Monthly archives: January, 2026

Mark your calendars! From May 9 through May 18, 2026, browngrotta arts will present Transformations: Dialogues in Art and Material, a Spring exhibition exploring the expressive power of materials and the inventive ways contemporary artists transform them.

Featuring works by more than nearly three dozen international artists, Transformations will examine materiality as a central force in artistic practice. Clay, silk, steel, bark, seaweed, bamboo, horsehair, cotton, linen, flax, and other materials are not treated as passive elements, but as active agents—each with its own history, constraints, and expressive possibilities. The exhibition highlights both the remarkable diversity of materials and the distinct outcomes achieved when artists work within the same medium.

The artists in Transformations exemplify what curator and historian Glenn Adamson calls “material intelligence”: a deep understanding of the physical world and the skill to give materials new form and meaning. Through thoughtful engagement, abstract ideas are transformed into tangible, sensory experiences, bridging the conceptual and the corporeal.

“The artists inTransformations may begin with the same material but through their singular instincts and inspirations they generate strikingly different results,” says Tom Grotta, co-curator of browngrotta arts. “It’s a testament to the power of the artistic imagination.” Examples include Kiyomi Iwata who creates freestanding sculptures of spun silk and shimmering wall works of kibisio, the first silk from the cocoon and Polly Barton who weaves images from silk threads that she has bound and dyed. In cotton, Simone Pheulpin and Mercedes Vicente create objects of cotton webbing that seem to have emerged from nature — resembling coral, shells, and stones, while Kay Sekimachi uses split-ply and card-weaving techniques to create loops of cotton cord to hold shells and stones sourced from the beach. Toshiko Takaezu forms smooth columns of clay, Yasuhisa Kohyama’s clay vessels seem to have been carved directly from a mountainside, and Karen Karnes creates functional pots that incorporate color yet retain the natural cast of fired clay, defying all sense of the manmade.

A full-color catalog will accompany the exhibition.

Exhibition Details

Location:
276 Ridgefield Road, Wilton, CT 06897

Dates & Hours:

• Saturday, May 9 (Opening & Artists’ Reception): 11 am–6 pm
• Sunday, May 10: 11 am–6 pm
• Monday–Saturday, May 11–16: 10 am–5 pm
• Sunday, May 17: 11 am–6 pm

Schedule Your Visit

Stay tuned for more information—and we hope you’ll join us this spring for Transformations at browngrotta arts.

Save the Date! The Spring 2026 exhibition at browngrotta arts, Transformations: Dialogues in Art and Material, scheduled for this May 9 – 17, 2026 in Wilton, Connecticut, will take a deep dive into materiality itself. It will explore the wide range of materials artists employ—including clay, silk, steel, bark, seaweed, bamboo, and horsehair—and the varied transformations these materials undergo in talented hands, even among artists working with the same medium. Transformations: dialogues in art and material will highlight the use of diverse materials and the varied ways in which artists reshape and reimagine a single material within their practices. 

We’d like to display works by you, Polly Barton, and Kiyomi Iwata to show varying uses of silk, works by Kay Sekimachi, Simone Pheulpin, Mercedes Vicente, and Sophie Rowley in cotton, works by John McQueen, Hisako Sekimachi, Dona Look, Linda Bills and Polly Sutton in tree bark, and so on. The artists included will all meet curator and historian Glenn Adamson’s definition of material intelligence: “a deep understanding of the material world around us, an ability to read that material environment, and the know-how required to give it new form…”

Transformations examines the use of diverse materials in art and the many ways artists reshape and reimagine a single material within their practices. The Spring 2026 exhibition at browngrotta arts, Transformations: Dialogues in Art and Material, takes a deep dive into materiality itself. It highlights the wide range of materials artists employ—including clay, silk, steel, bark, seaweed, bamboo, and horsehair—and the remarkable transformations these materials undergo in their skilled hands, even among artists working with the same medium.

We’ve had another busy 12 months. Below are the highlights. You can learn more about most of these events in previous arttextstyle posts or by using the search feature on our website. Thanks for being a part of another successful year celebrating art textiles, the artists that make them, and the fans that enjoy them.

Month by Month
January 2025:

• Japandí Revisited: shared aesthetics and influences, continued at the Wayne Art Center, Pennsylvania 

• A Japandí Revisited walkthrough with Tom Grotta took place at the Wayne Art Center, Pennsylvania

February 2025:

• American Craft magazine published: “A World of Fiber, browngrotta arts,” Deborah Bishop

March 2025:

• Tom and Carter Grotta and Rhonda Brown visited Paris to photograph exceptional artist Simone Pheulpin and view the extraordinary exhibition, Olga de Amaral,  at the Cartier Foundation

• Centurion magazine published, “Shaping Heritage,” by Kaoru Kijima, which featured work by Shoko Fukuda

May 2025:

