This is the animating premise of Transformations: dialogues in art and material which opens this Saturday, May 9th at browngrotta arts. The exhibition that asks a deceptively simple question: what happens when artists stop treating materials as additives and start treating them as collaborators? The answer, it turns out, is profound.

Material Is Not Neutral
We tend to think of materials as passive — the stuff through which ideas pass on their way to becoming art. The artists in Transformations challenge that assumption at every turn. In the contemporary art context, materiality isn’t just about physical substance. It encompasses everything a material carries with it: weight, surface, history, cultural memory, expressive charge. A piece of linen isn’t just woven thread. It’s centuries of labor, landscape, and touch.

System and Surprise
Transformations proves that the range of works that a simple material can inspire is nearly endless. Carol Shaw-Sutton, Chiyoko Tanaka, Sara Brennan, Mary Giles, Merja Keskinen, and Jane Sauer all work with Linen. In Shaw-Sutton’s hands the material becomes a molded vessel. Under Chiyoko Tanaka’s ministrations, woven linen fabric is returned to its essential threads, transformed into an artifact. For Sara Brennan, woven linen serves as a canvas. From a distance, her works appear to be abstract paintings. A close up view reveals a textured weaving using dozens of shades. For Jane Sauer and Mary Giles, linen is a sculptural medium.

Material as More
Metal is a canopied category in Transformations. Artists consider it as thread— from gold filaments, to lead extrusions, to bent wire of copper and brass. Kyoko Kumai’s spun steel threads float. Gyöngy Laky turns nails and wire into an artful assemblage. Sue Lawty weaves with bast fibers — raffia, hemp, nettle, linen — and elemental lead, and assembles carefully ordered stones drawn from beaches and riverbeds. She pursues qualities inherently given by the chosen substance, seeking “an understated restraint, balance, tension, rhythm: an essential stillness.”

Same Input, Different Outcome
Toshiko Takaezu and Yasuhisa Kohyama both devoted their lives to clay, but their practices reveal just how vast the distance can be within a single medium. Takaezu’s closed ceramic forms — rounded, glazed, often containing a small stone or rattle sealed inside — are intimate and quietly mysterious, their surfaces richly colored and their shapes suggesting the human body. There is a sense of the maker’s hand coaxing something from the earth. Kohyama, by contrast, surrenders control to the fire itself. He builds by hand and fires with wood, never applying glaze; color and surface are entirely the product of ash movement and the object’s position within the kiln. Where Takaezu brings clay close — shaping it into vessels that hold secrets — Kohyama sends it into an elemental process and receives back something ancient and unpredictable.

What These Works Carry
What unites the artists in Transformations isn’t a shared aesthetic or a shared geography. It’s a shared conviction: that choosing a material is a serious act, that working with it is as meaningful as the finished object, and that what results carries something more than form.

It carries thought. History. Culture. The trace of a hand that knew exactly what it was doing — and trusted the material to meet it halfway.

Join us at Transformations: dialogues in art and material (May 9-17) at browngrotta arts in Wilton, CT. Or order the 164-page catalog from browngrotta.com.

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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

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Rina Banerjee: Take me, take me, take me … to the Palace of love
Through September 13th
Yale Center for British Art
1080 Chapel Street
New Haven, CT
https://britishart.yale.edu/exhibitions-programs/rina-banerjee-take-me-take-me-take-me-palace-love

In an art journey that include Transformations’ exploration of materials at browngrotta arts, in Wilton, CT, Rina Banerjee’s Take me, take me, take me … to the Palace of love at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, CT would be an appropriate add on. It’s an amalgam of materials. Banerjee’s structure reimagines the Taj Mahal, a grand 17th century Mughal mausoleum, in ephemeral industrial materials: a frame of copper and steel is encased in vibrant pink plastic, creating a translucent ghost of the opulent marble façade of the original. The interior of the sculpture reveals an antique Anglo-Indian Bombay chair hovering above a globe, and a chandelier composed of expendable goods—pink foam balls, plastic beads, and artificial birds. As the gallery notes: “These objects challenge our ideas of value, pointing to a global system that produces things to be alternately fetishized or quickly thrown away.” The piece tells two stories, like the Taj does, as a somber tomb and a monument to love. 

WRIT and WEFTED:
Sally Van Doren, paintings and drawings; Nancy Koenigsberg, woven wire sculptures 
Through June 21st. 
Daphne:art Gallery and Advisory
55 West Morris Road
Bantam, Connecticut 

By appointment: daphneadeeds@gmail.com

In reviewer Julie Durkin’s words, the exhibition pairs, “two artists who both work at the boundary between language and material.” Sally Van Doren is a poet who works with illegible handwriting. Nancy Koenigsberg “draws” with wire — nets and mats, cubes and chains — that suggest fascinating interior and shadow lives.

extraORDINARY things
through June 17th
Flinn Gallery 
Greenwich Library
101 West Putnam Avenue
Second Floor
Greenwich, CT https://flinngallery.org/events/extraordinary-things/

Four artists — Qingjun Huang, Carole Kunstadt, Cheryl R. Riley, and Rob Strati —reimagine domestic items into vessels of memory, metaphor, and identity through photo essays, altered appliances, heirlooms, and keepsakes.

Art, Jazz + The Blues
through June 7th
Museum of Contemporary Art
19 Newtown Turnpike
Westport, CT

Art, Jazz + The Blues,  at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Westport, CT explores the intersections between visual art, jazz, and the blues, musical forms deeply rooted in African American traditions,  drawing from the rich holdings of the Westport Public Art Collections (WestPAC). The exhibition centers on Giants of the Blues, a sweeping series of seven group portraits by Westport native Eric von Schmidt (1931–2007) honoring blues, jazz, and folk musicians from the 1920s to the 1960s. Complementing von Schmidt’s paintings are over fifty artworks from the WestPAC collection depicting musicians, inspired by musical themes, or exploring the resonances between musical and visual forms. A selection of important loans from ACA Galleries, The Brubeck Collection at Wilton Library, Eric Chiang, Michael Cummings, Fairfield University Art Museum, Housatonic Museum of Art, Tudor Maier, Mark & Ellen Naftalin, Larry Silver, the Westport Library Collection, and private collections deepen the conversation. As the jazz great Charlie Parker once said, the show invites visitors to “hear with your eyes and see with your ears.”

Last but certainly, not least: Transformations: dialogues in art and materials (May 9 – 17). Schedule your visit here: https://browngrotta.com/exhibitions/transformations-dialogues-in-art-and-material

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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). 

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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. 

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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.”

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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!”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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