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). 

arttextstyle

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. 

arttextstyle

There’s a moment in weaving — the Polish textile artist Lilla Kulka has described it — when the work surprises you. When the loom leads rather than follows. For Kulka, that surrender to process is fundamental: “In the process of weaving, I am often surprised at the direction my work takes,” she says. It’s a quietly radical statement from an artist whose career has been defined by refusing the expected.

Born in 1946 in Kraków, Poland, Kulka came of age in one of the great centers of European textile art — a city where the Academy of Fine Arts carries a legacy stretching back to 1818, and where fiber art was being radically reimagined in the postwar decades. She went on to become a professor at that same institution, shaping generations of Polish artists in her unique fabrics studio.

Kulka’s work defies easy categorization, which is precisely the point. She creates art on the intersection between fiber art, painting, and sculpture, and has spent her career dismantling the hierarchies that place one above another. As she puts it: “Rather than locking myself within the bounds of any one artistic tradition, I have disregarded such artificial barriers to expression.” The results are monumental. Works like Traces (1979) — woven in sisal and handspun wool, stretching nine feet tall — pulse with human presence without depicting it literally. Her early figurative vocabulary evolved into something more elusive: human shadows, outlines, traces of bodies rather than bodies themselves. These were meditations on the great mysteries of life — pain, power, love, faith — rendered in the language of horizontal and vertical lines. 

What makes Kulka’s work particularly charged is its context. She has acknowledged that the political situation in Poland made it difficult to present all of her work publicly in the 1970s and early 1980s. That the work survived and circulated internationally is a testament both to her determination and to the peculiar freedom that fiber art, long dismissed as craft rather than fine art, sometimes enjoyed under censorial regimes.

Her materials speak their own language. Sisal, wool, cotton, steel — she juxtaposes materials with diametrically different connotations, sometimes combining industrial slabs of steel with meticulously handwoven gobelin tapestries. Softness and hardness. The handmade and the industrial. The personal and the structural. It’s a visual argument about what it means to live in a body in a political world. Kulka’s work will be included in browngrotta arts’ upcoming exhibition, Transformations: dialogues in art and material (May 9 – 17, 2026).

Kulka’s work spans tapestry, painting, drawing, interdisciplinary activities, and exhibition design, and she has participated in over 300 exhibitions across 17 countries in Europe, the United States, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, and Israel. She has shown at venues ranging from the Central Museum of Textiles in Łódź — home of the prestigious International Triennial of Tapestry — to galleries in Vienna, Düsseldorf, Chicago, and beyond. 

The enduring relevance of Kulka’s vision was celebrated in 2025 in Krakow in a three-venue exhibition, Tempus Omnia Revelat (Time Reveals All). A comprehensive catalogue raisonné of the same name was published to accompany the exhibition that includes over 300 pages of illustrations and essays. Included are a lengthy interview with the artist and excerpts from a 2003 review by Professor Magdalena Abakanowicz. “Lilla Kulka works in techniques that did not exist before,” she wrote. “The blindness of convention may label them as weaving, yet they are magical, multilayered, and thought-provoking objects, appearing today with particular clarity against the backdrop of society’s dependence on mechanical techniques.”

For those encountering her work for the first time, the invitation is open. As Kulka herself says: “The abstract content of my work cannot be easily explained by the titles of each piece. I invite each viewer to search for and find an individual meaning in my work.”

arttextstyle

Sue Lawty is recognized as one of Britain’s foremost contemporary textile artists. Her work encompasses weavings, constructed pieces, and drawings in both two and three dimensions, exploring rhythm, repetition, and interval. Lawty creates assemblages featuring thousands of tiny stones, like Coast, East Riding of Yorkshire 1-3, each smoothed by the sea and meticulously hand sorted, Whether making drawings and assemblages using tiny stones creating a kind of pixelated cloth, or weaving in linen, hemp, raphia, or lead, she talks of the “integrity of mark making intrinsic to particular thread or structure.” Lawtywill also be running an online workshop, Rhythm & Repetition in Woven Tapestry on Sunday, April 26  and May 3, 2026 on Zoom from 2 – 5pm GMT. To book your spot, visit the selvedge website HERE. 