• The Silvermine Art Galleries in New Canaan, CT invited browngrotta arts to jury its FIBER 2025 invitational. We also installed two exhibitions in their galleries, Masters of the Medium: CT: Helena Hernmarck and Norma Minkowitz and Mastery and Materiality: International

• A FIBER 2025 walkthrough with Tom Grotta and Rhonda Brown took place at the Silvermine Art Galleries, New Canaan, CT

• browngrotta arts loaned work to WEFAN, a group exhibition curated by Dina Lov Wright of Lov Art. Housed in the Hughes Memorial Library, in West Cornwall, CT, WEFAN featured works by 12 artists — including Dorothy Gill Barnes and Ed Rossbach — who work with fiber techniques and materials 

• Field Notes: an art survey, browngrotta arts’ Spring Art in the Barn exhibition, opened

• Out-of-the-area Artist Visits: Christine Joy (Montana), Wlodzimierz Cygan and granddaughter, Wiktoria (Poland), and Shoko Fukuda (Japan), visited the gallery, attending the opening of Field Notes and the artists’ dinner after.

• Field Notes: an art survey, the catalog, is published (our 60th)

June 2025:

• Art on Rocks: an art walkthrough with spirits, Field Notes edition — is presented on Zoom

• Fiberworks then and now: Ruth Asawa and Kay Sekimachi and their remarkable innovations. a panel discussion with Melissa Leventon, Jill D’Alessandro, Yoshiko Wada, and Tom Grotta — was presented on Zoom

September 2025: 

• Kay Sekimachi: a personal archive, a collaboration between browngrotta arts and the Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York City opened — Sekimachi’s first solo exhibition in NYC since 1970

• Out-of-the-area Artist Visit: Yong Joo Kim, who splits her time between Chicago and Korea, visited the gallery in CT

• T-X, txtilezine  published,”Weaves of Meaning: the Art of Anneke Klein Between Minimalism and Social Awareness,” by Barbara Pavel

•  FORM magazine published “The Gently Monumental,” by Anneke Enquist, an article about artist Helena Hernmarck

October 2025: 

•  Beauty is Resistance: art as antidote, browngrotta arts’ Fall Art in the Barn exhibition, opened

• Cover magazine published Beauty is Resistance, subversive textile art at browngrotta arts

• Out-of-the-area Artist Visit: Jin-Sook So joined us at browngrotta arts for the opening of Beauty is Resistance and the artists dinner after.

• The New York Times, publishes “There’s a Hornet’s Nest in the Living Room. On Purpose.” by Misty White Sidell, which featured Wendy Wahl and Kay Sekimachi• Beauty is Resistance: art as antidote, the catalog, is published (our 61st)

• Centurion magazine article, “A Stitch in Time,” by Jemima Sissons, is published, mentioning Kay Sekimachi, Mariette Rousseau-Vermette, Dominic DiMare, and John McQueen.

November 2025: 

• Art on Rocks: an art walkthrough with spirits, Beauty is Resistance edition — is presented on Zoom

December 2025:

• browngrotta arts loaned work by Adela Akers and Lia Cook to Drop, Cloth at Hollis Taggart Gallery in New York City. Curated by Glenn Adamson and Severin Deifs and spanning two Chelsea galleries, Drop, Cloth presented a 50-year lineage of draping in contemporary art.

Other News:
Acquisitions

• Transition by Neha Puri Dhir was acquired by the John and Mable Ringling Musuem in Sarasota, Florida

• Four 1980s works of wearable art by Norma Minkowitz —  Blue Jewel, Outer Crater, Long Dress, and Dusk — were acquired by the LACMA in Los Angeles, CA.

YouTube:
• browngrotta arts created 17 videos of artworks for its weekly artlive feature

• browngrotta arts created preview videos for Field Notes; Kay Sekimachi: a personal archive; and Beauty is Resistance

Social Media Outreach: 
• 31,911 emails from browngrotta arts were opened
• 41,822 people liked our Instagram content (a 14% increase over 2024)
• We gained 3,046 new followers to our Instagram account (a 90% jump over 2024)
• 24,819 people engaged with our Facebook posts (that’s a 96% increase over last year)
• We posted 52 times on arttextstyle.

We were very sad to learn that Washington State artist Dona Anderson had passed away on December 19, 2025 at age 97. 

Anderson began studying and exhibiting art in the late 1960s. She studied with Everett Community College instructor Russell Day, who mentored such noted Northwest artists as Chuck Close and Dale Chihuly. Her reputation grew steadily beyond Washington. By the 2000s she had exhibited throughout the US and in Cheongju, Korea at the International Craft Biennial. Her large boat basket form, Crossing Over, traveled to Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Michigan as part of the browngrotta arts’ exhibition Green from the Get Go: International Contemporary Basketmakers, curated with Jane Milosch.

