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browngrotta arts’s “Art in the Barn” Continental Drift: Encounters, North and South opens in just three weeks. When you travel to Wilton, Connecticut to see it from October 17th through 25th, 2026 there are several other stops worth adding to your trip. And, worth noting, the exhibition will take place just a week before peak leaf peeping here in Connecticut.

One of Wilton’s secret gems is Weir Farm National Historical Park. It is the only National Park Service site dedicated to American painting. The site was home to three generations of American artists including Julian Alden Weir, a leading figure in American art and the development of American Impressionism. At the Burlingham House Visitor Center you can learn about American Impressionism and the three generations of artists that inhabited Weir Farm, then explore the Weir House, Weir and Young Studios, and 60 acres of idyllic and inspiring landscape including gardens and a pond. The Farm welcomes plein air painters. On exhibit now is the The Big Truth: Julian Alden Weir and His Branchville Farm. Weir debuted his new Impressionistic painting style, influenced in part by the work of his friend Childe Hassam, in an 1891 exhibit at a gallery in New York City. (Weir Farm National Historical Park, 735 Nod Hill Road, Wilton, CT 06897.)

The Aldrich Museum in Ridgefield Connecticut is just up the road from browngrotta arts. It’s currently celebrating its first decennial, a recurring survey it plans to celebrate every 10 years. The series will spotlight current artists and practice emerging from Connecticut. As the museum points out, Connecticut has been the home to many art notables, including Annie and Joseph Albers, Louise Bourgeois, Alexander Calder, Jasper Johns, and Sol Lewitt. (We would add Sheila Hicks, Edward Steichen, and Gutzon Borglum to that list.) The exhibition’s title, The Aldrich Decentennial, I am what is around me, is excerpted from the American poet Wallace Stevens’s poem “Theory,” 1917. The 39 artists in the decennial range in age from 30 to 80 and work in a variety of media — much to discover. (Through January 10, 2027; The Aldrich Museum, 258 Main Street, Ridgefield, CT 06877.)

Greenwich, Connecticut, between New York and Wilton, is home to the recently renovated Bruce Museum. The Bruce features an engaging space and consistently significant exhibitions including Jeremy Frey, Ursula von Rydingsvard, and Leonardo Drew. Entering the museum, visitors see King Nyani, a massive gorilla sculpture by Gillie and Marc and the luminous thread sculpture, Plexus No. 43, by Gabriel Dawe. Currently on display is Jo Sandman: What Remains, 30 works that trace the connections between the Boston-based artist’s use of found objects – including discarded fax and parchment paper, linen fabric, tape, tin foil, and x-rays — unusual methods, and archaeological themes. (Through January 17, 2027; Bruce Museum, 1 Museum Drive, Greenwich, CT 06830.)

Last but not least, you’ll find work by 44 artists from North and South America, Europe, and Japan in Continental Drift: Encounters, North and South, at browngrotta arts, 276 Ridgefield Road, Wilton, CT. On view: October 17th – October 25th, 2026. Opening Reception: Saturday, October 17th, 11 am to 6 pm. Gallery Hours: Saturday, October 17th, 11 am to 6 pm; Sunday, October 18th, 11 am to 6 pm; Monday to Saturday, October 19th to 24th, 10 am to 5 pm; Sunday, October 25th, 11 am to 6 pm. (Safety Protocols: No narrow heels, please. We have barn floors.)

See you in October!

We’re just one month away from the opening of Continental Drift: Encounters, North and South (October 17–25) at browngrotta arts. The exhibition uses the concept of “continental drift”—the tectonic separation and reshaping of landmasses—as a metaphor for how artistic traditions migrate, collide, and transform across the Americas. The survey brings together museum-quality art textiles, three-dimensional sculptures, and fiber works from emblematic artists across the US, Canada, Chile, Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia, along with works by artists from outside the hemisphere whose encounters with North and South American land, art, and culture have shaped their practice.

Materiality is a central concern for many of the artists in Continental Drift. Rosana Escobar of Colombia explores the qualities of raw fique fiber and its affinity with horsehair. Trine Ellitsgaard, a Danish artist who has lived in Mexico since 1990; incorporates agave and espadín regularly in her work. The production of mezcal in Mexico generates significant agave waste, but the material has other uses—Ellitsgaard has worked with artisans in Oaxaca and the US to turn agave into fiber, spinning it into rugs, bags, and other artworks. Renowned Colombian artist, Olga de Amaral, studied architecture in Bogotá and then at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in the US. She uses gesso, paint, and plaster to create sculptural surfaces and gold leaf to achieve resonant reflective effects — blurring the line between textiles and architecture.

