Monthly archives: July, 2026

Another month of interesting works we’ve brought to your attention each Monday in New this Week on instagram. 

In Just Past Dead Center, the late John McQueen, plaited elm bark to create a whimsical tree sculpture. Originally a part of the Hechinger Collection, it was exhibited at City Museum, Saint Louis, Missouri, (and elsewhere) in Tools as Art: The Hechinger Collection. The work also appears in the book, Tools as Art: The Hechinger Collection, by Pete Hamill, New York, 1995. Throughout his career, McQueen created objects that explored the idea of what a basket truly is with wit and wordplay.

Linda Bills transforms tulip poplar bark into elegant sculptural baskets that honor the material’s natural beauty. In Arrowhead #2 (Algoma Basket), she has used peeled and unpeeled bark, subtle color, and waxed linen stitching to create a vessel that is both refined and deeply rooted in nature. The woven panels are marked and lightly colored and the stitched knots are made of waxed lined thread. The inside of the bark is on the outside.  Bills scrubbed the bark, with plain water, to remove the dirt accumulated during its life in the woods.  Introduced to bark as a basketry material by John McQueen in the 1980s, Bills has gone on to expand her practice into large-scale sculpture, drawing, and printmaking—allowing each medium to continually inspire the next. Some of Bills’s sculptures created shadow drawings on the floor or wall which peaked her interest. In the mid-2000s she began making actual drawings, on paper. Prints followed. Ultimately, inspiration came full circle, sculpture inspiring drawings and prints and those, in turn, inspiring sculpture and installations.

In The Yarns I’ve Carried series, James Bassler has developed a contemplative method for weaving more than 65 years of leftover warp and weft yarns into a quiet meditation on color, memory, and time. The series reflects what Bassler learned in his first “Color” class at UCLA in 1953 and references Josef Albers’s Color Theories, which Bassler later taught at UCLA for 25 years. The works transform wool, silk, linen, cotton, ramie, and handspun fibers into a vivid study of complementary color. As Bassler notes, this four-selvaged weaving is a work that rewards slowing down — and truly looking.

Bassler works with no end of warp and weft threads — wool, silk, linen, ramie, agave, sisal, Oaxaca brown cotton, coyuchi, and a contemporary, warmer brownish orange, coyuchi spun on the spinning device designed by Mohandas Gandhi in India. The pieces in The Yarns I’ve Carried series are very quiet. “Most of the interest, for me, Bassler says, “is focused on the vibrancy of the complementary color squares. Viewers will have to put down their phones to concentrate on it though I don’t know if that is still possible in our contemporary society.”

Aby Mackie is a textile artist who works with repurposed and existing materials through a material-led methodology. Through processes including layering, cutting back, stitching, gilding, and reconfiguration, Mackie transforms materials while often preserving aspects of their original character within the final composition. Much of her repurposed material comes from the Encants Vells market in Barcelona, Spain. In works like From Order to Chaos, 6, Mackie combines traditional and non-traditional textile techniques with a fine art approach. Each piece evolves through a sequence of material-led decisions, where every intervention informs the next, resulting in works that reflect an ongoing dialogue between process, material and form.

Watch for more highlights in August!

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.

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.

2026 is America’s 250th Anniversary. Museums across the US are offering options for celebrating this milestone. We’ve gathered images and information from some of the compilations we found most intriguing. These exhibitions broaden the lens through which we view the past. They make space for indigenous people, women, immigrants, and enslaved Americans, while giving a hat-tip to the founding fathers and to flags and other symbols of praise and protest.

For Which It Stands…
Through July 25th
Fairfield University Art Museum
1073 North Benson Road
Fairfield, CT 06824
https://www.fairfield.edu/museum/exhibitions/catalog/2026/for-which-it-stands/

In our backyard,  and well worth a visit, is For Which It Stands… is at the Fairfield University Art Museum for just two more weeks. This exhibition examines depictions of the American flag through more than 70 works by a diverse group of artists, beginning during WWI with Childe Hassam’s shimmering Italian Day, May 1918 and continuing to the present day. Work in a variety of media is included from Jasper Johns, Faith Ringgold, Robert Rauschenberg, Shepard Fairey, and Julie Mehretu, Gordon Parks, and others. For Which It Stands… challenges viewers to consider who the American flag truly represents and whether justice is available to all.

Life, Liberty, and Los Angeles
Through January 31st
Autry Museum of the American West
4700 Western Heritage Way
Los Angeles, CA 90027-1462
https://www.theautry.org/exhibitions/life-liberty-and-los-angeles

The expansive exhibition, Life, Liberty, and Los Angeles, explores the meanings behind some of the most powerful words in the Declaration of Independence. Los Angeles, from its beginnings, has been a place of competing claims to life, liberty, and happiness. This exhibition shares the stories of diverse Angelenos and how their ideas of life, liberty, and happiness inspired the city’s growth and amplified the opportunities and contradictions expressed in the nation’s founding principles. The 125 objects on display are deliberately eclectic. Political buttons, family photographs and papers, commissioned installations, even a 1967 Mark VII vehicle from Disneyland’s Autopia attraction and a can of Los Angeles smog, are installed alongside contemporary artworks.

American Stories: From Revolution to Rockwell
Through October 26th
Norman Rockwell Museum
9 Glendale Road, PO Box 308
Stockbridge, MA 01262
https://www.nrm.org

This sweeping exhibition portrays how artists – from the Revolutionary War era to today – emblazoned the ideals and evolving story of America. American Stories: From Revolution to Rockwell illuminates how iconic imagery created over centuries helped to reflect and shape what it means to be American. The exhibition includes original paintings, prints, book illustrations, broadsides, posters, advertisements, and digital media, from the Museum’s expansive holdings as well as major loans from important institutions and private collectors across the country, including the Smithsonian Museum. As New England Public Media notes: “From iconic masterpieces to everyday media, these works chart the nation’s … enduring pursuit of freedom. The exhibition places Rockwell’s iconic images in a broader national context, spotlighting illustration’s role in illuminating America’s ambitions, achievements, and struggles.”

An Indigenous Present
Through September 27th
Frist Art Museum
919 Broadway
Nashville, TN 37203

An Indigenous Present, a thematic exhibition spanning 100 years of modern and contemporary indigenous art, is another example of a reimagined view of the past. The exhibition includes significant works by 15 artists who use strategies of abstraction to represent personal and collective narratives, describe specific and imagined places, and build upon cultural and aesthetic traditions. Co-organized by artist Jeffrey Gibson, member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent and representative for the US at the Venice Biennial in 2024, and independent curator Jenelle Porter, the exhibition offers an expansive consideration of indigenous art practices, highlighting a continuum of elders and emerging makers. 

America 250: Common Threads
Through July 27th
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
600 Museum Way
Bentonville, Arkansas 72712 
https://crystalbridges.org/events/america-250-common-threads

In America 250: Common Threads, an early engraving of the Declaration of Independence anchors a group of historic documents displayed alongside textiles, paintings, toys, and other works from 1776 to the present. The exhibition considers how artists and national leaders document American history. The exhibition explores the symbols artists turn to when celebrating or commenting on the United States: George Washington’s many faces, eagles appearing across books, baskets, and coverlets, flags seen as quilts or as documentation of the moon landing, and more. Contemporary artists featured in the exhibition, such as Robert Colescott, Kay WalkingStick, Howard Finster, and our own, James Bassler, continue to revisit national symbols and explore their resonance. The exhibition also features live quilting, as local quilters and quilting guilds work in the galleries to piece quilt squares made by K-12 students across Arkansas and designed by artist Basil Kincaid.