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We had a lot of ground to cover in our last, and 60th, catalog. We curated three exhibitions under the title, Ways of Seeing, our broad-based umbrella look at how people collect art. 

The Ways of Seeing catalog contains an intro about collecting and sections on our theme-based grouping, The Art Aquatic, our artist-based collection,  Impact: 20 Women Artists to Collect, and our size-based assemblage, Right-Sized.  The result is a 188-page volume that features work by 74 international artists.

In the intro, we share a bit about our research into collectors, their passion and proclivities. People like Herb and Dorothy Vogel, who created a vast collection of Minimalist art, Komal Shah and Gaurav Garg who’ve created the Shah Garg collection of women artists and artists of color and Lloyd Cotsen who collected broadly and in depth, including bamboo baskets and contemporary textiles.

In The Art Aquatic section there is work by more than two dozen artists. There are works that are made from water-related materials, ones that evoke oceanic themes, and ones that feature maritime motifs. Included are Marian Bijlenga’s motif of fish scales, Jeannet Leenderste’s foamy sculpture of silk, and Merja Winqvist’s boat sculpture of paper.

The catalog offers extra content in the section on Impact: 20 Women Artists to Collect. There are short portraits of the women included, highlighting their innovative approaches and evolving art practices. And there are additional examples of their work, beyond those that were displayed in the in-person exhibit. Included in this section are works from a 55-year period, from a 1959 woven work by fiber pioneer, Kay Sekimachi to an ikat created by Polly Barton in 2024.

The Right-Sized section of the exhibition includes 68 works, organized into a few subgroupings. Among the mini-collections are works on paper — including newspaper and sandpaper, spheres and boxes of various materials, and taller baskets of natural materials, each at least 12 inches tall. Also included are ceramics, works of thread and acrylic, and of silk.

You can order a copy of Ways of Seeing from the store on our website.

If you are heading to Wilton to join us at Ways of Seeing sometime between September 21st and the 29th, there are some other art stops you might make on the way. 

Year of the Dragon
through November 10, 2024
Yale University Art Gallery
1111 Chapel Street (at York Street)
New Haven, CT
https://artgallery.yale.edu/exhibitions/exhibition/year-dragon

This exhibition celebrates the Year of the Dragon, with a presentation of nearly 30 artworks spanning from the 17th century to the present day. In the West, the dragon has historically been characterized as an evil creature, flying through the air while breathing fire from its mouth, but in the East, the dragon is believed to possess power in the celestial realm and to pour out blessings in the form of rainwater over swirling wind. The dragon also has a place in the Eastern zodiac calendar—alongside 11 other animals. The objects on view, feature dragons on folding screens, other paintings, textiles, ivory, woodblock prints and a ceramic by Yasuhisa Kohyama. Taking inspiration from East Asian history, folklore, and myth, these works demonstrate a long, complex, and continuing artistic tradition around this fantastical creature. 

Jonathan Becker: Lost Time
through January 26, 2025
Katonah Museum of Art
134 Jay Street
Katonah, NY 10536
https://www.katonahmuseum.org/exhibitions/exhibition/jonathan-becker-lost-time

Jonathan Becker: Lost Time features more than fifty of the artist’s photographs of influential figures from the worlds of politics, fashion, arts, and culture. Captured through the lens of his Rolleiflex camera, the striking, square-format images reveal intimate, closely observed scenes that serve as both timely and timeless portraits. Becker’s mastery of light, shadow, and saturation is evident across his work in both black and white and color mediums, evinced by the lush, velvety charcoal tones and dazzling chromatic range of his prints.

Tara Donovan: Aggregations
through March 9, 2025
Bruce Museum of Art
1 Museum Drive
Greenwich, CT 06830
https://brucemuseum.org/whats-on/tara-donovan-aggregations

Brooklyn-based artist Tara Donovan reimagines and elevates everyday, mass-manufactured materials into the realm of fine art. In her sculptures and large-scale installations, she employs a range of objects—disposable Styrofoam cups, index cards, paper plates, pencils, pins, rubber bands, straws, tar paper, and even toothpicks—transforming their physical properties and functions. While some of her works are inspired by abstraction and the pure geometry of the grid, others conjure up the sublime, evoking geological phenomena, biomorphic shapes, and organic, cellular forms.