Technical exchange is another way art practice moves among continents and artists. Andean weaving traditions influenced the iconic style of American artist Sheila Hicks. During a Fulbright scholarship in Chile in the 1950s, Hicks studied and photographed indigenous weavers and archaeological sites in the Andes, learning native techniques like the four-selvage panel and discontinuous warp. American James Bassler lived full-time in Oaxaca, Mexico in the 1970s, an experience that gave him direct exposure to indigenous weaving traditions and profoundly shaped his practice. In Chile, Carolina Yrarrázaval has studied textiles across diverse cultures, with particular attention to pre-Columbian techniques.

A third form of influence among the artists in Continental Drift is a mentorship of sorts. Gyöngy Laky, Lia Cook, and Tim Johnson are among the many artists working across mediums who point to the teachings, writings, and work of American artist Ed Rossbach as revelatory. Rossbach’s research in the 1960s into historical textiles and baskets, including Pre-columbian textiles, opened up areas of innovation and experimentation in the work and teaching of UK artist Tim Johnson. In his current basketwork, Johnson pursues interests similar to Rossbach’s, drawing on the study of ancient techniques and artifacts as inspiration for contemporary making and innovation. For Federica Luzzi of Italy, Lenore Tawney provided that inspiration. Ferne Jacobs took workshops with Tawney and Olga de Amaral in the course of establishing her uniquely personal sculptural approach to textiles. Leon Niehues admired the sculptural work of Dorothy Gill Barnes and John McQueen, who used natural materials from their respective environments—Ohio and New York—to sculpt objects using basket techniques, an approach that left its mark on Niehues’s own work.

The geography and culture of North and South America offer another source of artistic impact. After the destruction of his kiln in Japan, Yasuhisa Kohyama found a guidepost in the American Southwest, which led him to create nontraditional, asymmetric forms suggesting windswept canyons and rock towers. Eduardo Portillo and María Dávila have traveled throughout Venezuela, encountering materials and a diversity of people, customs, and ways of life; back in the studio, they translate this cultural and material richness into textile qualities that merge traditional processes with contemporary perspectives. Polly Sutton and Mary Giles sought basketmaking knowledge from Native Americans—the Salish tribes in Sutton’s case, and the Apache and Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe in Giles’s. Joe Feddersen, a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, and Dawn Walden, an Ojibwe descendant and member of the Mackinac Band of Chippewa and Ottawa Indians, continue Native American traditions while bringing a contemporary and distinctly personal perspective to the objects they create.

Whether the influence is material, cultural, geographical, or some combination of all three, the artists in Continental Drifthave each brushed against something from North or South America, and their work has been transformed as a result. The exhibition reveals these transformations in intriguing ways—well worth seeing and comparing in person, online, or in print in the Continental Drift catalog.

Make an appointment here: https://browngrotta.com/exhibitions/continental-drift-encounters-north-and-south. Order a catalog on our website after October 15, 2026.

browngrotta arts’ upcoming exhibition, Continental Drift (October 17 – 25) is falling into place. Continental Drift, Encounters, North and South uses the concept of “continental drift”—the tectonic separation and reshaping of landmasses—as a metaphor for how artistic traditions migrate, collide, and transform across the Americas. The survey brings together museum-quality, art textiles, three-dimensional sculptures and fiber works from emblematic artists across the US, Canada, Chile, Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia. Also included are works by artists outside the hemispheres whose encounters with North and South American land, art, and culture impacted their art practice. We are excited about the number of new artists that will be included, two of whom we will profile today — Rosana Escobar of Colombia and Ximena Ibáñez of Argentina.

We learned about Rosana Escobar’s work last year when we served as jurors for Fiber 2025 at the Silvermine Art Gallery in New Canaan, Connecticut. Escobar’s work in that exhibition was awarded the Grand Prize and it occurred to us then that she would be an ideal addition to the North/South hemisphere exchanges exhibition that we had planned for the fall of 2026.

