated fiber artists, including Sheila Hicks, Ritzi and Peter Jacobi, and Magdelena Abakanowicz, participated in Fiberworks’ programs. The Center’s international impact was affirmed when Fiberworks organized and hosted the Symposium on Contemporary Textile Art in 1978 and 500 participants from eight countries participated. The Symposium’s broad attendance, which included Helena Hernmarck, Walter Nottingham, and Nance O’Banion, “[bore] witness to the widespread interest in the new textile art.” (Giselle Eberhard Cotton and Magali Junet, From Tapestry to Fiber Art: Lausanne Biennials 1962-95, (Skira, Milan, Italy, 2017), p. 78.) Recognition and visibility for Fiberworks’ faculty, lecturers, exhibitors, and students also grew. In 1975, both Laky and Lia Cook would be selected to produce large, commissioned works for the federal Art-in-Architecture Program. (Riedel, pp. 33-34.)
“Fiberworks had a major impact on me, my art, and my life, and I think maybe on the teacher I am today,” Laky told interviewer Harriet Nathan in 1998(Gyöngy Laky: Fiber Art: Visual Thinking and the Intelligent Hand, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, California, 2003. An oral history conducted by Harriet Nathan, University of California. Interviews conducted in 1998–1999 (Bancroft Library Oral History), pp. 116-117). “There was a lot of exchange and learning. One of the things that I got from that experience, that early experience, was to give openly, not to secretly guard my ideas. People did not secretly guard their ideas, they didn t think, ‘Oh, this is my special way of working, I m not going to show it to anyone.’ The moment somebody came up with something that was working and exciting, that artist could hardly wait to do a class or demonstration to show everyone: ‘Here I just invented something, come look, let me teach you, let me show you.’ Wonderful spirit in that regard …. The moment people figured out some strange way of braiding or a different way of presenting a performance, whatever it was, it was given and out. The feeling was that there were so many ideas following behind that you didn’t have to guard your precious inventions or discoveries, that good ideas, creative ideas were limitless and there would be many more to come.”
The experimentation Rossbach encouraged in his classes at UC Berkeley evolved at the Center, into a wide-ranging exploration of site-specific, installation, performative, and non-traditional approaches, according to Riedel. Chere Lai Mah, a key member of Fiberworks’ nucleus, characterized that spirit of inventiveness as it had influenced her artwork in a statement for the exhibition, FIBERWORKS 1976, as “spontaneity, flexibility, spaces, change, impermanence, simplicity, actions, shadows, lines, throwaways, and the relationship of ideas and forms to their beginnings, becomings and endings.”(FIBERWORKS 1976 exhibition at the Transamerica Pyramid, San Francisco, California, coordinated by Louise Allrich.) In reviewing the FIBERWORKS 1976 exhibition, critic Alan Meisel noted, “The explosive newness of the works… sparkles….” (Alan Meisel, “Bay Area Fiber Art,” Artweek, October 9, 1976.)
In 2023, to celebrate Fiberworks’ illustrious 50-year anniversary, a group of former students and staff, including Julie Anixter, Gyongy Laky, Lia Cook, Donna Larsen, Janet Boguch, Chere Lai Mah, Susan Wick, Pat Hickman, and Debra Rapoport intiated a series of commemorative activities. There is a Wikipedia page, a Berkeley Historical site, records in the Archives of American Art. There have also been virtual presentations discussing Fiberworks and its influence, and the influence of Katherine Westphal and Ed Rossbach. The presentation about Ed Rossbach can be viewed online. It includes Tom Grotta’s images and commentary about Rossbach’s long association with browngrotta arts. More of the presentations will be made available online at a later date.
Enjoy!