Rachel Max is  looking forward to reading a new biography of Anni Albers, by Nicholas Fox Weber (Anni Albers: a life), which is coming out in April next year. “But,” she writes, “whenever I need a burst of inspiration, I dip into the Writings and Conversations, by Barbara Hepworth. I’ve always loved her work. Max also recommends Craftland by James Fox as a thoughtful and timely journey through Britain’s “endangered” crafts and heritage. 

“In a digital age where handmade skill is gradually being chiseled away by mass production and AI, Fox traverses both time and land to meet some of the people keeping our need for craftsmanship alive. As a maker, I am extremely conscious of techniques – not reviving them as such, but reviewing them to make something new. Admittedly, and perhaps because I live and work in a city, I take lots for granted – how agriculture, for example, has shaped our landscape with hedgerows and stone walls. I’ve always known that Sheffield is famous for its steel production, that Birmingham has a long history of jewelery making, and that Somerset is known for willow weaving. Each area has its own unique way of doing things – stone walls and baskets vary from region to region. I’ve walked past the British Library many times without considering who designed and carved the lettering on the facade. The bells of Big Ben toll across our screens every New Year, but, like many, I take for granted the skill and expertise that went into making and tuning them. 

Fox’s writing is poetic and contemplative but what comes acoss most in this book are the skills, dedication and determination of all the people he met along the way,” Max says. “Aside from the rush weaver, Felicity Irons, many names were unknown to me, but these names and their workmanship are hardly invisible, they are part of a far greater picture – our social and cultural history. So much so that once forgotten trades have become embedded in our own names and language. Fox reminds us to look around, to notice and to take note of crafts enduring legacy.”

“I can recommend What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory, by Brian Eno and Bette A.,” Randy Walker writes. “It’s a small book (literally 3” x 5”) consisting of 122 refreshing pages written and illustrated in children’s book fashion — just my style. I savor the thoughts, and only read a few pages at a time so I can contemplate them for a while.” The book is billed as “an inspiring call to imagine a different future.”

“My favorite book of the year was about photographer, Edward Curtis — Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis by Timothy Egan,” writes Polly Sutton. “I recently got to view photos at the Rainier Club in Seattle where he lived for many years and paid for his room and board with pictures.” 

According to the publisher’s notes, Curtis spent three decades documenting the stories and rituals of more than 80 North American tribes. It took tremendous perseverance  ​— ​ 10 years alone to persuade the Hopi to allow him to observe their Snake Dance ceremony. And the undertaking changed him profoundly, from detached observer to outraged advocate. Curtis would amass more than 40,000 photographs and 10,000 audio recordings, and he is credited with making the first narrative documentary film. The Ranier Club has an important collection of his works.

Exhibition catalogs often inspire recommendations; Europe was apparently the source for fiber exhibitions in the last 12 months, based on Heidrun Schimmel’s update. The expansive exhibition of Sheila Hicks: a little bit of a lot of things was a highlight this year In Germany, Schimmel writes. The exhibition was shown in Kunsthalle Düsseldorf from October 2024 to February 2025.  “A very good catalog of the same name was published,” she writes. It chronicles 50 years of the artist’s work and features a lay-flat sewn binding and an exposed spine, A Little Bit of a Lot of Things is designed to emulate Hicks’ playful, imaginative practice. 

“Another good exhibition, Soft Power, was shown in the Museum Das Minsk, Potsdam, Germany, in 2024, she says. You can order the exhibition catalog (112 pages) and take on line tour here: https://dasminsk.de/en/exhibitions/4478/soft_power.  A truly comprehensive exhibition, Textile Manifestos—From Bauhaus to Soft Sculpture, was displayed in Switzerland, in the Museum für Gestaltung, Zürich, she says. In addition to the fiber all-stars — Hicks, Tawney, Abakanowicz — the exhibition included intriguing artists Gunta Stölz, Elsi Giaque, Lia Cook, and Masakazu Kobayashi. In conjunction, the Museum recommends the volume, Textiles Manifestos.

Exhibition catalogs were also the inspiration for both Karyl Sisson’s and Gyöngy Laky’s recommendation: the Ruth Asawa retrospective — first in San Francisco, now in New York. (If you are on the East Coast, you have until February 7, 2026 to see it at MoMA.) “The breadth of her work is astounding,” Karyl Sisson says. Gyöngy Laky also recommended the retrospective catalog, Ruth Asawa: Retrospective. She and her husband Tom Layton were friends with Ruth Asawa. “Thinking about Ruth Asawa reminds me that the US has overcome threats to our Democracy before,” Laky writes. “During another time challenging our democratic values, in World War II, the Asawa family members were sent to internment camps. The terrible and misguided 1942 Executive Order eventually incarcerated 120,000 people of Japanese descent. It was, however, as a child in those wretched concentration camps, that the talent and creative interests of Ruth Asawa were nurtured. In 1946, at the age of 20, Ruth went to Black Mountain College where she met her future husband, architect Albert Lanier. At Black Mountain College her drawing teacher, Ilya Bolotowsky, connected her drawing with her wire work describing it as drawing in space. She began her looped-wire sculptures there after being introduced to basketry techniques in Mexico”. The following year Asawa’s work was shown at SF MoMA for the first time — only to be the subject of an extensive retrospective nearly 75 years later.

Asawa left her mark on cultural history in other ways. She married her husband Albert in 1949 in San Francisco when interracial marriages were still illegal in many parts of the US. The partnership lasted 59 years!  Asawa left a legacy within the larger Bay Area community, too. She co-founded the Alvarado Arts Workshop for elementary school children in 1968 – – now the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts. She was deeply devoted to arts education. Laky writes that an Imogen Cunningham photo from the 1950s greeted visitors to the SFMoMA exhibition accompanied by a quote: “An artist is an ordinary person who can take ordinary things and make them special.” And, Laky says, Asawa did just that. 

Stéphanie Jacques is looking forward to visiting Magdalena Abakanowicz: The Fabric of Life through April 12, 2026 at the Bourdelle Museum in Paris. “I love this museum and I’m excited to experience the works of Magdalena Abakanowicz. The catalog looks fascinating.” https://www.bourdelle.paris.fr/visiter/expositions/magdalena-abakanowicz-la-trame-de-lexistence In additional to exhibition attendance, Jacques has an ambitious reading list planned for next year. “Books are there to recharge us and open us up to other perspectives,” she writes. There are five books she’d like to read in early 2026:

To learn more about the path Rodin took to create his sculpture of Balzac: his approach, his doubts, his relationship to the real body, etc, Jacques is going to read Dérobades: Rodin et Balzac en robe de chambre by Marine Kisiel — only available in French. “Phyllida Barlow is an artist whose work I admire,” she writes. “I haven’t yet had the chance to see her pieces in person, and this book, In the Studio: Phyllida Barlow , text by Frances Morris, seems like an opportunity to discover more about her work and her creative process. Reading about other artists’ work is enriching and often prompts me to reflect on my own practice.” Three books on basketry in all its complexity and variety are also on Jacques’ list. She describes these as, “an inexhaustible source of inspiration and wonder; skills where the universal and the unique meet.”