The late Polish artist, Zofia Butrymowicz emerged as one of the pioneering East European textile artists in the 1960s. Butrymowicz excelled in the wool gobelin technique, utilizing handspun wools that were often rough and irregular to create striking and textured pieces. Color was a dominant theme for Butrymowicz. She frequently emphasized color, reflecting her deep interest in experimentation and new artistic expressions. Throughout her career, Butrymowicz’s contributions to the art world were celebrated globally. Her work was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s seminal Wall Hangings exhibition. Her legacy continues to inspire.

A leading figure in California’s celebrated fiber art community, Katherine Westphal was driven by boundless curiosity and creativity, exploring ceramics, quilting, fiber sculpture, photocopy collage, and wearable art with equal imagination and innovation. “Throughout her career, beginning with the batik samples she made for the commercial printed textile industry in the 1950s, [Westphal] incorporated images from her immediate world: street people in Berkeley, Japanese sculpture, Monet’s garden, Egyptian tourist groups, Chinese embroidery, images from newspaper and magazine photos, and her dogs…anything that struck her fancy wherever she happened to be at the moment – and she could put any or all of them into a repeat pattern.  Her wit and whimsy [were] legendary and her lively approach also inspired her husband [Ed Rossbach] to combine imagery onto the surface of his inventive baskets and containers,” wrote Jo Ann C. Staab in 2015 (“Fiber Art Pioneers: Pushing the Pliable Plane,” Retro/Prospective: 25+ Years of Art Textiles and Sculpture, browngrotta arts, Wilton, CT 2015.) Angels captured her interest in 1976 and resulted in the energetic embroidery Bicentennial Angels. The work is well worth a lookback in 2026, America’s semiquincentennial year.

For James Bassler, the inspiration for My Letterman Yantra was an exhibition commission. He was asked by Jack Lenor Larson to create a piece in response to one in George Washington University’s Textile Museum’s collection.  Bassler reviewed the museum’s digital images, doubtful that the dotted pixels on his screen, so far removed from their three-dimensional source, would prove inspirational.  But he was drawn to an image of a garment from Myanmar (then Burma), a shirt, embellished with yantras, auspicious signs and symbols, associated with cosmic powers that will bring good things to shirt’s wearer. As he is a runner, they reminded him of the race shirts he had been given over the years for participating in marathons, covered with logos and corporate symbols.  Why not, he thought, create a 20th-century version?  The Letterman Yantra is the result, with woven fabric, and embroidered designs that include rows of running “stick figures,” the number 262 and phrases to speed the imaginary wearer and runner, on. The curator pronounced the reimagined version a great success. Larsen wrote, “The two-sided jacket of James Bassler, with ikat-like patterning, is [ ] exceptional, created with a fugitive-dyed magenta yarn wicking into the adjacent areas. If wicking prints are extremely rare, his patterning of the back side, created by clamping and steaming together the patterned front and the plain back, is a unique and primitive form of transfer printing. Bassler has been successfully sourcing museums with varied and extraordinary results for a long time, and here he seems inspired to create a technique not yet in museums!”

arttextstyle

Mark your calendars! From May 9 through May 18, 2026, browngrotta arts will present Transformations: Dialogues in Art and Material, a Spring exhibition exploring the expressive power of materials and the inventive ways contemporary artists transform them.

Featuring works by more than nearly three dozen international artists, Transformations will examine materiality as a central force in artistic practice. Clay, silk, steel, bark, seaweed, bamboo, horsehair, cotton, linen, flax, and other materials are not treated as passive elements, but as active agents—each with its own history, constraints, and expressive possibilities. The exhibition highlights both the remarkable diversity of materials and the distinct outcomes achieved when artists work within the same medium.

The artists in Transformations exemplify what curator and historian Glenn Adamson calls “material intelligence”: a deep understanding of the physical world and the skill to give materials new form and meaning. Through thoughtful engagement, abstract ideas are transformed into tangible, sensory experiences, bridging the conceptual and the corporeal.