One of the works that Escobar exhibited at Fiber 2025 explored the potential qualities of fique, an agave plant endemic to the tropical Andes, today used primarily to produce coffee bags. “Through the process of dyeing and weaving,” Escobar said, “I explore the material as a body, and the use of color to create rhythm and new patterns, aiming to reclaim the value of the fiber beyond its use as a packaging material.” In her work for Continental Drift, Índigo Espina, Escobar’s investigationsinto fique and its proximity to horsehair, continue, in a work that blurs the line between animal and plant. Caminos is made using wild straw from the Paramos, a pristine ecosystem in the high altitudes of Colombia. The fiber has been used traditionally in bundles to make the hidden core of baskets. This piece exhibits the fiber in its natural length, smell and plasticity, and the complexity of the coiling technique. The name “caminos” which means paths in Spanish, is connected to the paths they follow to make the harvesting process a regenerative practice. 

We discovered Ximena Ibáñez’s work online. The artist’s mother is Spanish; her father is Argentinian. She was born in the Netherlands, but she lives and works in Buenos Aires. Ibáñez’s artistic practice delves into an exploration of the tensions between rootedness and estrangement, understood not only as physical conditions but as emotional and existential states. Through ceramics and embroidery, techniques that privilege touch and memory, the artist constructs sensory landscapes in which textures evoke both fragility and the resilience inherent to the human condition, and where the house appears as a metaphor.

Atalaya, which will appear in Continental Drift, belongs to the Atavistic series. This series brings together a group of sculptures that combine ceramics and handwoven textiles that explore the archaic relationship between humankind and its environment, focusing on the house or home as a sacred space. Through fired clay and woven fibers—simple yet noble materials whose manipulation has been essential to the development of ancient civilizations—Ibáñez seek to evoke collective memories and ancestral gestures. These pieces engage in a dialogue between the fragile and the enduring, the intimate and the universal, the earthly and the sacred, revealing how the creation of shelters transcends time and becomes a symbolic act of belonging and rootedness.

Earlier this summer, Ibáñez’s work appeared in the two-person exhibition at Dos Tres Gallery in Buenos Aires. In Regresarás solo y en un barco prestado, translated as You will return alone and in a borrowed boat, she and sculptor, Federico Rolla, invited viewers to take a journey through a mythical and profound world, reminiscent of The Odyssey, exploring the return to home. The artists’ message: all beings must at some point abandon their place of origin to begin the journey through life, but they will carry with them hear the voices of the place to which they promised to return.

Join us in October to see an intriguing grouping of works on which the North and South America have left an imprint.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Watch for more highlights in August!

This Fall, in Continental Drift: Encounters, North and South, (October 17 – 25), browngrotta arts will explore art from North and South America from two different vantage points. First, we will be gathering works by significant artists from the US, Canada, Chile, Venezuela, and Colombia. Many of these artists are not just representative of their own countries, but have a connection to another region as well. Second, we will be including work by artists from in and outside North and South America who cite art, artists, or experiences from these continents as an influence.

With the US currently elbowing its continental neighbors in a political context, it seemed an apt time to examine the gentler ways in which art and culture nudge one another and may wind up altered as a result. The term “continental drift” refers to the slow, tectonic movement of land masses — a process that both separates and reshapes. The exhibition draws an analog between geology and culture: artistic traditions, too, migrate, collide, and transform across the vast territories of North, Latin, and South America. This exhibition brings together works by artists from across the hemisphere. alongside works that bear the imprint of those traditions — whether through material, technique, imagery, or sustained encounter with place and people.

Among the artists from the Americas that will be included are renowned Canadian weavers Micheline Beauchemin and Mariette Rousseau-Vermette. Rousseau-Vermette exemplifies the migration of artistic influences from one continent to another. After graduation from the École des beaux-arts in Montreal in 1948, Mariette (then Rousseau, later Rousseau-Vermette) looked to the United States to further her education, unlike her fellow students who took their cur from Europe and travelled to France. She was inspired by a 1947 issue of Life magazine in which an article titled “Top Weaver” introduced her to the innovative Dorothy Liebes studio in San Francisco, where Rousseau-Vermette became an apprentice. “… [T]his magnificent woman was radically changing textiles in the United States, she was returning them to art,” Rousseau-Vermette said. 

For Ferne Jacobs, an innovative American artist, whose work will also be included, a workshop with noted Colombian artist Olga de Amaral was one way in which she was exposed to avant-garde, structural approaches to thread that has led her to create dramatic fiber sculptures. Jacob uses ancient techniques in her work, including coiling, particularly prominent among Indigenous peoples of the American Southwest. 