They are Contemporary Basketry: New Directions from Innovative Artists Worldwide by Carol Eckert and Janet Koplos, Kishies and Cuddies: A Guide to the Traditional Basketry of Shetland, by Lois Walpole, and The Material Culture of Basketry: Practice, Skill, and Embodied Knowledge, eds. Stephanie Bunn and Victoria Mitchell. And Jacques may return to The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, since she has done so regularly since first reading it over two years ago. “I have even opened it at random just to hear her voice,” she says. “It has everything: history and the upheavals of personal lives, political engagement, love, men, women, creation…” 

Gizella Warburton recommended three books about our relationship to nature: Wild Service: Why Nature Needs You, eds. Nick Hayes and Jon Moses, The Language of Trees: a Rewilding of Literature and Language, by Katie Holten and Is a River Alive? by Robert MacFarlane. Wild Service calls for mass reconnection to the land and a commitment to its restoration. A national bestseller, The Language of Trees invites readers to discover an unexpected and imaginative language to better read and write the natural world around us and reclaim our relationship with it. MacFarlane has been called “the great nature writer … of this generation.” The publisher says that Is a River Alive? is a joyful, mind-expanding exploration of an ancient, urgent idea: that rivers are living beings who should be recognized as such in imagination and law. They are not textile-related, says Warburton, but each offers “a hopeful and meaningful read.” Amen to that!

Next Week:
More book recommendations— this time from browngrotta arts …

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Wendy Wahl (US), writes that “Most mornings I find my spouse reading a book. It was clear that The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery by Adam Gopnik was speaking to his inner being as a furniture maker and writer. With each chapter he would share a quote or passage followed by, ‘I think you’re going to like this one.’ When he gave me the book it contained many dog-eared pages. I started with those, wondering what needed to be revisited. From start to finish Adam Gopnik reveals his trials, failures, and triumphs while trying to become proficient at something unfamiliar like drawing, magic, driving, baking, boxing, and overcoming fears. Through these short stories, he invites us to look at our own “mystery of mastery” that he suggests we all possess in some grand or compact form. His humor and skill at storytelling give us a glimpse into his approach as a novelist and critic.”

This year Wahl also herself immersed in Susan Casey’s The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean (Anchor, 2011). which documents enormous waves and the surfers who travel the globe in search of them. “Reading about this takes me to a place where I can imagine the incredibly heightened sensation of being while knowing it could be my last breath. I’m not called to the water in that way. However, Casey has also given us Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins (Anchor, 2016). She reveals the light and dark characteristics of these amazing cetaceans and the conditions created by human interaction. I read this during an expansive experience of swimming with dolphins in the wild on their terms and learning to think like one.”

In exhibition catalog recommendations, Wahl had two. “There are two exhibitions that I was unable to attend but grateful that one had a catalog and the other a monograph. The first exhibition was Encyclopedism from Pliny to Borges at the University of Chicago Library (Encyclopedism from Pliny to Borges, University of Chicago Library, 1990). The exhibition included 77 volumes from the Library’s rare book collection highlighting the different forms of encyclopedias. I stumbled across this exhibition doing research as an artist who uses discarded encyclopedias in their work. Viewing it through the online and physical catalogs has given me another perspective on these books. The second was the exhibition Gego: Measuring Infinity at the Guggenheim, in New York this year (Gego: Measuring Infinity, Guggenheim Museum Publications).  A dear friend sent me the monograph after a conversation we had about missed exhibitions. She said, ‘As someone who makes, makes, makes, you need to have this book. I was moderately familiar with Gego’s work and this publication presents the breadth of her talent as a sculptor, painter, and printmaker.'”  

“Going back in time a bit,” writes Lizzie Farey (UK) “I am currently gripped by Life with Picasso by Francoise Gilot and Carlton Lake (Virago Press, Ltd, 1990). “This memoir,” the publisher writes, “is both a vivid portrait of a monstrously difficult man and a brilliant depiction of a great artist at work.” When Picasso met the young painter Francoise Gilot in a Parisian Cafe he was 62 and already acknowledged as the greatest artist of his century. During the next 10 years they were lovers, worked closely together and she became the mother of two of his children, Claude and Paloma.  In an account filled with intimate revelations about the man, his work, his thoughts, his friends – Matisse, Braque, Gertrude Stein and Giacometti amongst others – Francoise Gilot paints a compelling portrait of her turbulent life with the temperamental genius that was Pablo Picasso. 

Carolina Yrarrázaval (CH) has been reading Persepolis: the story of a childhood (Pantheon Classics, 2004) by Marlane Satrapi. A “wonderful book,” she says of Satrapi’s depiction of her childhood in Tehran through it’s revolution

“I did an enjoyable deep dive into Andrew Doerr this year,” Blair Tate (US) writes, “I  started with Four Seasons in Rome (Scribner, 2008), while visiting there, then Cloud Cuckoo Land (Scribner, 2022) (a previous year’s recommendation) and All the Light We Cannot See (Scribner, 2017). Tate also recommends: These Truths: A History of the United States by Jill Lepore (W.W. Norton & Co., 2019) and If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino (Vintage Paperback, 2023). 

Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World (Pegasus Books, 2022) by Victoria Finlay is highly recommended by Gizella Warburton (UK). “It is a moving and informative read.” 

Stéphanie Jacques (BE) has three books on her list. First, I Paint What I Want to See, Philip Guston (Penguin Classics, 2022) “Thank God for yellow ochre, cadmium red medium, and permanent green light,” says the author. One of the most significant artists of the 20th century, he speaks about art with candor and commitment. Second on Jacques’ list is an exhibition catalog, Barbara Riboud/Aberto Giacometti: Standing Women (FAGE, 2021). Riboud is a sculptor, who, like Giacometti, has focused on the human body. In this catalog, she describes her work and Giacometti’s influence. Finally, Jacques recommends, Craft, edited by Tanya Harrod (MIT 2018), billed as “[a] secret history of craft told through lost and overlooked texts that illuminate our understanding of current art practice.”

