We’ll be exploring Beauty as Resistance: art as antidote in our 2025 Fall “Art in the Barn” exhibition at browngrotta arts in Wilton, Connecticut. The exhibition will explore how aesthetic creation—particularly within textile, fiber, and material-based practices—serves as a form of defiance, cultural preservation, and political voice. In an age of political polarization, ecological crisis, and rampant commodification, beauty might seem like a luxury—or a distraction. But the artists in this exhibition harness the power of beauty not as escape but as agency: to mourn, to protest, to remember, to heal, and to imagine

Beauty is Resistance will bring together more than two dozen artists, spanning generations, mediums, and geographies. The works fall loosely into four subthemes. Norma Minkowitz’s Frozen in Time reflects Threads of Memory, artworks in which fiber as a tool to archive personal, cultural, and collective memory and experience. Minkowitz’s work is about once-used personal items, perhaps ancient relics, in ominous black, showing every detail in time. A diary, combined with combs, various brushes, documenting a persons lived life, hidden messages inside a book that can’t be opened, are all frozen in time. These tell a story or trigger a question for the viewer.

Reading Between the Lines includes works that subtly or explicitly engage with, politics, ecology, and resistance. Aby Mackie, an artist located in Spain, works with discarded historic textiles, deconstructing and reconfiguring them. “In reworking with what was cast aside,” Mackie says, “my practice becomes a form of quiet resistance—honoring forgotten stories and reasserting the enduring significance of craft in the face of environmental and cultural neglect.” In the 80s, Ed Rossbach created aseries of assemblages, titled El Salvador. In the series, Rossbach used camouflage cloth and sticks to protest US covert activity in that South American country. More personal is Yong Joo Kim’s Weight of Commitment: 4 Years Old. For Kim, making art is less a means of expression and more a residue of her efforts to sustain her life under pressure and weight. She creates art works she hopes are seen as symbols of resilience, beauty, and the transformation of struggle into creation. Weight of Commitment illustrates that approach. “As light and shadow played across the work,” Kim says, “the silhouette of a child appeared—seemingly around four years old—floating in mid-air. This moment was meaningful, because it was completely unintended, and I made it while I was going through IVF.”

Randy Walker’s Collider reflects another of Beauty’s subthemes, Radical Ornament, in which art reclaims ornamentation, surface and structure as valid forms of protest and joy. Trained as an architect, Walker’s work straddles several boundaries of craft, sculpture, and installation.His works create dialogues — solidity and transparency; structural stability and collapse; visibility and invisibility.

Finally, for Ritual and Reverence, the fourth subtheme, we’ll exhibit work grounded in indigenous craft and sacred traditions reimagined. James Bassler’s Donald and his Habsburg Empire, is a comment on both the historical and the contemporary attitude of arrogance and entitlement that has existed throughout history. Bassler references the Habsburgs, the ruling family of Austria, 1276-1918 and of Spain,1516-1700, that gave the world elitism through birthright, with no regard to proven achievement, noting that today in the US, the Kardashian and the Donald Trump model has made the acquisition of vast sums of money and profit an alarming societal objective, an elitism that values profits over people. In 2016, Bassler was invited to an exhibition at the Museo Textile de Oaxaca in Mexico that utilized feathered yarn, created of Canadian feathers, by spinners in Mexico who based the yarns on ones created in the 17th century. “After reviewing all of the material, I couldn’t help but notice that on many of the ancient textiles in which the feathers were used promoted the double-headed eagle of the Habsburg Empire, a reminder to those subjugated as to who was in charge,” Bassler says. “With that in mind and knowing that the feathers came from Canadian ducks, it was a logical step to create the double-headed ducks. The Donald Trump arrogance factor developed as the presidential debates materialized.”
Other artists whose work will be exhibited in Beauty is Resistance include: Kay Sekimachi (US), Neha Puri Dhir (IN), Karyl Sisson (US), Naoko Serino (JP), Laura Foster Nicholson (US), Jin-Sook So (KR), Irina Kolesnikova (DE), James Bassler (US), Gyöngy Laky (US), Lia Cook (US), and Eduardo Portillo and María Dávila (VE).
Reserve a time to visit Beauty as Resistance: art as antidote : HERE
Beauty as Resistance: art as antidote
October 11 – 19, 2025
Location:
browngrotta arts, 276 Ridgefield Road Wilton, CT 06897
Times:
Saturday, October 11th: 11AM to 6PM [Opening & Artist Reception]
Sunday, October 12th: 11AM to 6PM
Monday, October 13th through Saturday, October 18th: 10AM to 5PM
Sunday, October 19th: 11AM to 6PM [Final Day]
Safety Protocol:
No narrow heels please — barn floors.