Ways of Seeing
September 21 – 29, 2024
browngrotta arts
276 Ridgefield Road
Wilton, CT 06897
https://browngrotta.com/exhibitions

Ways of Seeing explores how individuals envision and curate their art collections. 

Gallery Dates/Hours:
Saturday, September 21st: 11am to 6pm [Opening & Artist Reception]
Sunday, September 22nd: 11am to 6pm (40 visitors/ hour)
Monday, September 23rd through Saturday,September 28th: 10am to 5pm (40 visitors/ hour)
Sunday, September 29th: 11am to 6pm [Final Day] (40 visitors/ hour)
Schedule your visit at POSH. 

Safety protocols: Reservations strongly encouraged; No narrow heels please (barn floors)

See you soon!

Twenty international women artists of substance and significance are heralded in Impact: 20 Women Artists to Collect one of the groupings in Ways of Seeing at browngrotta arts this Fall. Ways of Seeing explores the varied ways in which people curate their art collections. Collecting by artist, including by race, sexual identity, country of origin, or as in Impact, by gender, is one of the ways in which collections are assembled.

In 2019, Artsy, an online platform we collaborate with, hosted 3,999 galleries. Only 8% of these galleries represented more women artists than men. browngrotta arts is among that 8%, promoting a diverse array of exceptional women artists beyond the group featured in Impact: 20 Women Artists to Collect. The selection in Impact, though a small sample of the women artists we work with, is a group, both intriguing and influential. The artists span various nationalities—including North America, Europe, Asia, and South America—and generations, with birth years ranging from 1917 to 1960. Each artist has mastered both traditional and experimental techniques, while expanding the boundaries of textiles as fine art. 

Impact will feature a multifaceted group of sculptures and weavings made from 1976 to 2024. The artists in Impact have demonstrated a knowledge of traditional and experimental techniques, while redefining the perception of textiles as fine art. “Each of these artists have enlarged the expectations and possibilities of fiber art through their singular, iconic practices,” says browngrotta arts co-curator, Tom Grotta. 

Ethel Stein (1917), for example, who would be 107 if she were still alive, studied under Josef Albers. Intensive study of historical textiles led her to reinterpret historical textile structures using contemporary looms, blending modernist Bauhaus ideals of simplicity, order, functionality, and modesty. In contrast, Katherine Westphal (1919), an eclectic artist from the same era, worked across ceramics, quilting, basketmaking, and wearable art. 

Born 30 years later in Korea, Jin-Sook So (1950) and Yeonsoon Chang (1950), began as traditional textile makers, then moved to exploring sculptural forms. So creates light-reflecting, three-dimensional works using electroplated and painted stainless steel mesh that evoke silk organza. Chang molds abaca fibers and Teflon mesh into structures that investigate the universe, coated with an eco-friendly resin she developed. 

In between those decades, textile sculptors are Simone Pheulpin and Hisako Sekijima, born 1940 and 1944, respectively, renowned innovators. Pheulpin transforms unbleached cotton strips into organic forms reminiscent of bark, ceramics, fossilized rock, coral, or shell, using stainless steel pins instead of stitching or glue — a technique entirely of her own design. For decades, Sekijima has been on what the Victoria & Albert Museum has described as “a journey of radical experimentation,” expanding upon traditional Japanese basketmaking techniques to create inventive non-utilitarian objects, noted for their exploration of volume, mass, and space.

Discover more about these 20 exceptional artists in person at Ways of Seeing or in our catalog. https://store.browngrotta.com/c-54-ways-of-seeing/

Exhibition Details:
Ways of Seeing
exploring ways individuals envision and curate art collections
browngrotta arts
276 Ridgefield Road
Wilton, CT 06897

Gallery Dates/Hours:
Saturday, September 21st: 11am to 6pm [Opening & Artist Reception]
Sunday, September 22nd: 11am to 6pm (40 visitors/ hour)
Monday, September 23rd through Saturday,September 28th: 10am to 5pm (40 visitors/ hour)
Sunday, September 29th: 11am to 6pm [Final Day] (40 visitors/ hour)

browngrotta.com

Schedule your visit at POSH. 
Safety protocols: Reservations strongly encouraged; No narrow heels please (barn floors)

We were very excited to visit Subversive, Skilled, Sublime: Fiber Art by Women last month, just after it opened at the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. Besides thoroughly enjoying the engaging exhibition, we were pleased to catch up with senior curator of the exhibition, Mary Savig, friend of the gallery, Kathleen Mangan of the Lenore Tawney Foundation, and artist, Lia Cook (and see her exquisite work, Crazy Too Quilt).