At browngrotta arts, we’re hoping to use some of the quieter days between Christmas and New Year’s to delve deeper into some of the compelling art books that we’ve picked up this year. Radical Fiber: Threads Connecting Art and Science, edited by Rebecca McNamara (DelMonico Books/Tang, 2023) celebrates the overlap between art, science, interdisciplinary creativity, and collaborative learning. It features artists at work in these areas, including Lia Cook. And, it explores engaging questions, such as: Can crochet explain the complexities of non-Euclidean geometry? How does the 1804 Jacquard loom relate to modern computing? Why do we respond differently to a woven photograph than a printed one?

Chosen as one of the year’s best art book by The New York Times, Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction, edited by Lynne Cook (University of the Chicago Press, 2023) is high on our list and sold on our list. “The sheer variety of work produced by more than 50 artists chosen by the book’s editor, Lynne Cooke, will knock your socks off,” writes Holland Carter.”(Just wait till you see what’s happening in the field of basketry alone.)” The exhibition on which the book is based, will travel to several venues, including LACMA in Los Angeles, the National Gallery in DC and then MoMA in New York City. It includes many browngrotta arts’ favorites: Kay Sekimachi, Dorothy Gill Barnes, Ed Rossbach, Katherine Westphal, Lenore Tawney and Sheila Hicks.

Another book that accompanies an exhibition is Making Their Mark: Art by Women Artists from the Shah Karg Collection (eds. Katy Siegel and Mark Godfrey, Gregory R.Miller & Co. 2023). This book explores the extensive collection of work by women artists compiled by Komal Shah and Gaurav Garg. There are essays, artists’ commentary, and more than 250 pages of plates of work by diverse group of artists that includes Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Olga de Amaral, Kay Sekimachi, Rosemarie Trockel, Trude Guermonprez, Jennifer Bartlett, and Faith Ringgold.

We are big fans of Weaving Modernist Art: The Life and Work of Mariette Rousseau-Vermette by Anne Newlands (Firefly Books, 2023), available on our website, and not just because you’ll find Tom Grotta’s photos in the book. Born into a large French-Canadian family in 1926, Mariette Rousseau embraced her passion for creative expression through wool and weaving at an early age. She studied art and weaving at l’École des beaux-arts in Quebec City and then worked at the California studio of ground-breaking American textile designer Dorothy Liebes. Back in Canada after an art-inspired trip to Europe, she and her husband, artist and ceramist Claude Vermette, joined the growing movement of young French-Canadian artists in their embrace of abstraction and new forms of art. The book covers her work in Canada and abroad, her collaborations with architects, involvement in the Lausanne Biennial of International Tapestry and leadership of the fiber program at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.

Vogue Magazine called Helen Molesworth, “the Art World’s Most Beloved Provocateur.” The former curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (from which she was fired) she is also an art historian, a writer, a curator, a critic, and a podcaster. Her latest book, Open Questions: Thirty Years of Writing about Art (Phaidon 2023), includes 30 years’ of essays on artists as diverse as Ruth Asawa and Marcel Duchamp. 

We’ve got a copy of Molesworth’s Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957 (Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 2015) to crack. A major incubator of midcentury American art, Black Mountain College in North Carolina was founded in 1933, as an experiment in making artistic experience central to learning. In just 24 years, this pioneering school played a significant role in fostering avant-garde art, music, dance, and poetry. An astonishing number of important artists taught or studied there. Among the instructors were Josef and Anni Albers, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Buckminster Fuller, Karen Karnes, M. C. Richards, and Willem de Kooning, and students included Ruth Asawa, Robert Rauschenberg, and Cy Twombly. The publisher says the book takes “a fresh approach” to convey the atmosphere of creativity and experimentation that was unique to Black Mountain, and served as an inspiration to so many.

We can’t wait … Happy Reading!

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Gyöngy Laky(US) recommends a tiny book about a big idea: Poetry as Insurgent Art (New Directions, 2007) by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. In the early 2000s, Laky joined the Board of the non-profit, North Beach Citizens (NBC) in her neighborhood in San Francisco, addressing the needs of our homeless and low-income citizens.  “Founded by Francis Ford Coppola,” she writes, “he invited his friend, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, to join him – both having been longtime residents and businessmen in North Beach.  The 4” x 6.3” book I am writing about is by Ferlinghetti, poet, painter, art critic, activist, and co-founder of the famed City Lights Book Sellers and Publishers.  I got to know him a little in the years I was on the Board.  He was a lively participant in NBC’s spring Galas sometimes contributing a stirring and inspiring poem.

“I began to read his modest, little book and heard his, now-silent, voice echoing in my head.  I found every line as if written directly to me, entreating me to greater boldness in my art even though his words were meant for poets.  I am not a poet though I often have said that I want my artwork to create a conversation with the viewer.  My sculptures, more and more over the years, led me to express my responses to the issues I find in the world around me. I sometimes refer to myself as an artist participant, an artist activist, a feminist, an environmentalist and, lately, even, an anti-militarist.  The translation for me as I read, became ‘Art as Insurgent Art’ urging and inspiring me to greater activism through the artworks I create. I found 15 examples in just the first 13 pages particularly and personally poignant!” Here are a few of them:

Be subversive, constantly questioning reality, and the status quo.

If you would be a poet [artist], discover a new way for mortals to inhabit the Earth.

Through art, create order out of the chaos of living.

Reinvent, America and the world.

Climb the Statue of Liberty.*

“Thank you, Ferlinghetti,” Laky writes, “for persuading me to never flinch, shrink or wince when an idea appears unexpectedly in my studio.”

* As a 5-year-old refugee arriving in New York Harbor I did dream of climbing the Statue of Liberty!

Jo Barker( UK) recommends “a beautiful, sensitive, thought-provoking book,” Patch Work: A life amongst clothes by Claire Wilcox. Wilcox is the senior curator of fashion at the V&A Museum in London. Her book won the 2021 Pen Ackerley Prize. “In Patch Work,” the publisher writes, “Wilcox deftly stitches together her dedicated study of fashion with the story of her own life lived in and through clothes. From her mother’s black wedding suit to the swirling patterns of her own silk kimono, her memoir unfolds in luminous prose the spellbinding power of the things we wear: their stories, their secrets, their power to transform and disguise and acts as portals to our pasts; the ways in which they measure out our lives, our gains and losses, and the ways we use them to write our stories.” Author Laura Cumming wrote that she was overwhelmed by this book: “It is an absolute masterpiece. A book of such beauty and profundity, of such poetry in its emotion and observation … I found my sense of life transformed by her writing as I often find it transformed after the exhibition of a great artist.”

