Category: Eco-Art

The Next Big Thing: Green from the Get Go: International Contemporary Basketmakers

November 17, 2011 0 Comment

Jiro Yonezawa bamboo Bridge and Kay Sekimachi Leaf bowl. photo by Tom Grotta

We’ve had a busy fall season at browngrotta arts. First was Stimulus: art and its inception, which you can still see in the catalog http://www.
browngrotta.com/Pages/c36.php and online through the end of the month http://www.browngrotta.com/Pages/StimulusOnlineExhibit.php. Next up, is Green from the Get Go: International Contemporary Basketmakers at the Wayne Art Center, Pennsylvania http://www.
wayneart.org/exhibition/green-from-the-get-go-international-contemporary-basketmakers which runs from December 2, 2011 to January 21, 2012.  Green from the Get Go is curated by Jane Milosch, former curator of the Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum in collaboration with browngrotta arts. The exhibition features an exciting compilation of more than 40 works by artists who take inspiration from nature and the history of basketry. Since prehistoric times artists and craftspeople have been highly attuned to the beauty and resources of the natural world, whether depicting a pristine landscape, untouched by man, or harvesting plants and minerals for pigments and brushes. Sustainability is part of the design and craft process, which requires a heightened sensitivity to materials, one that honors the caring for, replenishing and repurposing of materials. Artist Dorothy Gill Barnes captures this eco-friendly position well when she explains, “my intent is to construct a vessel or related object using materials respectfully harvested from nature.”

CROSSING OVER Dona Anderson bamboo kendo (martial art sticks), patterned paper, thread 15″ x 94″ x 30″ 2008. photo by Richard Nicol

 

Some of the sculptural baskets in Green from the Get Go are made from both flora and fauna, from bamboo, pine, sea grass, and willow to emu feathers and bayberry thorns. The tactile nature of these fiberous works stimulates all of the senses—sight, smell, touch and even sound. Each maker brings his or her own conceptual approach and expression to the design and fabrication process. Some works are small enough to nestle in the hand or rest table-top, while others are monumental or hang on the wall. Green from the Get Go stretches our imagination in terms of what materials and forms constitute a basket and how art bespeaks the interconnected relationship of man and nature.

The exhibition includes artists from Australia, Canada, Japan, the UK, Scandinavia and the US, featuring innovators in the genre of 20th-century art basketry as well as emerging talent: Dona Anderson, Jane Balsgaard, Dorothy Gill Barnes,Dail Behennah. Nancy Moore Bess, Birgit Birkkjaer, Jan Buckman, Chris Drury, Lizzie Farey, Ceca Georgieva, Marion Hildebrandt, Kiyomi Iwata, Christine Joy, Virginia Kaiser, Markku Kosonen, Gyöngy Laky, Dawn MacNutt,  John McQueen, Mary Merkel-Hess, Norma Minkowitz, Valerie Pragnell, Ed Rossbach, Hisako Sekijima, Kay Sekimachi, Naoko Serino, Klaus Titze, Jiro Yonezawa and Masako Yoshido.

PILLOW, Norma Minkowitz, fiber, wood, paint, 2011

 

The preview party for Green from the Get Go: International Contemporary Basketmakers and Craftforms 2011, juried by Elisabeth Agros of the Philadelphia Art Museum, takes place on the evening of December 2nd and we’ll be there. For more in formation, contact the Wayne Art Center: http://www.wayneart.org/events/?id=48.

Dispatches: Art in situ on Monhegan Island, Maine

August 24, 2011 0 Comment

We visited Monhegan Island inMaine http://www.monheganwelcome.com earlier this month in search of seafood and photos and some of Maine’s most beautiful coastline.  The island has no paved roads — but miles of trails, that are easy to navigate thanks to Monhegan Associates’ trail maps available in stores and trailside boxes all over the island.  Visitors are advised not to miss the shipwreck, lighthouse, museum, and the many

artists’ studios open to the public and to appreciate the abundant plant life and bird population. One of our favorite sites, however, was not listed in any of the literature.  We were delighted when we stumbled upon an art colony of tiny structures populating Trail 11. Reminiscent of the World Beach Project https://arttextstyle.com/2010/05/14/eco-art-news-world-beach-project, in which beachgoers create sculptures of stones, visitors to Trail 11 have created small sculptures of sticks, bark, pinecones, leaves and shells. Some are more accomplished than others, but it was the sheer

volume that impressed us.  We stopped counting at 100, but until then, we had great fun looking behind tree roots, around rocks, in branches and creeks to find as many as we could.  And, we couldn’t leave without making a contribution; Carter, our budding artiste, created the word “ART” out of large sticks.