From Chile, Carolina Yrarrázaval cites her encounters with American artist Sheila Hicks as formative. Traditional textiles are another significant touchstone for Yrarrázaval. Throughout her career, she has investigated textile traditions across diverse cultures, with particular attention to pre-Columbian techniques. 


From outside North and South America, we’ll be featuring work by artist Trine Ellitsgaard. Ellitsgaard grew up in Denmark. It was there she trained as a weaver, but for the last 20 years she has lived in Oaxaca, Mexico. Her work has a Scandinavian sensibility. There are influences from her adopted home to be seen, as well, including using black-dyed sheep’s wool skirts of the Chamula women of Chiapas in her works and other materials found there — horse-hair, palm, gold thread, plastic, paper, silk, sisal, seeds — deftly blending the organic and the inorganic. Other individuals whose work will be included in Continental Drift have cited artists from the US as having an impact on their art. For Hisako Sekijima and Jiro Yonezawa of Japan it was John McQueen. For Stéphanie Jacques of Belgium and Tim Johnson of the UK it was Ed Rossbach.

The practices of these artists, and the others who will be included, are an apt descriptor of the premise explored in Continental Drift. Each influence absorbed, each tradition studied, contributes another dimension to the tiers of weaving, years of research, and volumes of texture that distinguish these artists’ work.

We’ll be publishing a full-color catalog to accompany Continental Drift, with an essay by Sarah Parrish, Associate Professor of Art History, Plymouth State University, Massachusetts, Research Fellow, Fiber Sculpture: 1960 to the present, ICA, Boston. .

Join us in October! More information to come.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Four Mondays in April; four highlighted works for review.

First this month was Burning Bush by American Katherine Westphal. Westphal concentrated on surface, pattern, and decoration in textiles, quilts and clothing, as well as vessels. The use of fractured and random images, as featured in Burning Bush, became a signature of her work. In the catalog for the OBJECTS USA exhibition in 1970, Westphal wrote, “I was trained as a painter. I see things from that viewpoint. I build up; I destroy. I let the textile grow, never knowing where it is going or when it will be finished. It is cut up, sewn together, embroidered, quilted, embellished with tapestry or fringes, until my intuitive and visual senses tell me it is finished and the message complete.”

Next up was Aurora, an intriguing piece in titanium by Kyoko Kumai of Japan. In 1975, Kumai began using metallic thread for the warp in her tapestries. She started first with with stainless steel, then added titanium, which comes in many colors. Aurora, which is featured in Transformations: dialogues in art and materials (May 9-17), the upcoming exhibition at browngrotta arts, is made of crystal-finished titanium in artfully blended colors. “I am supremely happy if these works create a rich environment that surrounds the viewer,” she says, “arousing various mental images and liberating the spirit.” 

Jane Balsgaard is a Danish sculptor and painter Initially, working with paper did not interest her, but its potential for flight and refracting light captured her attention. Balsgaard spent time in Japan in the 90s, preparing for exhibits there. Works of paper and twigs, like Paper Sculpture 4, were the result. In her work, white paper often contrasts the dark color of the willow twigs, the skeleton framing the paper. Balsgaard is the recipient of an Artist’s Lifetime Grant from the Government of Denmark.

Between Two Sunsets by Baiba Osite explores the fragile threshold between collapse and regeneration, using materials that carry ecological and emotional weight. Driftwood washed ashore and fragments of plastic collected after the destructive floods in Jūrmala in Latvia become markers of the intertwined vulnerability of humans and nature. These remnants of civilization return as a visual reminder of the layers of pollution that shape our environment. Osite is known for her work with different fiber materials including driftwood, glass beads, wire, metal spirals, wool, and linen. Reconstruction is a means to new possibilities, multiple paths to renewal, she says. Osite’s work incorporating metal springs will be featured in Transformations.

See more at Transformations at browngrotta arts this May 9 -17: https://browngrotta.com/exhibitions/transformations-dialogues-in-art-and-material

William Morris, pillar of the arts-and-crafts movement in the 1880s opined, “There is only one real dye: indigo.”

Transformations: dialogues in art and material this May 9 – 17th at browngrotta arts will feature works from Japan, Korea, Venezuela, the UK, and the US that incorporate indigo. Every culture that discovered indigo seems to have felt the transformation as something more than chemical: the cloth goes into the vat one color and emerges another, steeped in a blue that belongs simultaneously to sky and sea and shadow. The plant’s leaves are dark green, and the mystical blue color is unveiled through a fermentation process — when a dyed article is exposed to air, the color transition occurs, starting from yellow to green, and ultimately resulting in the well-known indigo shade. 