Like Laky, another Californian, who is always a thoughtful contributor to our annual book review post, is Nancy Moore Bess (US). She recommends The Sculptures of Ruth Asawa – contours in the air (Daniel Cornell, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and University of California Press,

2007; the University of California has released an expanded edition, The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa, Second Edition: Contours in the Air, Paperback, 2020 by Timothy Anglin Burgard (Editor), Daniel Cornell (Editor)). “I’ve recently begun rereading this (I reread a lot, including favorite mysteries),” says Bess, “using Asawa’s New York Times obituary notice as a bookmark. Yesterday, I finished the third Zoom presentation from the Whitney Museum, inspired by its current exhibition devoted to her works on paper. (I hope one of your artists adds that catalogue to your list.) In rereading this book, I no longer focused entirely on her amazing wire work but moved more widely into all of her art. It’s a big book. I’ll be busy for awhile, but I’m in no hurry.”

Bess writes that “When we lived in San Francisco, not so long ago, it was clear how beloved Asana is – present tense! She continues to be an integral, enriching part of the city. Her continued presence reminded me of how people in Honolulu respected/revered/honored Toshiko Takaezu when we lived there a long time ago. These creative women continue to have impact on us. And I am immensely grateful. Ruth cooked, carved, gardened, bent wire, designed installations, molded masks from friends, mothered, loved and drew, drew, drew. 

See if you can find a copy of this amazing book,” Bess says. “It will so much be worth the effort.” 

From Germany, Heidrun Schimmel (DE) also recommends an exhibition catalog

Inside other spaces. Environments by Women Artists 1956-1976 (the exhibition is at Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany through March 10, 2024). Many of the pioneers in environmental art were women, but their works were often ephemeral, destroyed once a show was over. The exhibition highlights women’s fundamental contributions to the history of environments and presents the work of 11 women artists across three generations from Asia, Europe as well as North and South America: Judy Chicago, Lygia Clark, Laura Grisi, Alexsanda Kasuba, Lea Lublin, Marta Minujin, Tania Mouraud, Martia Nordman, Nanda Vogo, Faith Wilding, Tsuruko Yamazaki. The curators have painstakingly recreated some of these artists’ works that were destroyed after being exhibited, bringing these artists back into the spotlight.

Polly Sutton (US) shared a favorite book of hers with us, Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life by Héctor Garćia and Francesc Miralles (Penguin, 2017).  

We have an update on a previous recommendation from Gyöngy Laky and Jim Bassler, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent, by Isabel Wilkerson (Random House, 2020): Caste has been made into a film by noted director Ava DuVernay. In the film, titled Origin, writer Isabel Wilkerson, grappling with tremendous personal tragedy, sets herself on a path of global investigation and discovery as she writes the book, Caste. Caste is also serving as inspiration for Jim Bassler’s work. “For months,” he writes, “I have been working out ideas mentioned in the book.  I am finally getting around to putting it together. It includes another flag hanging on a very dark brown background with suggestions of African mud cloth.”

More book notes to come in Part 2!

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At the forefront of the revolution in fiber art, Ferne Jacobs has been creating innovative work since the mid-60s. At her retrospective in 2022 in Los Angeles, Building the Essentials: Ferne Jacobs, the Craft in America Center noted that Jacobs is recognized for her mastery of material and process. Reinventing and advancing traditional techniques used for basketry, including knotting, coiling, and twining, Jacobs has generated an entirely new language of sculptural art. Her acute sense of color melded with her poetic and intuitive approach set her work apart. You can order a copy of the catalog at browngrotta.com.

Ferne Jacobs began as a painter, exploring the possibilities of three-dimensional painting in the mid-1960s, before moving to weaving after workshops by such avant-garde fiber artists as Arline Fisch and Olga de Amaral. After the American Craft Museum (now Museum of Art and Design) exhibition Sculpture in Fabric (1972), Jacobs gained national attention for her work. Jacobs has taught and lectured on fiber arts and design since 1972. She received her M.F.A. from Claremont Graduate University in 1976 and has been featured in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and abroad. She is the recipient of the Flintridge Foundation Award for Visual Artists, and in 1995 she was named a Fellow of the College of Fellows by the American Craft Council. 

Jacobs’ work is meticulous, intensive and personal. She felt particularly close to Interior Passages, “as though we are one and the same.” She says that “[t]his has never happened so completely to me before. It has caused me to ask why, and to try to find a way to explain it to others. In the world I find myself today, feminine values are often desecrated. I am beginning to understand that there is no such thing as a ‘second class citizen’ — anywhere, anytime. There are aspects of world culture where weak people try to control others; because that is the only way they feel their own existence.” Interior Passages emphatically resists that approach. “Interior Passages knows she exists,” Jacobs notes. “She needs no one to tell her who she is or what she is. She knows her value, and I expect the world to respect this inner understanding. When it doesn’t, I think it moves toward a destructiveness that can be devastating.”

Open Globe reflects Jacobs’ reaction to the environment. “The title Open Globe came from experiencing the piece as I was making it,” Jacobs explains. “In my mind, it was the earth. The colors green, brown, blue, grey are the elements on our planet. Open came because there is no bottom or top. The piece is open, so can we see the earth as a globe/ball and open/unending.” The undulations in Blue Wave operate on numerous levels, conjuring ancient Greek pottery, wave froth and water, and the female form among other references.

Jacobs’s work is found in many public collections, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C., the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York, the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts, the de Young Museum, San Francisco, California and the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island. 

Ferne Jacobs’ work will be included in browngrotta arts’ spring 2023 exhibition Acclaim! Work by Award-Winning International Artists. You can order a copy of the catalog Ferne Jacobs: Building the Essentials at browngrotta.com.

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In Cloud Cuckoo Land, Wendy Wahl writes, “Anthony Doer takes the reader on a kaleidoscopic ride that is expansive and intimate. His characters include those from the past, present, future, and multi-species beings bound together on a journey about the love of books in general and one in particular. I was drawn in from the beginning by the thought of young girls tied to needle and thread embroidering liturgical garments. Each of the storylines brought up unexpected emotions. I will return to this novel again and again. Learn more about this amazing tale from this NPR review: https://www.npr.org/2021/09/28/1041004908/anthony-doerr-cloud-cuckoo-land-review. 

Both Gjertrud Hals and Jane Balsgaard are fans of Swedish writer Kerstin Ekman. Hals says Ekman is her favorite autjor. She just read Löpa Varg, (only in Swedish, for now) and her big book about the woods Herrarna i slogan, from 2007. The Free Online Library says of Herrarna i slogan, “Appropriately, the title is ambiguous. Ekman is writing about the forest (skogen); more precisely, about the vast Swedish acreage of forested land, a forest paradigm as good as any. The first word in the title (herrarna) means either “the men/ gentlemen” or “the masters/lords.” These are the men, real or fictional, who have lived with the forest and known it and turned it into what it is today, be they masterful industrial foresters or crouching botanists, lumberjacks or poets, Sir Olof in a sad medieval folksong or Dr. Astrov in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanja.”  Balsgaard read Blackwater (in English) a thriller by Ekman that gave her“the feeling of the soul from old Sweden.” 