“The artists inTransformations may begin with the same material but through their singular instincts and inspirations they generate strikingly different results,” says Tom Grotta, co-curator of browngrotta arts. “It’s a testament to the power of the artistic imagination.” Examples include Kiyomi Iwata who creates freestanding sculptures of spun silk and shimmering wall works of kibisio, the first silk from the cocoon and Polly Barton who weaves images from silk threads that she has bound and dyed. In cotton, Simone Pheulpin and Mercedes Vicente create objects of cotton webbing that seem to have emerged from nature — resembling coral, shells, and stones, while Kay Sekimachi uses split-ply and card-weaving techniques to create loops of cotton cord to hold shells and stones sourced from the beach. Toshiko Takaezu forms smooth columns of clay, Yasuhisa Kohyama’s clay vessels seem to have been carved directly from a mountainside, and Karen Karnes creates functional pots that incorporate color yet retain the natural cast of fired clay, defying all sense of the manmade.

A full-color catalog will accompany the exhibition.

Exhibition Details

Location:
276 Ridgefield Road, Wilton, CT 06897

Dates & Hours:

• Saturday, May 9 (Opening & Artists’ Reception): 11 am–6 pm
• Sunday, May 10: 11 am–6 pm
• Monday–Saturday, May 11–16: 10 am–5 pm
• Sunday, May 17: 11 am–6 pm

Schedule Your Visit

Stay tuned for more information—and we hope you’ll join us this spring for Transformations at browngrotta arts.

Save the Date! The Spring 2026 exhibition at browngrotta arts, Transformations: Dialogues in Art and Material, scheduled for this May 9 – 17, 2026 in Wilton, Connecticut, will take a deep dive into materiality itself. It will explore the wide range of materials artists employ—including clay, silk, steel, bark, seaweed, bamboo, and horsehair—and the varied transformations these materials undergo in talented hands, even among artists working with the same medium. Transformations: dialogues in art and material will highlight the use of diverse materials and the varied ways in which artists reshape and reimagine a single material within their practices. 

We’d like to display works by you, Polly Barton, and Kiyomi Iwata to show varying uses of silk, works by Kay Sekimachi, Simone Pheulpin, Mercedes Vicente, and Sophie Rowley in cotton, works by John McQueen, Hisako Sekimachi, Dona Look, Linda Bills and Polly Sutton in tree bark, and so on. The artists included will all meet curator and historian Glenn Adamson’s definition of material intelligence: “a deep understanding of the material world around us, an ability to read that material environment, and the know-how required to give it new form…”

Transformations examines the use of diverse materials in art and the many ways artists reshape and reimagine a single material within their practices. The Spring 2026 exhibition at browngrotta arts, Transformations: Dialogues in Art and Material, takes a deep dive into materiality itself. It highlights the wide range of materials artists employ—including clay, silk, steel, bark, seaweed, bamboo, and horsehair—and the remarkable transformations these materials undergo in their skilled hands, even among artists working with the same medium.

arttextstyle

Month by Month
January 2025:

• Japandí Revisited: shared aesthetics and influences, continued at the Wayne Art Center, Pennsylvania 

• A Japandí Revisited walkthrough with Tom Grotta took place at the Wayne Art Center, Pennsylvania

February 2025:

• American Craft magazine published: “A World of Fiber, browngrotta arts,” Deborah Bishop

March 2025:

• Tom and Carter Grotta and Rhonda Brown visited Paris to photograph exceptional artist Simone Pheulpin and view the extraordinary exhibition, Olga de Amaral,  at the Cartier Foundation

• Centurion magazine published, “Shaping Heritage,” by Kaoru Kijima, which featured work by Shoko Fukuda

May 2025:

• The Silvermine Art Galleries in New Canaan, CT invited browngrotta arts to jury its FIBER 2025 invitational. We also installed two exhibitions in their galleries, Masters of the Medium: CT: Helena Hernmarck and Norma Minkowitz and Mastery and Materiality: International

