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Art Out and About: North America

July 20, 2017 0 Comment

If you are vacationing in the East, South, Midwest, or West this summer, there is a wide variety of textile artists on display across the United States and Canada online, including exhibitions featuring artists whose work you’ll find at browngrotta arts. Emphasizing baskets in one case, abstraction in another and tapestry in two others, whether you’ve planned a family vacation, a weekend getaway or staycation there are exhibitions for art-lovers of all kinds.

Anemones by Helena Hernmarck, wool, 54” x 108”, 1985

The Nordic Tapestry Group: Weaving Knowledge into Personal Expression

Washington Art Association and Gallery (Washington Depot, CT)

August 12-Sept 9

Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday 10:00 am – 5:00 pm, Sunday, 10am-2pm 

Website: http://www.washington

artassociation.org/exhibitions

/nordictapestryshow/

Weavers from Sweden, Iceland, and the United States formed the Nordic Tapestry group a decade ago after tapestry artist Helena Hernmarck traveled to Sweden to teach workshops on her weaving technique. Combining traditional Swedish weaving techniques with her own method, Hernmarck is able to achieve powerful photorealistic effects by bundling a variety of hued yarns that combine and create an illusion of depth.  With a common passion for textiles, members of the Nordic Tapestry group have a desire to learn more about how Hernmarck’s tapestries are made, how to use light, and how to use the different qualities of yarn to create images. Hernmarck’s Anemones will be on display along with smaller weavings by 21 of her students.

Sunrise Sentinel, Mary Giles, waxed linen, copper, iron, 26.25″ x 6.5″ x 6.5″, 2007

Opening in August, Rooted, Revived, Reinvented: Basketry in America

Lauren Rogers Museum of Art (Laurel, MS)

August 22-November 12

Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday 10:00 am – 4:45 pm, Sunday 1:00 pm- 4:00 pm | Closed Monday

Website: https://www.lrma.org

This traveling exhibition curated by Josephine Stealey and Kristen Schwain, chronicles a history of American basketry from its origins in Native American, immigrant, and slave communities to its presence within the contemporary fine art world. Through the selection of materials, colors, designs, patterns, and textures, artists featured in this exhibition tell different stories and cultural histories. Rooted in local landscapes, basketry has been shaped by cultural tradition but is now thriving in our contemporary world. Browngrotta arts’ artists Polly Adams Sutton, Mary Giles, Nancy Moore Bess, Christine Joy, Nancy Koenigsberg, Dorothy Gill Barnes, Ferne Jacobs, Gyöngy Laky, Kari Lønning, John McQueen, Norma Minkowitz, Leon Niehues, Ed Rossbach, Karyl Sisson and Kay Sekimachi all have work featured in the exhibition. Rooted, Revived, Reinvented: Basketry in America is on show at the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art from August 22 to November 12.

 

Cosmos, Naomi Kobayashi, Gampi paper, sumi ink, and paper thread
15 x 15 1/4 x 2 7/8 inches, 2005
Cotsen Collection
Photography: Bruce M. White © Lloyd Cotsen, 2016

The Box Project

Racine Art Museum (Racine, WI)

May 21-August 27

Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday  10:00 am – 5:00 pm, Sunday  12:00 – 5:00 pm | Closed Monday, Federal Holidays and Easter |The Museum Store closes at 4:45 pm each day.

Website: http://www.ramart.org/content/box-project-uncommon-threads

The Box Project challenges artists to work within the parameters of an archival box. Artists interpret the challenge their own way, resulting in a diverse array of one-of-a-kind art highlighting the artists’ creativity and skills. The limited edition book The Box Project book can be purchased here at browngrotta arts’ online store. The Box Project features work from 37 artists, 10 of whom are represented by browngrotta arts:  Helena Hernmarck, Agenta Hobin, Kiyomi Iwata, Lewis Knauss, Naomi Kobayashi, Nancy Koenigsberg, Gyöngy Laky, Heidrun Schimmel, Hisako Sekijima and Sherri Smith.  

 

Seaweed, Lenore Tawney, linen, silk, canvas, 120 x 32 in., The Lenore Tawney Foundation, New York. © Lenore G. Tawney Foundation

 

Between Land and Sea

The Menil Collection (Houston, TX)

April 14-August 27    

Gallery Hours: Wednesday–Sunday 11:00 a.m.–7:00 p.m.

Website: https://www.menil.org/exhibitions/249-between-land-and-sea-artists-of-the-coenties-slip

 

In Houston, Texas, Lenore Tawney is one of six artists featured in The Menil Collection’s exhibition Between Land and Sea: Artists of the Coenties Slip. The exhibition is a combination of work from a group of artists, intellectuals, filmmakers and poets who lived and worked in the old seaport at the lower tip of Manhattan throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s. The works in the aesthetically diverse exhibition is united by artists’ desire to explore new ways of abstraction. Between Land and Sea: Artists of the Coenties Slip is on show at The Menil Collection until August 27th.