A few of the recommendations are more philosophical. Things I Don’t Want to Know, by Deborah Levy is recommended by Stéphanie Jacques, who read it in French, and also the other two volumes in her Cost of Living series. “Great books,” says Jacques. “I loved her voice, her writing, the way she looks at life. She talks about creation and how to continue but not only that.” Jacques also recommends Power of Gentleness; Meditations on the Risk of Living by Anne Dufourmantelle. “Also a great author, and a book that helps us through life.” Yeonsoon Chang is rereading the Asian classic, Book of Changes (The I Ching). “This book inspires me,” she says.

Nancy Moore Bess has been pursuing an interest in Shinrin Yoku, or Forest Breathing. “It was formulated by a Japanese government agency in the early 1980s,” she writes, “but I feel there’s a strong connection to Shintoism and its respect for and connection with nature. Practicing Shinrin Yoku is a form of meditation that draws calmness from being in nature. I have often experienced this sense of peace and calm when alone in a bamboo grove. I guess this is a good time in my life to remember those moments. Wish I could capture them again.” Want to know more? Amazon lists Forest Breathing: How Trees Can Bring You Health and Happiness as having 4.5 stars from 777 reviewers. 

At browngrotta arts we also have a group of recommendations — all of which are found on our website. First, our most recent book, Gyöngy Laky: Screwing with Order — assorted art, actions and creative practice with text by Mija Reidel, David M. Roth, and design by Tom Grotta. At 328 pages, it is the first comprehensive monograph on the work of this exceptional artist. It looks at her life from three perspectives: “Laky’s personal story of immigration and education is narrated by arts and culture writer, Mija Reidel. An assessment of the evolution and impetus for Laky’s work is given by David M. Roth, editor and publisher of Squarecylinder, a San Francisco Bay Area online visual art magazine. Finally, images of forms, vessels, and wall works provide insight into Laky’s studio practice, activism, and philosophy of sustainable art and design, original thinking, and the value of the unexpected.” (“Celebrating Gyöngy Laky,” Selvedge Magazine, July 17, 2022).

An expansive catalog was also created in conjunction with the retrospective of Ferne Jacob’s work at the Craft in Americagallery in Los Angeles. You can obtain a copy of Ferne Jacobs: Building the Essentials on our website. Jacobs has been at the forefront of the revolution in fiber art since the 1960s, She has pioneered ways to create a new category of sculpture. Transforming materials and pushing boundaries, she builds solid structures with coiled, twined, and knotted thread. This exhibition was the first to survey more than 50 years of Jacobs’ pivotal and timeless work through the present. Jacobs’ intimate drawings and collage diaries, which had never been publicly displayed, were included providing an additional lens into her vision, inspiration, and philosophical perspective. 

Two of our 2023 exhibition catalogs are available from our store. Crowdsourcing the Collective. a survey of textile and multimedia art (148 pages) features 42 international artists whose work illustrates the vitality of art textiles, ceramics and mixed media. The artists come from four continents and work in a wide varity of materials and techniques: tapestries of silk and agave, sculptures of seaweed, seagrass and willow, wall works made of sandpaper, hemp and horsehair, and ceramics of Shigaraki clay. Our most recent catalog, published in October is Allies for Art: work from NATO-related countries (148 pages). It showcases work by nearly 50 artists from 21 countries made from the 1960s through the present. The diverse fiber works and sculpture in the exhibition were created by artists who fled repressive regimes, who have worked under and around government restrictions and who have been influenced by current political instability in Europe. The catlog includes 132 photos and an essay by Kate Bonansinga, Director, School of Art, College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning at the University of Cincinnati, Ohio. 

Good gifting and good reading!!

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Art books always make up a good portion of our list, and this year is no exception. Shoko Fukuda told us about three books: Garden, by Derek Jarman, Art Forms in the Plant World by Karl Blossfeldt, and  Champs d’Oeuvre by Frank Stella. Heidrun Schimmel says that “in spite of all the trouble and problems with the documenta fifteen exhibition in Kassel, Germany this year,  it was an important exhibition event with a good catalog: Documenta Fifteen: Handbook, (English ed., Hatje Cantz, Stuttgart, Germany, 2022). 

Stéphanie Jacques discovered an artist that she did not know this year and a catalog about her, Lee Bontecou, that was “a good door to go inside her world.” Jacques says she was “overwhelmed by her sculptures and her engravings, her drawings. And how she always continued to invent and manufacture her unusual materials.”

From Korea, Young-ok Shin read the following book “with great interest” this year: 5000 Years of Korean Textiles: An Illustrated History and Technical Survey by Yeon-ok Sim (available in libraries). She also recommends Conversations Avec Denise René (in French). Denise René was a gallerist in France who specialized in kinetic and op art. And, another look at art (in German), Was ist ein Künstler? by Verena Kreiger.

This year, Polly Barton “loved” The Paper Garden: An Artist Begins Her Life’s Work at 72, by Molly Peacock. “Mary Delaney’s work with color, dyes and flowers through collage, as well as her life story was deeply inspiring to me,” Barton writes. “In the contemplation of each flower as a product of a period in the artist’s life, I found myself reflecting on my own forty years of work in woven ikat. It is a quiet, absorbing, book. The images a treat for the eyes.” She highly recommends it. Polly Sutton found the stories of older artists of interest, too. She has been reading Last Light, How 6 Great Artists Made Old Age a Time of Triumph by Richard Lacayo. “The book is heavy in more ways than one, while reading myself to sleep!” she writes. “But it is compelling to understand these artists’ productive later years.” Gertrud Hals also recommended 

Simone Pheulpin: Cercle d’art (available from browngrotta arts) about the 81-year old French artists’ unique works of cotton tapes and stainless steel pins and the monograph from Kiki Smith’s major exhibition in France in 2019 and 2020, Kiki Smith, Camille Morineau, Silvana Editoriale.