As the Gallery notes explain, the 33 selected artworks in Subversive, Skilled Sublime piece together an alternative history of American art. Accessible and familiar, fiber handicrafts have long provided a source of inspiration for women. The artists in this exhibition took up fiber arts, dismissed by many art critics as menial labor, to complicate this historic marginalization and also revolutionize its import to contemporary art. They drew on personal experiences, particularly their vantage points as women, and intergenerational skills, to transform humble threads into resonant and intricate artworks.

The works in the exhibition are artfully displayed. From the dramatic Claire Zeisler at the entrance to the exhibition, to the Lenore Tawney Cloud in the room just behind, to the narrow circular alcove where an ethereal Kay Sekimachi monofilament hangs in space, there are many vignettes that delight. We had a few (maybe more than a few) favorites. Lenore Tawney’s In the Dark Woods from 1959 is a revelation. It represents the artist’s open warp technique in which she pulled fiber through the vertical threads (the warp) by hand to create painterly, gestural forms. Unveiling of the Statue of Liberty is an exceptional Katherine Westphal quilt. We also loved Faith Ringgold’s The Bitter Nest, Part II: The Harlem Renaissance Party and its fascinating backstory.

New to us was A Matter of Trust, Maria Emilia-Faedo’s quilt of metal mesh. “I collected secrets from friends and strangers, sealed them in ordinary envelopes, and sewed them into the quilt’s pockets,” the artist told Paradise News magazine. The envelopes containing the secrets are known only to their authors and were never read by Emilia-Faedo. We also loved Red and Blue, the 1969 work by Else Regensteiner.

We were also impressed by the dedicated gallery space of archival materials, and spent a good amount of time there. It provides a window into the artists’ studios, deepening insight into their creative processes with sketches, mail art, and photographs. There are many resources on line, including portraits of a few of the artists. All of the artworks are drawn from the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s permanent collection; archival materials and interviews are selected from collections of the Archives of American Art. 

You have until January 5, 2025 to see Subversive, Skilled, Sublime. In the meantime, you can see work by four of the artists in Sublime, Katherine Westphal, Adela Akers, Lia Cook, and Kay Sekimachi at browngrotta arts’ in Impact: 20 Women Artists to Collect, part of our fall exhibition, Ways of Seeing.

For our Spring exhibition, our accomplished chef and close friend Max Fanwick worked up some foods that embodied themes from Discourse: Art Across Generations and Continents. Max’s cuisine is thoughtful and inventive. For Discourse, he looked at themes that emerged as we curated the exhibition and translated them into exciting canapés and desserts. For us it was a treat, to eat and to see our words and thoughts transformed into edible art. Here are some of the highlights — bites paired with the artworks that inspired them. They embody Discourse’s overarching aim to celebrate connections and contrasts.

Generational and Geographical Correlations: Tomato Soup Spheres with a Grilled Cheese Crouton
Max’s Musings: Few flavors better resonate across the generations than grilled cheese and tomato soup. This modern take captures all the flavor in  modernized bite.

Art Inspiration: Discourse paired work like Nåky Vision II from the 1950s by Margareta Ahlstedt-Willandt of Finland and On Balance by Blair Tate from the US made 70 years later for generational resemblance The exhibition also paired Słońce Szafirowe, (Sapphire Sun) by Zofia Butrymowicz of Poland and Tracking Nasca Patterns by James Bassler of the US for cross-continental comparison.

Structural Explorations: Unstructured Gyoza
Max’s Musings: What makes a dumpling? The shape? The wrapper? The flavor? If you remove the structure, we have all come to recognize what does it become?

Art Inspiration: Perhaps no work in Discourse presented more of a structural mystery than the complex plaiting works by Norie Hatakeyama. Naoko Serino’s ethereal works of jute raised many eyebrows, too. 

Reading Between the Lines: Salmon Tartare on Lotus Crisps
Max’s Musings: In Japan lotus root represents good things to come. If you read between these lotus root lines, you will find the good thing to come is salmon tartare.