 

Ithaka, Dawn MacNutt, willow, 108.5” x 21” x 24”, 2006

Crossing Generations: Past, Present & Future

Oregon College of Art and Craft (Portland, OR)

July 10-August 6

Gallery Hours: Monday-Sunday, 10:00am-5:00pm

Website:

https://ocac.edu/events/

sda-exhibition-crossing-generations-past-present-future

The Surface Design Association’s Exhibition Crossing Generations: Past, Present & Future includes two bga artists: Lia Cook, Glen Kaufman. Curated by well-known gallerist Jane Sauer, the goal of this exhibition was to “highlight the work of the great mentors that laid the ground work for what is happening today, mid-career artists, and a look into what the future hold by showing the work of a few emerging artists.”  The exhibition will be on show at the Hoffman Gallery at the Oregon College of Art and Design until August 6th.

 

And online — you can still see Dawn MacNutt’s May exhibition A Fortunate Adversity, at Sunbury Shores. Nova Scotia, online at http://sunburyshores.org/fortunate-adversity-dawn-macnutt/ .Using willow to make figurative basketry,  Dawn MacNutt is inspired by the “beauty of human frailty.” In MacNutt’s words,  A Fortunate Adversity “expresses a full life enriched by caring and seeing loved ones overcome disasters and small misfortunes.”

Textiles At Tate Modern in London

July 5, 2017 0 Comment

These are exciting days at the Tate Modern in London for fans of art textiles. You’ll find fiber works by important artists in several different galleries.

Beyond Craft, in the Boiler House, curated by Ann Coxon features three pioneers, Lenore Tawney, Olga de Amaral and Sheila Hicks, who experimented with different weaving techniques, often looking to historical or indigenous textiles for inspiration. De Amaral and Hicks were particularly inspired by the technical brilliance of Peruvian weavings made before European colonization. The Museum notes that many artists in the 1960s were using weaving and knotting to create innovative hangings and sculptures, integrating traditional craft techniques into fine art practice. “The 1960s saw several high-profile exhibitions of ‘fiber art’: textile techniques used to create unique art objects without a practical function. These three artists were among those who attempted to collapse the hierarchy that sets fine art above craft. While this distinction has not entirely disappeared, in recent years fiber art has become a source of inspiration for a new generation of artists and curators and the artists displayed here are receiving fresh consideration.”

Peruvian by Lenore Tawney
Peruvian by Lenore Tawney, linen double weave , 86″ x 18″, circa 1962-83
Lenore, like many artist of the 1960s, was drew inspiration for her weaving from indigenous Peruvian weavings. Photo credit: Tom Grotta
Lekythos by Lenore Tawney, linen; woven, knotted, 50” x 31-3/4” x 1-3/4”, 1962,
Photo: George Erml

In Magdalena Abakanowicz, also in the Boilerhouse, viewers can explore Abakanowicz’s stitched cloth sculptures inspired by biological systems, organic matter, and regeneration. “Made at a time of political tension between the Soviet Union and Poland, Abakanowicz has said the work ‘could be understood as a cry from behind the Iron Curtain’,” says the Museum notes. (That was the time frame in which Anne and Jacques Baruch brought Abakanowicz’ work to the US, the subject of browngrotta arts’ catalog, Advocates for Art: Polish and Czech Fiber Artists from the Anne and Jacques Baruch Collection.)

Embryology by Magdalena Abakanowicz, burlap, cotton gauze, hemp rope, nylon and sisal, 2009
Photo: Tate Photography

Elsewhere in the Boilerhouse is a work by El Anatsui, who completely transforms the most pedestrian materials into art. By flattening bottle tops and stitching them together into a shimmering metal cloth, he turns familiar disposable objects into something that appears precious and alters them in the viewers’ eyes. Taking a similar approach to the mundane, Sheela Gowda from India has created a room-sized installation made of car bumpers and handwoven human hair, an observation on “the coexistence of ritual and superstition alongside modern urban and economic transformation.”

Ink Splash II by El Anatsui, aluminum and copper, 9.35 ft x 12.24 ft, 2012
Photo: Tate Photography

Want to know more? Visit the Museum’s website to see images and to read New Yarn, Tate, etc. Essay: Textiles and Art by Kirsty Bell: http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/new-yarns

Guest Post Alert: Carol Westfall’s First Guest Post This Monday

November 25, 2011 0 Comment

Kazuyo Onoyama, Orikata (Folded Form), 2006. Kyôko Ibe, Screen from the Hogosho series, 2009. Fuminori Ono, Feel the Wind, 2010. Hisako Sekijima, Kôzô o motsu ryô II (Volume That Has Structure II), #546, 2009. Hisako Sekijima, Renzoku suru sen (Continuous Lines), #559, 2010. Hisako Sekijima, Jûsan’yô no satsu (A Book with Thirteen Leaves), #553, 2009. Installation photo by Richard Goodbody.