Aby Mackie tells us that her “all-time favorite art book” is Ninth Street Women by Mary Gabriel. The publisher describes the book as, “Set amid the most turbulent social and political period of modern times, Ninth Street Women is the impassioned, wild, sometimes tragic, always exhilarating chronicle of five women who dared to enter the male-dominated world of 20th-century abstract painting — not as muses but as artists. From their cold-water lofts, where they worked, drank, fought, and loved, these pioneers burst open the door to the art world for themselves and countless others to come.” Aby has been reading this year, and recommends, an additional group of art books: What Artists Wear by Charlie Porter and How Art Can Be Thought by Allan deSouza; and Cy Twombly: The Sculpture by Hatje Kantz. 

Two of the recommended books reference weaving:  Teresa Lanceta Weaving as Open Source by MACBA and Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child by Hatje Kantz, which documents that artist’s fiber works from the last two decades of her life.

Her last recommendation is a book that redresses an historic imbalance: The Story of Art Without Men by Katy Hessel which promises you will have “your sense of art history overturned and your eyes opened to many artforms often ignored or dismissed,” through 300 works of art from the Renaissance to the present day.

Just out this past fall, Chunghi Choo and Her Students: Contemporary Art and New Forms in Metal, a large-sized book of lush photographs of Choo’s work in fiber and metal, is recommended by Mary Merkel-Hess (and browngrotta arts). “Jane C. Milosch, the editor, has written a fascinating biography of Choo’s life from her childhood in South Korea through her study at Cranbrook, her teaching at the University of Iowa and her rise as a world-famous artist,” she writes. The book also includes short sections and photographs of work by 30 of her students, including Mary Merkel-Hess, Sun-Kyung Sun, Jocelyn Chateauvert and Sam Gassman. The students’ works show how techniques learnt in a metal program are impressively transferred to other fields of art.

Last, but certainly not least, Rachel Max calls out a “amazing” book: Magdalena Abakanowicz, Writings and Conversations, which she is reading after seeing the brilliant Abakanowicz show at the Tate in London. “It’s an incredible compendium of archival material and a fascinating insight into Abakanowicz’s creative mind,” Rachel says. “She talks of her necessity to create and of soft materials and weaving as something which enabled her to realize her ideas. She also talks of her pieces as compositions in space, of their scale and sense of movement and ours as we walk through her installations. Her Abakans, she says, are ‘shelters’, objects of protection, a second skin and even to some extent mobile homes, giant pockets of interior and exterior spaces. Hardly surprising given that Abakanowicz’s whole life was in her own words, ‘formed and deformed by wars and revolutions of various kinds’.  Art, she says, tells about reality because it springs from the reality from which it develops.” Rachel wishes to some extent that she’d started reading this book before visiting the exhibition, that artist’s “voice feels so present and strong and her words and thoughts so insightful.”

So many books, so little time!

Good gifting and great reading.

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We are thrilled to report that copies browngrotta arts’ latest book, Gyöngy Laky: Screwing With Order, Assembled Art, actions and creative practice, have arrived in the US from our publishing partner arnoldsche art publishers in Stuttgart, Germany. Order a copy on our website: http://browngrotta.com. Designed by Tom Grotta, with text edit assistance from Laky and Rhonda Brown, and featuring Tom’s photography and that of several other photographers, the book examines the career of renowned textile artist and sculptor Gyöngy Laky from three perspectives. First, is Laky’s personal story of immigration and education narrated by arts and culture writer, Mija Reidel. Second, is an assessment of the evolution and impetus for Laky’s artwork by David M. Roth, editor and publisher of Squarecylinder, a San Francisco Bay Area online visual art magazine. Third, are images of forms, vessels and wall works, 249 pages, divided into seven sections: Drawings in Air, Grids, Vessels, Words & Letters, Signs & Symbols, Site Installations, and Abstractions.

Laky has been described as a “wood whisperer.” Her highly individual, puzzle-like assemblages of timber and textiles helped propel the growth of the contemporary fiber-arts movement. Laky’s art reflects an extraordinary personal story: Born amid the bombings of World War II, escaping from post-war, Soviet-dominated Hungary to a sponsor family in Ohio, attending grade school in Oklahoma, studying at the University of California, Berkeley and in India, then founding Fiberworks Center for Textile Arts in the 1970s and fostering innovations as a professor at the University of California, Davis. And, since the late 60s, she has been creating individual works and installations in the US and abroad. 

Laky’s oeuvre, which reflects those experiences, “defies easy classification,” writes David M. Roth. “It draws on the history of indigenous people using found or harvested objects to create art and basic necessities; the 20th-century tradition of using found objects in collage,assemblage and sculpture; and the design and engineering principles that undergird contemporary architecture.“ Symbols and three-dimensional words feature in much of Laky’s work — using wood in this way, Roth posits, is akin to learning a foreign language, and Laky is conversant in more than a dozen,”becoming conversant in the dialects ‘spoken’ by each species.” Pieces like Line have been described as “cheeky.” Letters in works like Lag can be read in more than one way — in this case, as “Gal,” a statement on the hiring of women faculty at the University of California. “[It’s] an intellectual kind of play,” says Bruce Pepich, executive director and curator of collections at the Racine Art Museum, in Wisconsin.”It’s not a conventional sense of humor, but it’s the kind one gets from walking into various layers that exist in objects …You can take them at face value, but the more questions you ask, the deeper your engagement goes.” You can engage with more of Laky’s story and her art in Screwing with Order. The book provides insight into Laky’s studio practice, activism, and teaching philosophy, which champions sustainable art and design, original thinking, and the value of the unexpected.

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Novels:

Wlodmierz Cygan recommended Nocturnes, Five Stories of Music and Nightfall, by Kazuo Ishiguro. Tamiko Kawata is rereading another Japanese novelist, Soseki Netsuke, while on an exercise bike — currently Sorekara. Carolina Yrrazaval is finding  Putas Asesinas by Roberto Bplagno, Murdering Whores in English, “very interesting.”

Art and Reference Books:

Young Ok Shin offered us a sampling of favorite books from her bookshelf — those of lasting import:

Bauhaus Textiles (T&H, London, 1993), by Sigrid Wortmann Weltge (who wriote the essay in our catalog, Lenore Tawney: celebrating five decades of work); Art in Architecture, Jeanne Parkin (Visual Arts, Ontario 1982); Soft Art, Erika Billetier (Benteli 1980); Te Aho Tapu–The Sacred Thread, Mick Pendergrast (Reed Publishing, NZ, 1987). This book is based on the Te Aho Tapu exhibition of traditional Mâori clothing, mainly cloaks, put on by the Auckland Institute and Museum; Beyond Craft: the art fabric, Mildred Constantine and Jack Lenor Larsen (Van Nostrand Reinhold Co, 1973) and On Weaving. Anni Albers (Wesleyan University Press, 1974).

