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We’ve made our reputation on documentation and photography of art at browngrotta arts (“Beyond Measure,” Glenn Adamson, Volume 50: Chronicling fiber art for three decades (browngrotta arts, Wilton, CT 2020)). Crowdsourcing the Collective: survey of textiles and mixed media art, our 53rd volume, is the latest of our efforts. 

In an essay titled “State of the Art: where we are/how we got here” the catalog takes a look at fiber and art textiles today, as these art forms bask in renewed popularity. It also sheds some light on where fiber art has come from — featuring work that ranges from 1982 to 2022. The 42 artists featured in the exhibition (from 13 countries), are both a part of that legacy and a reflection of fiber’s current state.  In the 1960s, Adela Akers was creating large-scale weavings; by the 1970s, her works were noted for their spare designs and darker colors — brown, black and maroon. Gyöngy Laky has been a force since founding Fiberworks in the 1970s, a prestigious textile gallery and academic program in Berkeley, California. Lia Cook and Naomi Kobayashi participated in the prestigious Lausanne Biennials of International Tapestry in the 1970s; Laky in the 1980s. Artists in the exhibition who began exhibiting in the 2000s continue this legacy. Stéphanie Jacques, Rachel Max and Neha Puri Dhir all claim textile artist pioneers as an influence — Ed Rossbach and Claire Zeisler for Jacques;  Anni Albers and Ruth Asawa for Dhir and Max.

The catalog also includes the artists’ perspectives in their own words in “State of the Artist: how we are working/what’s front of mind?” and in the comments on their individual works. Not surprisingly, their preoccupations vary. For some, like Lewis Knauss and Laura Foster Nicholson, it’s the environment in the large sense — fires and climate change and the impacts of over consumption. For Lia Cook, and her garden, it’s more immediate. For still others, like Caroline Bartlett and Polly Barton, an abstract consideration is underway on the power of thread as a medium to reflect the fragility and connectivity of our world, and the cross fertilization of the senses as expressed in fiber. 

Crowdsourcing the Collective: survey of textiles and mixed media art is in full color, 148 photographs, 42 artists from 13 countries. You can obtain your copy at browngrotta.com. Learn more about the exhibition by joining our Zoom presentation on June 3rd at 5 pm EST, Art of the Rocks: an exhibition walkthrough with spirits. We will talk about the works in Crowdsourcing the Collective and toast the artists with a curated cocktail by our own mixologist, Max Fanwick @DudeWhoCooks.

We’ve got updates — and images — from exhibitions that include browngrotta artists and friends. 

Toshiko Takaezu has received pride of place at the Venice Biennial in Italy. Eight of Takaezu’s works are featured in a gallery space that she shares with an dramatic selection of works by Ruth Asawa. Asawa is one of a group fiber artists (Ruth Asawa, Sonya Delaunay, Mrinalini Mukherjee and Rosemary Trockel) included in the Biennial this year. 

La Biennale di Venezia
59th International Art Exhibition
The Milk of Dreams
through November 27, 2022
BUY YOUR TICKETS

Takaezu’s work is also highlighted in a gallery space in This Present Moment: Crafting a Better World at the Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, aside a large portrait taken by Tom Grotta. Also well displayed in This Present Moment are works by Christine Joy, Polly Sutton and Joanne Segal Brandford. You can learn more about this ambitious exhibition in this brief video: https://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/this-present-moment.

This Present Moment: Crafting a Better World 
Renwick Gallery
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Pennsylvania Avenue at 17th Street NW
Washington, DC 20006

Building the Essentials: Ferne Jacobs at the Craft in America Gallery Los Angeles, California is a long-overdue retrospective for the California artist. Throughout her 50-year career, Jacobs has revolutionized the fiber arts and pushed the boundaries of sculpture, while exploring expressions of gender through her artworks. Learn more about this remarkable exhibition in Christopher Knight’s insightful review from the Los Angeles Times: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2022-05-11/review-backlog-pandemic-postponed-art-shows?_amp=true. You still have until June 18th to see the exhibition. Can’t get there in person? The website has numerous images and videos.

Building the Essentials: Ferne Jacobs
Craft in America Gallery
8415 West Third Street
Los Angeles, CA 90048

Garnering deserved international attention — The Guardian, W, Wallpaper, The New York Times, Aesthetica — as “ravishing,” “delicious,” a “thrill of color” is Sheila Hicks‘ exhibition Off Grid in the UK. In progress for two years, she first visited the museum in person this spring before the opening. “It was fascinating to watch her enter the space, mapping and reading it in ways that I hadn’t seen other artists do, looking at the light sources, thinking of the angles,” the museum’s chief curator Andrew Bonacina told Wallpaper (“Riotous color, terrific textiles: Sheila Hicks: ‘Off Grid’ at The Hepworth Wakefield,” Jessica Klingelfuss, Wallpaper, April 9, 2022). “Across the exhibition, you’ll see an artist who has really explored the endless possibilities of fibre and thread as a sculptural material.” The exhibition features work that expands her 70-year career and includes photographs from her many travels. The museum is an ideal venue for such an ambitious display. ““I think it’s one of the most beautiful buildings I’ve ever shown in,” Hicks told inews.co.uk. If the UK is not in your travel plans, visit the museum’s site to view additional images: https://hepworthwakefield.org/whats-on/sheila-hicks/.