• A FIBER 2025 walkthrough with Tom Grotta and Rhonda Brown took place at the Silvermine Art Galleries, New Canaan, CT

• browngrotta arts loaned work to WEFAN, a group exhibition curated by Dina Lov Wright of Lov Art. Housed in the Hughes Memorial Library, in West Cornwall, CT, WEFAN featured works by 12 artists — including Dorothy Gill Barnes and Ed Rossbach — who work with fiber techniques and materials 

• Field Notes: an art survey, browngrotta arts’ Spring Art in the Barn exhibition, opened

• Out-of-the-area Artist Visits: Christine Joy (Montana), Wlodzimierz Cygan and granddaughter, Wiktoria (Poland), and Shoko Fukuda (Japan), visited the gallery, attending the opening of Field Notes and the artists’ dinner after.

• Field Notes: an art survey, the catalog, is published (our 60th)

June 2025:

• Art on Rocks: an art walkthrough with spirits, Field Notes edition — is presented on Zoom

• Fiberworks then and now: Ruth Asawa and Kay Sekimachi and their remarkable innovations. a panel discussion with Melissa Leventon, Jill D’Alessandro, Yoshiko Wada, and Tom Grotta — was presented on Zoom

September 2025: 

• Kay Sekimachi: a personal archive, a collaboration between browngrotta arts and the Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York City opened — Sekimachi’s first solo exhibition in NYC since 1970

• Out-of-the-area Artist Visit: Yong Joo Kim, who splits her time between Chicago and Korea, visited the gallery in CT

• T-X, txtilezine  published,”Weaves of Meaning: the Art of Anneke Klein Between Minimalism and Social Awareness,” by Barbara Pavel

•  FORM magazine published “The Gently Monumental,” by Anneke Enquist, an article about artist Helena Hernmarck

October 2025: 

•  Beauty is Resistance: art as antidote, browngrotta arts’ Fall Art in the Barn exhibition, opened

• Cover magazine published Beauty is Resistance, subversive textile art at browngrotta arts

• Out-of-the-area Artist Visit: Jin-Sook So joined us at browngrotta arts for the opening of Beauty is Resistance and the artists dinner after.

• The New York Times, publishes “There’s a Hornet’s Nest in the Living Room. On Purpose.” by Misty White Sidell, which featured Wendy Wahl and Kay Sekimachi• Beauty is Resistance: art as antidote, the catalog, is published (our 61st)

• Centurion magazine article, “A Stitch in Time,” by Jemima Sissons, is published, mentioning Kay Sekimachi, Mariette Rousseau-Vermette, Dominic DiMare, and John McQueen.

November 2025: 

• Art on Rocks: an art walkthrough with spirits, Beauty is Resistance edition — is presented on Zoom

December 2025:

• browngrotta arts loaned work by Adela Akers and Lia Cook to Drop, Cloth at Hollis Taggart Gallery in New York City. Curated by Glenn Adamson and Severin Deifs and spanning two Chelsea galleries, Drop, Cloth presented a 50-year lineage of draping in contemporary art.

Other News:
Acquisitions

• Transition by Neha Puri Dhir was acquired by the John and Mable Ringling Musuem in Sarasota, Florida

• Four 1980s works of wearable art by Norma Minkowitz —  Blue Jewel, Outer Crater, Long Dress, and Dusk — were acquired by the LACMA in Los Angeles, CA.

YouTube:
• browngrotta arts created 17 videos of artworks for its weekly artlive feature

• browngrotta arts created preview videos for Field Notes; Kay Sekimachi: a personal archive; and Beauty is Resistance

Social Media Outreach: 
• 31,911 emails from browngrotta arts were opened
• 41,822 people liked our Instagram content (a 14% increase over 2024)
• We gained 3,046 new followers to our Instagram account (a 90% jump over 2024)
• 24,819 people engaged with our Facebook posts (that’s a 96% increase over last year)
• We posted 52 times on arttextstyle.

arttextstyle

Anderson began studying and exhibiting art in the late 1960s. She studied with Everett Community College instructor Russell Day, who mentored such noted Northwest artists as Chuck Close and Dale Chihuly. Her reputation grew steadily beyond Washington. By the 2000s she had exhibited throughout the US and in Cheongju, Korea at the International Craft Biennial. Her large boat basket form, Crossing Over, traveled to Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Michigan as part of the browngrotta arts’ exhibition Green from the Get Go: International Contemporary Basketmakers, curated with Jane Milosch.