Stéphanie Jacques has a classic that she returns to again and again: Hisako Sekijima’s  Basketry, projects from baskets to grass slippers (Kodansha USA, 1986).

The Grotta Home by Richard Meier: A Marriage of Architecture and Craft (Arnoldsche, 2019) remains Dawn MacNutt’s “fave and inspiration.” She kindly shared a comment on the book from her correspondence with the late Jack Lenor Larsen: “Have you seen the newest Grotta Book?. It’s spectacular and a durable tribute to Son and Author.” Well, we can’t argue with that! At browngrotta arts we recommend Women Made: Great Women Designers (Phaidon 2021). The Wall Street Journal says it’s: “Thoroughly international in scope… a compendium of disarming surprises.” We’d also recommend our Japandí catalog (Japandí: shared aesthetics and influences, browngrotta arts 2021) our best-selling catalog of the year.

“Recently, I had to discard our family dictionary that I’ve depended on for 50 years,” Wendy Wahl, writes. “I could no longer engage daily with my trusted lexicon because every time I turned the pages to discover a new word it released its microbial matter causing me to sneeze. As much as I loved this book I knew it was time to let it go. This Webster’s Third New International Dictionary has been temporarily replaced by a two-volume World Book Dictionary set from my collection of encyclopedic materials reserved for artwork. Fortunately, WTNID, while not cloth bound, is still in print and available from amazon.”

Annette Bellamy and James Bassler both recommended Craft: An American History by Glenn Adamson (who wrote the essay in our Volume 50 catalog in 2020). “Well worth reading!,” says Bellamy.

Politics and Philosophy:

“The most important book for me this year is Un-Dinge written by the philosopher Han, Byung-Chul,” says Heidrun Schimmel (Ullstein, Berlin 2021)There are some essays about ” our hand”, meaning “working by hand,” today in our digital world, she says. “This fact is very interesting for me as ‘craft artist.'”

Say it Loud by Randall Kennedy (Random House, 2021) is Polly Sutton’s choice. It’s a collection of provocative essays exploring the key social justice issues of our time—from George Floyd to antiracism to inequality and the Supreme Court. The New York Times says Kennedy is “among the most incisive American commentators on race.” James Bassler has just begun Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent, by Isabel Wilkerson (Random House, 2020) highly recommended last year, too, by Gyöngy Laky.

One more biography:

While gift hunting this season, we discovered Andrea D’Aquino’s biography of Ruth Asawa (A Life Made by Hand: The Story of Ruth Asawa (Princeton University Press, 2019) for children. It is lovely and informative. D’Aquino is an artist. The book is charmingly illustrated, describing Asawa’s interest in spider webs and education in wire work in Mexico. It includes additional factual information in the back and also an activity guide.

To a Year of Good Reading in 2022!

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Gyöngy Laky wrote eloquently about her re-reading of Fate and Art, the illustrated autobiography of pioneering Polish sculptor, Magdalena Abakanowicz, whose organic installations explored the politics of space in presciently fresh ways.

“This work it is not a woven Abakan nor a Bronze Crowd,” writes Laky. “It is Abakanowicz speaking to us directly herself in a most intimate and electrifying way.  The first edition of Fate and Art, a monologue in her own words, was published in 2008.  This second edition was initiated and overseen by Mary Jane Jacob, renowned American curator, writer, and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  It was published in 2020 in the midst of an unexpected and deadly virus pandemic that is responsible for the deaths of nearly 800,000 Americans, more than in all the wars in which the US engaged since 1898.” In the current struggle, Laky sees an echo of WWII’s horrific conflict. Abakanowicz was 9, growing up in Poland, when the Nazis invaded. “Experiences that might have defeated others forged an artist whose works express the power, intensity and mystery of human existence,” Laky observes.

“Abakanowicz writes in English, an adopted language – every sentence honed to poetic perfection with each recounted episode providing the strong intellectual and emotional impact so characteristic of the muscle and might of her sculptures and installations,” says Laky.

“She was absorbed by the physical world around her.  She writes of her childhood, ‘The urge to have around me, to touch, to hoard —twigs, stones, shards and bark— continued.  They embodied stories with which I wanted to live.’  Those stories she absorbed and magnified to build the large themes of her work.”

Laky recommends that, if you did not read this captivating book in 2008, you should read it now.  “Given the magnitude of the struggles we face today, Abakanowicz’s life and art will renew inspiration to hope, to act and to create.  This monologue will regenerate belief in human resilience, so well expressed through her stirring and thought provoking narrative and in her art.” 

Tamiko Kawata also recommended an artist’s biography, Everything She Touched: the life of Ruth Asawa. Mary-Merkel-Hess did, too: Silence and Beauty by Makoto Fugimura. “I have been following Makoto Fugimura,” Merkel-Hess writes.. He is a Japanese American, a Christian, a writer as well as an artist and recently had a show at the High Line Nine Gallery in Manhattan. As a Japanese artist and a Christian he was an advisor to Martin Scorsese during the filming of the movie Silence based on the 1966 novel by Shisaku Endo also called Silence. Both the book and the movie tell the story of the martyrdom of Japanese Christians in the late 17th century.” Fugimura’s book Silence and Beauty is an extended reflection on Endo’s novel, the nature of art and how Fugimura’s faith journey overlaps with Endo’s. Fugimura recently published another book called Art and Faith: A Theology of Making (2020).

Stéphanie Jacques has been reading Anita Pittoni’s diaries and articles, Anita Pittoni: Journal 1944-1945, and a postface by Christina Benussi, Journal 1944-1945 (Editions La Baconnière, Genève). The author was a textile designer,  an artist, a writer and an editor. The book is in French, but she provided us a translated passage: “For me, writing is made exactly like a fabric, it brings me back to my humble artisan work (…); the same law governs me, makes me perform the same movements, so that the material and the structure of the fabric, made of stitches that are linked rather than tight threads, follows the thread of my thought.” Also on Jacques’ nightstand, a memoir of Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Incarneune abstraction /Embodying an abstraction, bilingual edition French-English (Actes Sud, 2020) summarizing her career and artistic aims. Shaped by 40 years of research and risk-taking, she takes the reader on a journey — each chapter is inspired by major encounters: from Constantin Brancusi and Trisha Brown to Johann Sebastian Bach and Pythagoras.

Lizzie Farey is reading The Luminous Solution by Charlotte Wood (Allen & Unwin, 2021) “Drawing on research and decades of observant conversation and immersive reading,” Farey writes, “Wood shares what artists can teach the rest of us about inspiration and hard work, how to pursue truth in art and life, and how to find courage during difficult times.” Charlotte Wood is one of Australia’s most provocative and gifted writers, Farey notes, an award-winning author, and, just happens to be, Lizzie’s cousin. In the Preface, Wood writes, “A rich inner life is not just the preserve of the arts. The joys, fears and profound self-discoveries of creativity — through making or building anything that wasn’t there before, any imaginative exploration or attempt to invent — I believe to be the birthright of every person on this earth.  If you live your life with curiosity and intention – or would like to — this book is for you.”