Carter’s contribution to trail 11, Monhegan Island photo by Tom Grotta

Eco-Art News: Chris Drury’s Carbon Sink Creates Controversy in Wyoming

August 20, 2011 0 Comment

photo by Chris Drury

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An installation at the University of Wyoming Art Museum in Laramie by British land artist Chris Drury has heated up the debate over coal in that state http://uwartmuseum.blogspot.com/2011/07/land-artist-chris-drury-begins.html. Carbon Sink: What Goes Around Comes Around,  is 36 feet in diameter, took three weeks to create and at its center  features logs from trees killed by beetles, surrounded by lumps of coal. Drury had learned from students and faculty in the fall of 2010 about mountain pine beetles that have infested and killed more than 100 million acres of forest in Wyoming and other mountain states in the last decade. Scientists attribute

photo by Chris Drury

photo by Chris Dury

the infestation to the warming of the planet, which has reduced the frequency of the well-below-zero temperatures that would otherwise kill the insects. Human-caused greenhouse gas emissions are a major cause of rising temperatures; a primary contributor to greenhouse gases is the burning of coal. Two state legislators from coal-centric Campbell County were not impressed by Drury’s work.  According to the Green blog of The New York Times,  Representatives Tom Lubnau and Gregg Blikre, Republicans from Gillette, wrote to the University of Wyoming to complain about the sculpture, Lubnau telling a local newspaper, “…every now and then you have to use these opportunities to educate some of the folks at the University of Wyoming about where their paychecks come from,” which includes, of course,  tax revenues from coal and other energy industries. http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/21/coal-themed-sculpture-annoys-lawmakers “I just wanted to make that

photo by Chris Drury

photo by Chris Drury

connection between the burning of coal and the dying of trees,” says Drury. “But I also wanted to make a very beautiful object that pulls you in, as it were.” The work “has certainly generated a big debate,” he says, “which is good.” To see Drury’s photos of the work and the West, visit his blog at http://chrisdrury.blogspot.com/2011/07/carbon-stink.html. “Art is free to speak its truth,” he writes there, “and in the case of Carbon Sink all I am trying to do is to make many and multiple complex connections in as striking and beautiful way as I am able.” Watch for an interview with Chris Drury, filmed by the museum it will eventually be posted on its You Tube page at http://www.youtube.com/user/uwartmuseum.

Eco-Art News: Green: the Color and the Cause at the Textile Museum in D.C.

April 20, 2011 0 Comment

Gyongy Laky 101L ALTERATIONS apple, grapevine, nails, wire, 58″ x 68″ x 3″ 2008

This Earth Day, visit the Textile Museum’s new exhibition, Green: the Color and the Cause, in person or the gas-free way: online http://www.textilemuseum.org/green. The exhibition includes 34 artists, including Gyöngy Laky and Jiro Yonezawa. These artists work in natural, eco-friendly and repurposed materials and/or create works that reference diminishing resources, species extinction and the like. Online, there is an image for each artist, along with a description and in some cases, links to videos in which the artists describe their work, show their process or their inspiration. You can browse by artist name or by theme: The Color, Nature, Global Choices, Interconnectedness, Repurposing, Sustainability or Adaptation. There’s also a slide show about the history of the Green Movement in this country. The exhibition runs through September 11, 2011. The Textile Museum is located at: 2320 S Street, NW, Washington, DC 20008. For more info call: 202-667-0441. Also, online at http://browngrotta.com/Pages/earthday.php, Eco-Art for Earth Day, through May 1st.

Newsflash: Eco-Art extended through June 22nd

June 4, 2010 0 Comment
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Eco-Art Installation at the Artifact Design Group

Our current exhibition, Eco-Art: Materials, Recycled, Repurposed and Re-Envisioned at Artifact Design Group, 2 Hollyhock Lane, Wilton, Connecticut, has been extended through June 22, 2010.  For more information call Artifact at 203.834.7757 or browngrotta arts at 203.834.0623.  Make a day of it and visit The Dressmaker’s Art and Andy Warhol’s Flowers at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich or Tom Molloy at the Aldrich Museum in Ridgefield  through June 13th; assorted exhibits after that.
 