Anderson was known for her her use of diverse materials, including recycled hockey sticks, surgical tubing, and dental molds. When she was selected as Snohomish County Artist of the Year in 2003, the Snohomish County Times , reported that Anderson had shopped at the Boeing surplus store in Renton, Washington, buying the same material used on the skins of 747s and driving over the stuff to flatten it to create art material. She fashioned bras out of automobile parts and immersed girdles in pink artist cement. (“Late Bloomer is local Artist of the Year,’ Diane Wright, Times Snohomish County bureau, February 26, 2003.)  “I love the touch of the materials whether they are paper, reeds, cement or metal,” she said, “shaping them into an image that satisfies me.” Her ideas or inspiration came from the routine of life, everyday things that surrounded her — her house, friends, architecture, even television.

“In the mid-1980s when I was working with fiber,” Anderson told The Seattle Times in 2009, “I took a class in basketry at Wallingford’s Factory of Visual Arts. There we used raffia and did traditional coiling. As time went by, my work become more and more complicated.” She preferred to call her works “structures” rather than baskets.

A significant body of Anderson’s work involved the use of sewing patterns. “In 1988, I began using round reeds, and sewing them together to create architectural and more experimental forms,” she told The Seattle Times. “I started covering the reeds with pattern paper,…The black lines on the paper created interesting surface designs after I sewed the reeds into the desired shapes.”

For browngrotta arts’ 2011 exhibition, Stimulus: art and its inception, she turned a tire chain into a basket. ‘Walking through my neighborhood everyday,” she told us. ‘I took care to find that special something that appealed to my imagination. When I saw a rusty piece of metal wire tweaking out from a pile of dirt, my heart soared with possibilities. No one even knew what it had been until I cleaned it—a tire chain I turned into a basket.”

Anderson and her husband, Bob, were also significant promoters of the arts in their area, seeding an endowment for the visual arts among other supports. As an artist and advocate, she will be missed.

arttextstyle

Toshio Sekiji’s Neighbors is an illustration of the woven collages for which he is known. In this case, he has plaited lacquered strips from various Israeli newspapers in order to make a plea for intergroup harmony. In other works, to make his point, Sekiji has mixed newspapers from Japanese and Korean newspapers, and used The New York Times, dust jackets from controversial books, and Indian and other Asian newspapers.

Gyöngy Laky has spent a lifetime bringing light to issues of the environment—joining branches and tree prunings — often from agricultural sites — with industrial materials. Laky’s work takes many forms, from baskets and vessels to text-based sculpture like Lie Ability (OUCH) which spell out her feelings on the current political climate in literal terms. Laky had heard many of the lies in the 2016 presidential campaign and feared the man now in charge. The title is a double entendre – a small hint to her thinking beyond the work itself. The word “OUCH” offers to viewers the opportunity to read into the work what is in their minds and hearts once Laky has attracted their attention — an example of the power of art to evade censorship.

Artist Aby Mackie’s textile-based artwork engages with themes of ecology, history, and resistance through a process of reclamation and transformation. Working with discarded historic textiles, she deconstructs and reconfigures, disrupting their original function to create new meaning. In Fragments of a Life Lived 3 she uses antique-ticking fabric as both material and metaphor. Once utilitarian, worn by time and use, it is reconstructed through stitching and further manipulated with paint and gold leaf. These interventions reimagine its surface—echoing stories of erosion, endurance, and renewal. The addition of gilding speaks to the overlooked value in what is often discarded, while the act of mending becomes a gesture of care and reclamation. The viewer is invited to read between the layers— to sense the life once lived through it, and to reflect on what we choose to preserve or let go. 