Sheila Hicks: Off Grid
through September 25, 2022
The Hepworth Wakefield
Gallery Walk
Wakefield
West Yorkshire
WF1 5AW
01924 247360

hello@hepworthwakefield.org

browngrotta arts and the artists we work with have been in the news lately — quite a bit in fact!

• In January, Simone Pheulpin’s remarkable career was the cover story in Crafts magazine from the UK. The work of Crafts “cover star” defies expectations. Her “ambiguous textile forms recall geological strata and the rings of a tree,” the magazine notes and “evoke the passage of time.” (Cynthia Rose, “Life Lines,” Crafts magazine, January 2022.)

• Karyl Sisson’s work graced the cover of the National Basketry Organization’s basketry+ in its Fall 2021/Winter 2022 issue. The article, “Karyl Sisson: From Nostalgic to Unexpected,” by Janet Mendelsohn, talks about Sisson’s Shapeshifters, a new series of vessels, which will be featured in browngrotta arts upcoming exhibition Crowdsourcing the Collective (May 7 – 15). The works are created of tightly quilled paper straws, laced like beads, threaded in circles, row by row to create cylinders that are manipulated to create lively sculptures. “I see my work as the expression of hidden energy and forces inside all of us,” the magazine quotes the Sisson. “The structures I create are diagrams of physical forces and laws that govern all growth and patterning.”

• The Bay Area Artists’ Legacy Project has published its second volume, The Seventies, with a foreword by Maria Porges. One of the artists included is Lia Cook.

• Maria Rosaria Roseo interviewed Carolina Yrarrázaval for a recent issue of Arte Morbida. “[Yrarrázaval’s] tapestries,” Roseo writes, “in which dark chromatic shades predominate with red and orange overlaps, together with the essential elegance of vegetable fibers such as jute, silk, cotton, hemp and linen, are the result of continuous research about the weaving techniques of ancient cultures such as pre-Columbian and Japanese which the artist draws inspiration from, creating textile abstractions with a refined, sober and rigorous aesthetic.” (https://www.artemorbida.com/interview-with-carolina-yrarrazaval/?lang=en).

• HANDWERKEN, zonder grenzen (Crafting without limits) (https://www-handwerkenzondergrenzen-nl.translate.goog/?_x_tr_sl=nl&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=sc) in the Netherlands featured a profile of Aleksandra Stoyanov in a recent issue. “Her work often contains images of the life she left behind in Ukraine [before emigrating to Israel] and has an emotional character that focuses on the social dilemmas of immigrants experiencing the loss of family and disconnecting their connection,” writes Alie Dijk. “She also incorporates family photos in her work, as in From the First Person. In Silence, she creates a space for personal memories.”

• In “Wonder Wall,”by June Hill, Embroidery magazine profiled Dutch artist Marian Bijlenga last year. Rather than drawing on paper, the author points out, Bijlenga draws in three dimensions, “creating a series of rhythmic, visual relationships between form, pattern and mark.”

• Finally, 068 (formerly Wilton Magazine) touted browngrotta arts’ Spring 2022 exhibition in its March/April Issue (“Uncovering a Hidden Gem”). Author Julia Bruce says browngrotta arts is “a unique, international showcase for contemporary fiber arts.” The magazine further notes that fiber artists tend to be women, and that browngrotta arts is committed to promoting, exhibiting and documenting their work.

We’re all pleased to be noticed!

Work by a number of artists who work with browngrotta arts is on display in museum exhibitions across the country. From West to East:

New Mexico

Indelible Blue: Indigo Across the Globe
Albuquerque Museum
through April 24, 2022
abqmuseum@cabq.gov

We were delighted to loan several works to the Albuquerque Museum’s for Indelible Blue: Indigo Across the Globe, an expansive survey of the origins and history, techniques and movement of indigo, tracing back more than 6,000 years across cultures in Africa, Asia and elsewhere. The exhibition includes clothing and works of art by Eduardo Portillo and Mariá Dávila (VE), Hiroyuki Shindo (JP), Chiyoko Tanaka (JP), James Bassler (US), Chang Yeonsoon (KR) and Rowland Ricketts.