What connects the artists in Transformations  who work in indigo — across continents and generations and very different formal concerns — is a relationship with the material that goes beyond color preference. Each has submitted to the discipline the dye demands. Indigo is not a paint you squeeze from a tube. It requires a living vat, careful chemistry, patience, and what practitioners often describe as ritual. It is a dye that demands discipline to use, with some indigo textiles taking thousands of hours to produce, requiring prolonged concentration akin to a meditative state. 

Hiroyuki Shindo discovered the dye as a student: he first encountered indigo while at Kyoto City University of Fine Arts in Japan in the late 1960s, when an older artisan told him he was the last of 14 generations of indigo dyers. Shindo was determined to prevent the art form’s extinction. Over decades, Shindo maintained indigo vats in Kyoto and developed a distinctive technique entirely his own. He developed his own system, utilizing wide flat troughs in which he laid small stones, watching carefully as the indigo was drawn slowly into the fabric, creating gradations of hue — from nearly invisible shadows to areas of nearly black — through a combination of natural process and his own invention. The white of the cloth, Shindo insisted, was as important as the dyed portions.

James Bassler took a journey to indigo. In 1960, a voyage home from a civilian job in England via a cargo ship through Asia proved transformative. On this journey he witnessed the importance of world crafts and their essential role in cultures — a spinning and weaving demonstration in Bombay and the dyeing processes of Indonesia and Japan. Bassler has since explored the wedge-weave structure of the Navajo, shibori from Japan, and the scaffold weave of pre-Columbian cultures in his textile work. Indigo is threaded through decades of his practice. In works, such as Cumbe, he has used indigo-dyed silk and linen warps in combination with an array of other natural fibers — ramie, sisal, pineapple, nettles — creating textiles that feel like accumulated knowledge made visible.

Japan and paint were Polly Barton’s route to indigo. As a young artist, she worked as a personal assistant to abstract expressionist painter Helen Frankenthaler, from whom Barton says she gained “permission” to build up layers of color in her own work. In 1981, she moved to Kameoka, Japan to study with master weaver Tomohiko Inoue, living in the religious heart of the Oomoto Foundation. Barton has spent over four decades exploring ikat, the ancient technique of binding skeins of yarn in calculated patterns before dyeing, which produces the distinctive blurred, feathered color transitions characteristic of the form. Indigo is central to her palette. Her work uses indigo alongside pigment, sumi ink, soy milk, and metal and silver leaf — materials that she layers to create luminous, meditative surfaces.

One of the foundational figures of American fiber art — and one of its great iconoclasts — Ed Rossbach taught for nearly three decades at the University of California, Berkeley, where he created works in almost every known textile technique during his five-decade-long career, experimenting with labor-intensive techniques such as Andean discontinuous warp weaving, Native American coiled basketry, European lace, and Indonesian ikat. Indigo appeared in his work as part of his deep engagement with global textile traditions. He used the dye not as an element in a restlessly curious practice that moved between the ethnographic and the anarchic — making a basket from plastic, a hanging from newspaper, a piece from tundra grass. Indigo was part of that global inventory, a dye he understood as one of humanity’s great shared materials.

Yeonsoon Chang takes indigo into the realm of philosophy. The Korean artist is known for creating ethereal works of starched indigo and was named Artist of the Year at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul in 2008. Chang’s signature material is abaca — a fiber derived from a species of banana plant — which she subjects to an elaborate 12-step process that includes starching, In her Matrix III series, she dyes the abaca fabric with indigo blue over thirty times, creating tightly stiffened material that pays homage to its disciplined creation. The Matrix series, she has said, illustrates the Asian perspective of the human mind and body as unified rather than separate — and the repeated dyeing, the compulsive labor, the rigid geometry are all in service of that idea.

The Venezuelan partnership of Eduardo Portillo and María Dávila may have traveled the furthest — literally and conceptually — to arrive at indigo. Working together since 1983, they have been dedicated to exploring the intricacies of the material production of textiles, traveling extensively in China and India to study the traditional techniques of indigo dye making, silk sericulture, and hand-weaving. Indigo became central to a pivotal body of work rooted in place and longing. Looking for blue in their mountain landscape and realizing they could only find it in the sky, they merged their previous projects — the silk, the vegetable fibers, the natural dyes — into a series called Azul Indigo, exhibited in 2012, recreating the hours of the day: sunrise, noon, sunset, night, and the night’s shadows — their interest in blue shifting with the intensity of light according to the hour.