A diverse and geographically disparate range of influences grounded Adela Akers work. Akers was born in Spain, educated at the University of Havana in Cuba and inspired by her extensive travels. A trip to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where she observed the painting process of the Mbuti women of the Ituri Forest, led to the marks in Akers’s work, Interrupted II. “I’ve always been interested in looking at patterns of other cultures and other people,” she told a San Francisco television interviewer. When she transferred her drawing of Mbuti women’s marks to a larger scale she separated the lines and they no longer lined up. “It’s fine with me if they don’t,” she said. “But by spreading it out, then I have, of course, room for this other color to be in, again to add more dimension, so that the horsehairs (use of which is on of her trademarks) float over a lot more.”

Like Toshio Sekiji’s works, Dualities by Neha Puri Dhir invites contemplation on coexistence and transformation. The work, involving stitch-resist dyeing on handwoven silk, reminds viewers of the quiet harmony that emerges when opposites are held together in a single frame – a thoughtful message for these contentious times. The two circular motifs, one in negative and another in positive space, reflect ideas of balance and contrast. The earthy browns merge into deep indigo blues, evoking cycles of day and night, fullness and emptiness, presence and absence. 

Watch for more work in 2026!

arttextstyle

Sophie Rowley, a German and New Zealand artist with an MA from Central Saint Martins London, lives and works in Berlin. With a background in textiles, her work embraces the experimentation with techniques in fiber. Rowley’s work explores how repetitive gestures and modes of deconstruction can foster evolutionary change. Central to her approach, are self-developed techniques involving meticulous repetition. Unfolding across days, weeks, and months, the result is intricate, corporeal “paintings” that challenge the inherent structural norms and tangible aspects of canvas, redefining its role as a mere substrate to the very essence of the artwork itself.

“I like to view deconstruction as not merely a visual or formal technique that I employ,” says Rowley. “I like to think of it also in a broader sense and to explore what lies between the material and the discursive: How do internal perceptions manifest in tangible form? What new insights emerge through the process of undoing? I believe it is essential to question known structures and challenge received ideas, not only on a material level but also in the intangible realms.” 

Rowley also disrupts conventional perceptions surrounding predetermined gender associations attributed to mediums and materials. Embracing a feminist ethos, she celebrates the utilization of traditionally female mediums that are historically rooted in domesticity. Her practice questions entrenched biases, inviting a reevaluation of societal constructs that dictate artistic expression along gendered lines. 

Rowley’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at Make Hauser & Wirth, Somerset, UK; the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona; Roche Court’s New Art Centre, Salisbury, UK; the Design Museum Gent, Belgium; and Isamu Noguchi Stone Heaven, Tokyo, Japan. In 2019, she was a finalist in the LOEWE Foundation’s Craft Prize, an internationally distinguished award for contemporary makers. Recently, in Repetition is a Form of Change, in the Fall of 2025 at Looiersgracht 60 in Amsterdam, Rowley reflected on her journey from a fundamentalist community at the age of 16 and the subsequent deconstruction of her faith. With site-specific installations and individual works, she merged views of the past and visions of the future. You can hear the artist in conversation about the exhibition with Francesca Raimondi, professor of philosophy at Free University Berlin, based both in Berlin and Amsterdam. Prof. Dr. Raimondi’s research spans aesthetics, critical social theory, feminism, and political philosophy, with a focus on how modern forms of subjectification and embodiment are critiqued and transformed through artistic practices: https://www.sophierowley.com/news.

Rowley’s works are represented in the collections of the V&A, London; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona; the Design Museum Gent, Belgium; and the Georgetown University Art Galleries, Washington, D.C. She has completed a residency at Carraig na gCat/Ireland with the Josef and Annie Albers foundation and has another upcoming residency with their Thread residency in Senegal.

arttextstyle

We’re beginning our holiday revelry early this year!

Here’s round up of Holiday images.

Wishing you all a most enjoyable holiday season!

arttextstyle