Anderson was known for her her use of diverse materials, including recycled hockey sticks, surgical tubing, and dental molds. When she was selected as Snohomish County Artist of the Year in 2003, the Snohomish County Times , reported that Anderson had shopped at the Boeing surplus store in Renton, Washington, buying the same material used on the skins of 747s and driving over the stuff to flatten it to create art material. She fashioned bras out of automobile parts and immersed girdles in pink artist cement. (“Late Bloomer is local Artist of the Year,’ Diane Wright, Times Snohomish County bureau, February 26, 2003.)  “I love the touch of the materials whether they are paper, reeds, cement or metal,” she said, “shaping them into an image that satisfies me.” Her ideas or inspiration came from the routine of life, everyday things that surrounded her — her house, friends, architecture, even television.

“In the mid-1980s when I was working with fiber,” Anderson told The Seattle Times in 2009, “I took a class in basketry at Wallingford’s Factory of Visual Arts. There we used raffia and did traditional coiling. As time went by, my work become more and more complicated.” She preferred to call her works “structures” rather than baskets.

A significant body of Anderson’s work involved the use of sewing patterns. “In 1988, I began using round reeds, and sewing them together to create architectural and more experimental forms,” she told The Seattle Times. “I started covering the reeds with pattern paper,…The black lines on the paper created interesting surface designs after I sewed the reeds into the desired shapes.”

For browngrotta arts’ 2011 exhibition, Stimulus: art and its inception, she turned a tire chain into a basket. ‘Walking through my neighborhood everyday,” she told us. ‘I took care to find that special something that appealed to my imagination. When I saw a rusty piece of metal wire tweaking out from a pile of dirt, my heart soared with possibilities. No one even knew what it had been until I cleaned it—a tire chain I turned into a basket.”

Anderson and her husband, Bob, were also significant promoters of the arts in their area, seeding an endowment for the visual arts among other supports. As an artist and advocate, she will be missed.

New this Week artworks are introduced by browngrotta arts every Monday. December 2025 featured five Mondays so our recap this month features one more artwork than usual. In this version of Art Assembled, you’ll see work by Toshio Sekiji, Gyöngy Laky, Aby Mackie, Asela Akers, and Neha Puri Dhir.

Toshio Sekiji’s Neighbors is an illustration of the woven collages for which he is known. In this case, he has plaited lacquered strips from various Israeli newspapers in order to make a plea for intergroup harmony. In other works, to make his point, Sekiji has mixed newspapers from Japanese and Korean newspapers, and used The New York Times, dust jackets from controversial books, and Indian and other Asian newspapers.

Gyöngy Laky has spent a lifetime bringing light to issues of the environment—joining branches and tree prunings — often from agricultural sites — with industrial materials. Laky’s work takes many forms, from baskets and vessels to text-based sculpture like Lie Ability (OUCH) which spell out her feelings on the current political climate in literal terms. Laky had heard many of the lies in the 2016 presidential campaign and feared the man now in charge. The title is a double entendre – a small hint to her thinking beyond the work itself. The word “OUCH” offers to viewers the opportunity to read into the work what is in their minds and hearts once Laky has attracted their attention — an example of the power of art to evade censorship.

Artist Aby Mackie’s textile-based artwork engages with themes of ecology, history, and resistance through a process of reclamation and transformation. Working with discarded historic textiles, she deconstructs and reconfigures, disrupting their original function to create new meaning. In Fragments of a Life Lived 3 she uses antique-ticking fabric as both material and metaphor. Once utilitarian, worn by time and use, it is reconstructed through stitching and further manipulated with paint and gold leaf. These interventions reimagine its surface—echoing stories of erosion, endurance, and renewal. The addition of gilding speaks to the overlooked value in what is often discarded, while the act of mending becomes a gesture of care and reclamation. The viewer is invited to read between the layers— to sense the life once lived through it, and to reflect on what we choose to preserve or let go. 

A diverse and geographically disparate range of influences grounded Adela Akers work. Akers was born in Spain, educated at the University of Havana in Cuba and inspired by her extensive travels. A trip to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where she observed the painting process of the Mbuti women of the Ituri Forest, led to the marks in Akers’s work, Interrupted II. “I’ve always been interested in looking at patterns of other cultures and other people,” she told a San Francisco television interviewer. When she transferred her drawing of Mbuti women’s marks to a larger scale she separated the lines and they no longer lined up. “It’s fine with me if they don’t,” she said. “But by spreading it out, then I have, of course, room for this other color to be in, again to add more dimension, so that the horsehairs (use of which is on of her trademarks) float over a lot more.”

Like Toshio Sekiji’s works, Dualities by Neha Puri Dhir invites contemplation on coexistence and transformation. The work, involving stitch-resist dyeing on handwoven silk, reminds viewers of the quiet harmony that emerges when opposites are held together in a single frame – a thoughtful message for these contentious times. The two circular motifs, one in negative and another in positive space, reflect ideas of balance and contrast. The earthy browns merge into deep indigo blues, evoking cycles of day and night, fullness and emptiness, presence and absence. 

Watch for more work in 2026!