That labor-intensive nature of indigo, paradoxically, is part of its appeal for contemporary artists working in an era of infinite digital speed. The vat slows you down. It insists on process. It connects you — through fermented indigo leaves and wooden mallets and resist-tied threads — to every dyer who has stood at a vat in Kano or Kyoto or the Carolina Lowcountry, watching cloth transform in the air. William Morris was right. There is only one real blue dye. And in the hands of artists like these, its presence is spell binding.

Join us to see their work at Transformations:dialogues in art and material (May 9-17). 

Each March, New York becomes a global gathering place for collectors, curators, and lovers of Asian art. Asia Week New York (March 19 – 27, 2026) brings together the world’s foremost galleries, auction houses, and museums for 10 days of exhibitions and cultural programming. Here’s a guide to museum exhibits – https://asiaweekny.com/asia-week-march-2026-museum-exhibition-guide/ – from Chinese Porcelain at the Frick, to Hindu Devotional Prints, 1860–1930 at the Met, to a solo exhibition of work by Choong Sup Lim at the Korean Cultural Center. 

At browngrotta arts, it might as well be Asia Week all year long as we have a glorious group of contemporary textile and ceramic artists from India, Japan, and Korea whose work we promote. Asia Week 2026 gives us a good excuse to highlight a select group of their works. Whether you’re a seasoned collector or simply curious, it’s a great time to explore works from these countries in depth.

First up, are stitched and resist-dyed textiles from India by Neha Puri Dhir. Her works explore negative and positive space, reflecting ideas of balance and contrast. The textured surfaces, shaped by stitches and dye migration, add a tactile depth, emphasizing the labor-intensive process she undertakes.

browngrotta arts also promotes singular ceramics, sculpture, basketry, and wall works created by more than 20 artists from Japan. Among these works are ceramics by Toshiko Takaezu and Yasahisu Kohyama. We also show vessels and sculptures by several inventive basketmakers including a group that has studied with Hisako Sekijima — Norie Hatakeyama, Kazue Honma, Noriko Takimaya, Tsuruko Tanikawa, and Masako Yoshida — as well as Shoko Fukuda, Jiro Yonezawa, and Kosuge Kogetsu. Remarkable weavers are also represented, including Hiroyuki Shindo, Masako Nakahira, Jun Tomita, Chiyoko Tanaka, and Naomi and Masakazu Kobayashi.

Five Korean creators of innovative art textiles made of steel, paper, velcro, silk, and ramie are among those whose work we highlight. The effects of light and color in Jin-Sook So’s works of stainless steel reflect her years living in Korea and Sweden. Yong Joo Kim has reinvented velcro as a fabric to create evocative sculptures while Young-ok Shin explores ramie with great impact. Yeonsoon Chang transforms the “softness” of fiber, and transcends the material’s limitations with structures made of abaca fibers and Teflon-coated, glass-fiber mesh to which she attaches gold leaf. Sung Rim Park uses knots of paper, determining the shape and size of each knot based on the meanings and symbolism it holds. While the knots and fibers works that result may appear delicate, they have the power to shape space. 

Pictured here are just a sampling of the Asian artworks at browngrotta arts. Visit our website to see the entire group, by name, or filter by country: Yeonsoon Chang, Neha Puri Dhir, Shoko Fukuda, Norie Hatakeyama, Kazue Honma, Matsumi Iwasaki, Kiyomi Iwata, Yong Joo Kim, Naomi Kobayashi, Masakazu Kobayashi, Yasuhisa Kohyama, Kosuge Kogetsu, Kyoko Kumai, Maki, Nakahira, Nio, Park, Hiroyuki Sato-Pijanowski, Toshiko Sekiji, Hisako Sekijima, Kay Sekimachi, Naoko Serino, Young-ok Shin, Hiroyuki Shindo, Jin-Sook So, Toshiko Takaezu, Noriko Takamiya, Chiyoko Tanaka, Hideho Tanaka, Tsuroko Tanikawa, Jun Tomita, Mariyo Yagi, Jiro Yonezawa, Masako Yoshida.