Over the next few months, we’ll be featuring Guest Posts by artist, educator, collector and friend, Carol Westfall.  Westfall’s work has been exhibited extensively in Japan, Europe, South America and the US. She has taught at both Columbia University’s Teacher’s College in New York City and in the Fine Arts Department at Montclair State University in New Jersey  and is one of the artists included in the upcoming exhibition, Distinguished Educators, at the Crane Arts Building in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania next March. We worked with Westfall when she was at Montclair state University to produce the Art of Substance  exhibition in the gallery there.

In her first post, up Monday, November 28th, she takes a comprehensive look at the Fiber Futures: Japan’s Textile Pioneers exhibition, open through December 18th, which is still being talked up in New York City (including in a segment on Sunday Arts NY on PBS, Channel 13). In December, she’ll review Crafting Modernism: Midcentury American Art and Design, at the Museum of Arts and Design, in New York through January 15th. Kazuyo Onoyama, Orikata (Folded Form), 2006. Kyôko Ibe, Screen from the Hogosho series, 2009. Fuminori Ono, Feel the Wind, 2010. Hisako Sekijima, Kôzô o motsu ryô II (Volume That Has Structure II), #546, 2009. Hisako Sekijima, Renzoku suru sen (Continuous Lines), #559, 2010. Hisako Sekijima, Jûsan’yô no satsu (A Book with Thirteen Leaves), #553, 2009. Installation photo by Richard Goodbody.

Summer Site-ings II: Exhibitions Abroad

July 17, 2011 0 Comment

Traveling outside the US this summer? If so, there are lots of places to see the work of the artists browngrotta arts represents.  In France, 13 Scottish weavers all trained in the tapestry department of the College of Fine Arts in Edinburgh, including Sara Brennan and Linda Green are part of the Vive La Tapisserie exhibition from July 16th to August 18th at Galerie la Tour Montsalés, in Montsalès http://www.galerielatourmontsales.com. In Paris, you still have nine days to see Carte Blanche á Philip Hughes: Works by Chris Drury, Philip Hughes and Nicholas de Staël at Galerie Gimpel & Müller, 12 Rue Guénégaud,

http://www.gimpel-muller.com/
expositions.php, through July 26th. In Belgium, Marian Bijlenga’s work is included on the 7th International Triennial of Contemporary Textiles in Tournai, through September 25th,
http://www.triennaletournai.
be/?page_id=10.

In Denmark, Ane Henricksen’s solo exhibition, Lady Sings the Blues, continues at the Design Museum in Copenhagen through August 7th,

Forside


udstillinger/aktuelle-saerudstillinger/lady-sings-the-blues. Connecting: Contemporary Arts and Crafts from Germany, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Sweden is a travelling exhibition organized by the art and craft associations of Schleswig-Holstein (Germany) and its partner regions in Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway http://www.connecting-artsandcrafts.com. Forty artists, including Grethe Sorenson of Denmark, have presented 90 new works. The exhibition is at the Akershus Art Center in Lillestrom, Norway through July 31st and at the Pohjanmann Musuem in Vaasa, Finland from September 9th through November 27th. In Lladudno, Wales, Laura Thomas‘ resonate sculptures and works by 10 other artists are on display through September 1st  at the retail space at Oriel Mostyn, in an exhibit entitled, Similar Threads: A Celebration of the Beauty of Thread.

Book Lust: Penguin Books – Threads Deluxe Classics and Tie-ins

June 21, 2011 0 Comment

 

We love Penguin Classics.  The collection includes more than 1,000 classic titles from The Adventures and Memoirs of  Sherlock Holmes to Gulliver’s Travels to A Christmas Carol to Middlemarch and Dracula. This October, new versions, Penguins Threads Deluxe Classics, will be released with gloriously embroidered covers by Jillian Tamaki. You can pre-order the three titles commissioned to date, Emma, The Secret Garden and Black Beauty on Amazon now. You can also order a set of

100 Penguin Book Cover Cards from Amazon. And Penguin has released two versions of Book Cover Wrapping Paper. One, a collage of Penguin covers, is available from Bas Bleu, the other, an image of Penguin spines, can be found at Shiny Shack in the UK. Still not enough Penguin? You can obtain the entire line of Penguin Classics in one complete paperback collection, from Renaissance philosophy to the poetry of revolutionary Russia, from the spiritual writings of India to the travel narratives of the early American colonists, from The Complete Pelican Shakespeare to The Portable Sixties Reader, for $13,000+.