Eco-Art News: Eco-Site-ings

May 26, 2010 0 Comment

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Environmental aesthetics have come a long way from Birkenstocks and macrame.  The web features a wealth of sites that feature ecological conscious design.  Here are several we like: HAUTE*NATURE is an eco-guide to creative ideas, art and green products that blend high style with sustainability like the  Sit Bag Suitcase chair by maybedesign. http://hautenature.blogspot.com Then there’s treehugger.com the Earth Mother of all eco-sites. The site has regular sections on Design & Architecture, which highlighted Gyöngy Laky’s environmental architecture in 2008. Also a Fashion & Beauty section, which this week covers the (Re)Fashioning Fiber: New Horizons in Environmental Art and Fashion exhibition http://abigaildoan.blogspot.com at Green Spaces Gallery, which includes work by Ceca Georgieva and Abigail Doan.  You’ll also find eco-news, games, green buying guides and lots of How-Tos. Ranked by the Times Online as one of the 100 Best Blogs of 2009, treehugger.com also offers the occasional odd take on the topic, from the photo essay: Clouds that Look Like Boobs (yeah, these do) to the celebrity report: Football Player Leaves NFL, Starts Interning At a Small Organic Farm to eco-pop quizzes like: Is Your Sex Sustainable? Fair warning You can start out looking for a local place to recycle batteries and find yourself an hour later still engaged. Also enjoyable is http://www.ecouterre.com/about which is devoted to the future of sustainable fashion.  It was there that I learned about a “sweat shop” in Paris where you can rent sewing machine time by the hour and sip coffee or tea while you work, got a first glimpse of “vegan style” and learned about the FEED projects great looking Guatemalan ikat totes that provide nutrition for malnourished kids.

 

Then you may want to bookmark the Sustainability and Contemporary Art blog http://artandsustainability.wordpress.com which aims to cover the deepening relationship between contemporary art and notions of environmental sustainability which can include everything from eco-critique to a report on sustainability summer school. If you want to do more than just read about ecology and art. Then the Center for Sustainable Practice in the Art website  http://www.sustainablepractice.org should be your next stop. The Executive Director is Ian Garrett who teaches Sustainability in the Theatre Department at CalArts University.The site covers conferences, grants and exhibitions and offers book suggestions, too.

 

 

Eco-Art News: Outtakes

May 19, 2010 1 Comment
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YEW SPHERES and photo by Chris Drury

Several of the artists that are included in Eco-Art: Materials Recycled, Repurposed, Re-Envisioned have created environmental installations and other works that could not be included in the confines of the exhibit at Artifact Design Group which continues through May 31st. Here’s a sampling:

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BREATHING VESSELS and photo by Britt Smelvær

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GRAFTED WILLOW by Dorothy Gill Barnes photo by Cynthia Tinapple and PROTEST by Gyöngy Laky

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THRU THE WINDOW and photo by Lawrence LaBianca

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SNOW BALL EXPERIMENTS AND LANDSCAPE FOR MEN, burdock Burrs and photo by Ceca Georgieva

 

Technorati Tags: Ceca Georgieva, Chris Drury, Dorothy Gill Barnes, Eco-Art, Lawrence LaBianca, Britt Smelvær

 

Eco-Art News: World Beach Project

May 14, 2010 0 Comment
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Pattern made by Sue Lawty on a south Devon beach

Sue Lawty World Beach Video

If you have ever aspired to be an Eco-Artist, the World Beach Project is your chance. A global art project devised by Sue Lawty while she was artist-in-residence at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the World Beach Project is open to anybody, anywhere, of any age. Building on the experience many of us have of making patterns on beaches and shorelines, this project combines the simplicity of making patterns with stones with the complexities of shape, size, colour, tone, composition, similarity and difference. Lawty’s idea for this project has always been based around patterns made with stones. That means no seashells, seaweed, driftwood or other flotsam and jetsam commonly found on beaches.

