1re Espina índigo, Rosana Escobar’s, agave fiber, indigo dye, 68” x 19” x 16”. Photo by Tom Grotta
browngrotta arts’ upcoming exhibition, Continental Drift (October 17 – 25) is falling into place. Continental Drift, Encounters, North and South uses the concept of “continental drift”—the tectonic separation and reshaping of landmasses—as a metaphor for how artistic traditions migrate, collide, and transform across the Americas. The survey brings together museum-quality, art textiles, three-dimensional sculptures and fiber works from emblematic artists across the US, Canada, Chile, Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia. Also included are works by artists outside the hemispheres whose encounters with North and South American land, art, and culture impacted their art practice. We are excited about the number of new artists that will be included, two of whom we will profile today — Rosana Escobar of Colombia and Ximena Ibañez of Argentina.
We learned about Rosana Escobar’s work last year when we served as jurors for Fiber 2025 at the Silvermine Art Gallery in New Canaan, Connecticut. Escobar’s work in that exhibition was awarded the Grand Prize and it occurred to us then that she would be an ideal addition to the North/South hemisphere exchanges exhibition that we had planned for the fall of 2026.
One of the works that Escobar exhibited at Fiber 2025 explored the potential qualities of fique, an agave plant endemic to the tropical Andes, today used primarily to produce coffee bags. “Through the process of dyeing and weaving,” Escobar said, “I explore the material as a body, and the use of color to create rhythm and new patterns, aiming to reclaim the value of the fiber beyond its use as a packaging material.” In her work for Continental Drift, Espina, Escobar’s investigationsinto fique and its proximity to horsehair, continue, in a work that blurs the line between animal and plant. Caminos is made using wild straw from the Paramos, a pristine ecosystem in the high altitudes of Colombia. The fiber has been used traditionally in bundles to make the hidden core of baskets. This piece exhibits the fiber in its natural length, smell and plasticity, and the complexity of the coiling technique. The name “caminos” which means paths in Spanish, is connected to the paths they follow to make the harvesting process a regenerative practice.
We discovered Ximena Ibáñez’s work online. ITHe artist’s mother is Argentinian; he father is Spanish. She was born in the Netherlands, but she lives and works in Buenos Aires. Ibáñez’s artistic practice delves into an exploration of the tensions between rootedness and estrangement, understood not only as physical conditions but as emotional and existential states. Through ceramics and embroidery, techniques that privilege touch and memory, the artist constructs sensory landscapes in which textures evoke both fragility and the resilience inherent to the human condition, and where the house appears as a metaphor.
Atalaya, which will appear in Continental Drift, belongs to the Atavistic series. This series brings together a group of sculptures that combine ceramics and handwoven textiles that explore the archaic relationship between humankind and its environment, focusing on the house or home as a sacred space. Through fired clay and woven fibers—simple yet noble materials whose manipulation has been essential to the development of ancient civilizations—Ibáñez seek to evoke collective memories and ancestral gestures. These pieces engage in a dialogue between the fragile and the enduring, the intimate and the universal, the earthly and the sacred, revealing how the creation of shelters transcends time and becomes a symbolic act of belonging and rootedness.
Earlier this summer, Ibáñez’s work appeared in the two-person exhibition at Dos Tres Gallery in Buenos Aires. In Regresarás solo y en un barco prestado, translated as You will return alone and in a borrowed boat, she and sculptor, Federico Rolla, invited viewers to take a journey through a mythical and profound world, reminiscent of The Odyssey, exploring the return to home. The artists’ message: all beings must at some point abandon their place of origin to begin the journey through life, but they will carry with them hear the voices of the place to which they promised to return.
Join us in October to see an intriguing grouping of works on which the North and South America have left an imprint.