Poet Warrior is a beautifully written memoir by Joy Harjo, the first Native American to serve as U.S. poet laureate, recommended by Annette Bellamy. Harjo shares with readers the heartaches, losses, and humble realizations of her “poet-warrior” road. Poet Warrior reveals how Harjo came to write poetry of compassion and healing, poetry with the power to unearth the truth and demand justice.

Polly Sutton referred to us Michelangelo in Ravensbruck. The inspiring and beautifully written memoir records a neglected side of World War II: the mass murder of Poles, the serial horrors inflicted by both Russians and Nazis, and the immense courage of those who resisted. The memoir is of Countess Karolina Lanckoronska, a professor and wealthy landowner, who joined the Polish underground in 1939, was arrested, sentenced to death, and was held in Ravensbruck concentration camp. There she taught art history to other women who, like her, might be dead in a few days. 

The remarkable life story of the pioneering surgeon, Samuel Pozzi, is the subject of The Man in the Red Coat by Julian Barnes, which was recommended by Włodzimierz Cygan. Pozzi was a society doctor, free-thinker and man of science with a famously complicated private life who was the subject of one of John Singer Sargent’s greatest portraits. Barnes’ story of Belle Epoque Paris features Henry James, Sarah Bernhardt, Oscar Wilde, Proust, James Whistler, among others and holds more parallels to our own age than we might imagine.

We would add to this list, Bente Sætrang, (Nina M. Schjønsby (ed.) Arnoldsche). This monograph tells the story of Sætrang (b. 1946) and her 40-year commitment to the medium of textile. She is known for her intensive investigation of trompe l’oeil drapery, bold textile printing, monumental abstract color studies, and charcoal drawings. She was Norway’s first professor of textile art, and her political engagement and unique knowledge of color and textile qualities permeate her work. Through essays, poems, interviews, montages, and rich imagery, this monograph sheds light on the different phases of Sætrang’s artistic practice.

Last, but certainly not least, Ai Weiwei’s much-anticipated memoir, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows: A Memoir (Random House) is just published. It tells a century-long epic tale of China through the story of his own extraordinary life and the legacy of his father, the nation’s most celebrated poet and is, according to Michiko Kakutani, “an impassioned testament to the enduring powers of art.” Edward Snowden’s notes on the book and what it has to tell us about freedom (“The message that emerges from Ai’s work is that the truest resistance to the oppression of conformity is the riot of human diversity,….”) can be found here: https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/culturalrevolutions

This list may offer you enough reading inspiration for all of 2022, but there are more recommendations on the way! Watch for Books Make Great Gifts, Part Two: Novels, Art Books and the Like on arttextstyle next month.

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Book sales are up nationwide and the artists promoted by browngrotta arts have done their share of reading this year. Polly Sutton pulled Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling by Ross King (Penguin) off her shelf where it had been sitting for years. “Worth it,” she says. Nenna Okore recommends 50 Women Sculptors, from Aurora Metro Books. The book, which challenges the perception that sculpture is a male pursuit, features Okore’s work and that of Louise Bourgeois, Ruth Asawa, Yayoi Kasuma and others.

“If you’re curious about the weird wonderful world of mushrooms and how we are related to the Fungi Kingdom, then Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures (Random House) is a literary journey to take,” writes Wendy Wahl. “Merlin Sheldrake stitches together a story of our co-evolution offering scientific and historical analysis in a captivating and thought-provoking way. The author transports the reader into the Fungi Kingdom revealing the mysterious maneuverings of this powerful part of nature’s network and the filament threads that binds us together. In two hundred and twenty five pages followed by chapter notes and bibliography, this is a book with doors to unusual discoveries and pathways of connecting in all directions.”

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson (independently published) is excellent”, says Gyöngy Laky. “Difficult and painful… a must read for every adult person in the U S… should be mandatory reading in high school.” 

Randy Walker recommends a new book from France, L’art du fil, by Marie-Madeleine Masse, published in October by Alternatives press. From the book’s press notes,  photos and embroidered ceramics, arachnean sculptures or totem tapestries … the thread never ceases to inspire contemporary artists from here and elsewhere, as superbly evidenced by the 80 international designers selected in this book one of whom is Walker. “The book is inspiring to me,” he writes,” because it exemplifies how fiber-based work is translated to many scales and contexts and that small, gallery-scale work can and should be celebrated alongside larger works.” 

At browngrotta arts we took note of three beautiful art books that arrived in 2020. First up, Objects USA 2020 (Monacelli Press), with essays by Glenn Adamson and others. In 1969, the Objects: USA  exhibition opened at the Smithsonian Institution, travelling to 22 venues. The exhibtion defined the American studio craft movement. Objects: USA united a cohort of artists inventing new approaches to art-making by way of craft media. Objects: USA 2020 revisits this revolutionary exhibition and its accompanying catalog–which has become a bible of sorts to curators, gallerists, dealers, craftspeople, artists, and auction houses–by pairing fifty participants from the original exhibition with fifty contemporary artists representing the next generation of practitioners to use–and upend–the traditional methods and materials of craft to create new forms of art.

Another visually striking volume, Olga de Amaral: To Weave a Rock (Arnoldsche) traces Amaral’s career over five decades, features more than 40 key pieces of work, and examines the artist’s oeuvre through the lens of contemporary and fiber art. Olga de Amaral: To Weave a Rock celebrates an artist who for decades has gracefully produced across traditional divides: fine art and craft, local and universal, ethereal and material. Published to accompany an exhibition at Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills (US), between 19 November 2020 and 7 March 2021, and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (US) between 27 June to 19 September 2021, and at Museum of Arts and Design, New York (US), between 21 October 2021 and 27 February 2022.

Published in 2018, but new to us is Anchors in Time: Dominic di Mare by Signe Mayfield (Fine Arts Press). The book includes insightful essays, but much of it features full-page photos of DiMare’s meticulously crafted constructions and detailed oil paintings.The book was produced in conjunction with an exhibition of DiMare’s work at the Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco, California in 2018. 

Last but nowhere near least, Agneta Hobin oversaw the publication of Agneta Hobin, this year which features lush photographs of her work, a passel of family and historical photos and text in English and Danish. You can puchase the book at browngrotta arts http://store.browngrotta.com
/agneta-hobin/.

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