Art Inspiration: There were many messages between the lines in the works in Discourse. In Anticipation, Gyöngy Laky asked “Who?” a question, she says, “that underlies the search for a way forward to a better day.” Laura Foster Nicholson reflects on man’s role in the environment, in Rural Road, Freight Train which depicts a train slicing through the Midwestern landscape.

Weaving Emotion into Art: Filo Threads Woven into Cheesecake Bites
Max’s Musings: This take on baklava cheesecake creates a nostalgic flavor profile known to make people so emotional they will make a special journey  just for a bite. 

Art Inspiration:  Works in Discourse often provoked viewers on an emotional level. Our engagement with fiber art is deeply personal. Our first memories are of cloth — fuzzy blankets, soft towels — and they remain strong ones. Aby Mackie sources and recycles used clothing and linens from flea markets in Spain, fabrics laden with memory. She gilds this repurposed material in works like We Can All Be Saved 13, asking viewers to consider what creates value.

Technical Departures: Flaming Ice Cream
Max’s Musings: Ice cream in a chocolate crust is lit on fire which is as big a technical departure as we could fit into one bite.

Art Inspiration: Discourse also highlights the wide range of technical innovations and experiments that fiber art has featured since its inception, including work by several artists who make vastly different uses of paper. Scrolling of encyclopedia pages by Wendy Wahl from the US, knotted paper objects  by Shoko Fukuda of Japan, sculptural works of rice paper by Pat Campbell and paper cord by Mary Merkel-Hess from the US, and woven paper patchworks by Eva Vargö of Sweden were all included.

The diversity of the works in Discourse made for an engaging exhibition. Max’s Musings were an inspired interpretation. 

You can find the works in Discourse  exhibition on Artsy and you can purchase a full-color catalog at browngrotta.com.

Our Spring exhibition, Discourse: art across generations and continents, opens on May 4th and runs until May 12th. It’s worth a trip to Wilton just to see our work by 60+ artists from 20 countries, but if you want to make a day of it, here are suggestions for a few additional venues worth visiting.

Yale University Art Gallery
Modern and Contemporary Art and Design
3rd Floor
1111 Chapel Street (at York Street)
New Haven, CT
https://artgallery.yale.edu/visit

Selected items from permanent collection are on display through the end of this year. You’ll see work some browngrotta favorites there: Mary Giles, Nancy Koenigsberg, and a recent acquisition by Christine Joy.

Neuberger Museum of Art
Then and Now: Selections from the Collection
Ongoing
Purchase, NY
https://www.purchase.edu/neuberger-museum-of-art/visit

it’s the Neuberger Museum’s 50th anniversary. The Museum has assembled a selection from its permanent collection. It includes a wide range of artists and media from mid-century American to African art, Constructivist art, contemporary Latin American art, Dada and Surrealist objects, and more. You’ll find works by Milton Avery, Romare Bearden, Alexander Calder, Stuart Davis, Helen Frankenthaler, Marsden Hartley, Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe, Louise Nevelson, Jackson Pollock, Hedda Sterne, Rufino Tamayo, Max Weber, and Zao Wou-Ki alongside objects by living artists including Chakia Booker, the Guerrilla Girls, and Judy Pfaff. 

The Glass House
Shigeru Ban: The Paper Log House
through December 15, 2024
New Canaan, CT
https://theglasshouse.org/visit/

Shigeru Ban: The Paper Log House at The Glass House marks the first time in six years that the innovative house is on display in North America. In collaboration with The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Union, 36 architecture students gained hands-on experience assembling the Pritzker Prize-winning architect Shigeru Ban’s Paper Log House, a 14 by 14-foot enclosure made of paper tubes, wood and milk crates deployed to provide temporary housing for victims of disaster across five continents over the last 30 years. The students fabricate dthe components at The Cooper Union then assembled the paper Log House on the grounds of The Glass House.

Bruce Museum
1 Museum Drive
Greenwich, CT 06830-7157
https://brucemuseum.org/whats-on/gabriel-dawe-plexus-no-43

Stop by and see Gabriel Dawe’s highly intricate Plexus No. 43 thread installation and the new and enormous King Nyani gorilla sculpture by Gillie and Marc Schattner.

Then join us at Discourse: art across generations and continents at browngrotta arts, 276 Ridgefield Road, Wilton, CT 06897. 203 • 834 • 0623.