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Lawty has explained her inspiration: “The idea for the World Beach Project arrived in my head fully formed and in an instant. It popped up by way of responding to the response to my work using small stones, which in its turn, is a response to the land – specifically, rock. Whether a line of quartz splitting a rock face or a huge folded mountain range, the structure of rock talks of the structure of our planet. It is like a map of time – the earth drawing itself on a massive scale. And whether stones are satisfyingly smooth… or like long thin fingers… or beautifully, almost purely round; whether they are knobbly, shiny, dull, crinkly, holey, patterned or plain, black or white – they reflect the language of their making i.e. how they look in this de-constructed state is as a direct result of their construction, probably millions of years ago. I find this exciting. World Beach was conceived as a global drawing project; a stone drawing project that would speak about time, place, geology and the base instinct of touch. Drawings made on shorelines all over the world, which although erased by the next tide or rains, would be collected within the V&A to become a permanent record of the individual human desire to make pattern. To pick up a rock, is to touch base. Touching stones gives us a primal, spiritual connection with the earth. When we handle a stone, we hold in our hands a small drawing, a tiny piece of the map; we are holding time. That’s why.”

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‘Hells Mouth, North Wales ‘ Jess Hutchinson

It’s easy to get involved.  More than 800 people have participated from Ross Island, Antarctica to Cape Town, South Africa.  Go to the map and pick your favorites. (Some of ours: Rarotonga, Oceania, Mt. Hood, Washington, Klive Beach and Eastbourne.) Watch Sue Lawty explain how to get involved in the project by watching the World Beach Video . Then go to the V&A website for instructions on adding your art http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/textiles/lawty/world_beach/ for instructions on adding your art

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Technorati Tags: Art Installation, Sue Lawty

Eco-Art News: Green by the Foot

May 10, 2010 0 Comment
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photo courtesy of dominicwilcox.com

Field is a magical installation by Dominic Wilcox made of 500 eco-friendly shoes whose laces rise in unison and grow toward’s the window’s light. View the video at the artist’s website: http://www.dominicwilcox.com/field.html or see the installation in person at the Salone del Mobile at Entratlibera c.so indipendenza 16 / 20129 milano / italy / tel. +39 02 70006147 until July 2010.
 
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photo courtesy of dominicwilcox.com

 

Eco-Art News: Entre glace et neige exhibit in Italy

May 7, 2010 0 Comment

 

lake Concordia by Chris Drury

Land artist Chris Drury is one of more than 30 international artists included in the exhibition, Entre glace et neige. Nature’s processes and energies, which opens at the Centro Saint-Bénin in Aosta, Italy on May 15th and runs through October 26, 2010.  The exhibition, curated by Laura Cherubini and Glorianda Cipolla, investigates the relation between art and nature, focusing on elements such as ice and snow, icons of the natural transformations of matter. Valle d’Aosta, the exhibitions locale, offers an exemplary perspective on the dialectical shifts between water, ice and snow – in their aesthetical, scientific and ecological aspects.

 

 

 

Using different techniques and expressive strategies – from painting to photography, from film to sculpture and installation – the artists in Entre elace et neige have dealt with natural phenomena representing the solid states of water. Work by established artists such as Anish Kapoor, Mario Merz, Salvatore Scarpitta, Hamish Fulton, Lawrence Carroll and Salvo will be present alongside work by younger artists such as  Elisa Sighicelli, Massimo Bartolini, Hans Op de Beeck, Christian Frosi, Lucy+Jorge Orta and Loris Cecchini to investigate the way art reflects on natural energy, in its dual aspect of a dangerous, and currently endangered, universe. In the exhibit, Jana Sterbak’s Dissolution creates impractical ice chairs, while her videoFévrier depicts a Montreal ice-skating rink with clear Brueghel quotations. Anish Kapoor celebrates sun and moon with a white marble mountain. Walter Niedermayr portrays the huge emptiness of mountains, punctuated by tiny figures. Chris Drury captures the life of an iceberg and offers the equivalent of a glacier’s electrocardiogram.

 
Drury’s work, Basket for the Crows, is included in Eco-Art: Materials Recycled, Repurposed, Re-Envisioned, at Artifact Design Group in Wilton, Connecticut through May 31, 2010. He is a Curator’s Choice artist in The Green Museum.

Technorati Tags: Chris Drury, Environmental Art, Eco-Art