Minnesota

Parallel Lines: New Textile Masterworks Inspired by Geometry
Minneapolis Museum of Art
Minneapolis, MN
through August 28, 2022
https://new.artsmia.org/exhibition/parallel-lines-new-textile-masterworks-inspired-by-geometry

Parallel Lines explores woven textiles, which are inherently geometric. Vertical warp and horizontal weft threads impose a gridded framework that is necessarily linear and two-dimensional. It guides but it also constrains. Presented here is a group of newly acquired textile works, all on view for the first time, which bear witness to artistic experiments in color and form that both celebrate and defy this intrinsic geometry. Included in this exhibition is Compostela, 1985, the Museum’s recent acquisition by Adela Akers. The work is geometrically intricate and also presents as two works, depending upon the side from which it is viewed. Helena Hernmarck’s work, Euclid’s Elements, 1995, also in the exhibition, expertly creates an optical illusion involving a ball, a pyramid and rainbow, rendering a “sculptural multimedia assemblage within a two-dimensional wool textile.”

New York

Radical Fiber: Threads Connecting Art and Science
Tang Museum, Skidmore College
Saratoga Springs, NY
through June 12, 2022
See More

For centuries, fiber arts have influenced practical, theoretical, and pedagogical areas of the sciences as diverse as digital technology, mathematics, neuroscience, medicine, and more. Radical Fiber: Threads Connecting Art and Science explores this relationship through contemporary art and historical artifacts centered on four key themes: shape, body, brain and machine. A celebration of interdisciplinary creativity and collaborative learning, Radical Fiber foregrounds each work as at once fine art, process-driven craft, and scientific tool, complicating existing frameworks across fields. Can a crochet hook and yarn uniquely explain the complexities of non-Euclidean geometry? Why does the 1804 Jacquard loom relate to modern computing? How did the accidental discovery of synthetic mauveine dye in 1856 pave the way for modern pharmaceuticals yet also generate toxic environmental impact? Why do we respond differently to a woven photograph than a printed one? These and other questions will reframe the histories of fiber/science intersections and ask not only how artists continue to engage in scientific inquiry through fiber, but also importantly, how the medium can be used to improve our world for the future.

During this exhibition a study will be conducted in the neuroscience lab using woven faces (by Lia Cook)

Connecticut

The Westport Idea
Museum of Contemporary Art
Westport, Connecticut
Through March 12, 2022
https://mocawestport.org/the-westport-idea/

The Westport Idea features a diverse range of selections from Westport, Connecticut Public Art Collections (WestPAC) holdings of more than 2,000 artworks. Most of these works, by 50 different artists, have been housed in public schools and municipal buildings, not always accessible to the public. The collection includes works by Alex Katz, Robert Rauschenberg, Joan Mitchell, Robert Indiana and Norma Minkowitz. Her 1986 work, From Nothing to Nothing, is made of cotton fiber, colored pencil, metal screen and shellac. The vessel is both knitted and crocheted, a departure for her at that time. The exterior is knitted, the ball is crocheted with metallic screen in the background. The work, says Minkowitz, is about perpetual isolation, loneliness and entrapment as were many of her vessels during this period.

We had a busy year in 2021. Here are some of the details, quantified.

online platforms

Next year is shaping up to be just as busy. We are scheduling two in-person exhibitions and accompanying catalogs, videos and online walkthroughs. And this year, we are adding a book, scheduled for Spring publication. Also, coming soon on browngrotta arts’ website: Viewing Rooms. More news to come. Watch this space in 2022!

For more than 20 years, Pantone has been choosing a color of the year. For 2021, however, the color influencer has chosen harmony over singularity. The color for 2021 is two colors, Pantone 17-5104 Ultimate Gray + Pantone 13-0647 Illuminating — soft gray and citron yellow reflecting strength and positivity, practical and rock solid but at the same time warming and optimistic https://www.pantone.com/color-of-the-year-2021. “No one color could get across the meaning of the moment,” Laurie Pressman, vice president of the Pantone Color Institute, told the New York Times. “We all realized we cannot do this alone. We all have a deeper understanding of how we need each other and emotional support and hope.” 

To celebrate the pairing, we present a selection of art works that feature gray and yellow. 

According to the Pantone Color Institute, “the two offer a combination of color whose ties to insight, innovation and intuition, and respect for wisdom, experience, and intelligence inspires regeneration, pressing us forward toward new ways of thinking and concepts. Emboldening the spirit, the pairing of Ultimate Gray and Illuminating highlights our innate need to be seen, to be visible, to be recognized, to have our voices heard.”

We are adding a new feature to our social media lineup periodically, an Artist Focus. Our first artist spotlight is on Chiyoko Tanaka, who celebrated her birthday on January 1st. 

We have been honored to exhibit the work of Chiyoko Tanaka since 1996, when we were pleased to host Sheila Hicks Joined by Seven Artists from Japan. 

Time is essential in Tanaka’s work. After weaving works on an obi loom, she agrees them with mud and stone, brick and clay. Portions of the work are deliberately worn away as an actual and metaphorical representation of time, or “weaving time into space,” as she describes it. She works in various series — Mud-Dyed Cloth, Grinded Fabrics and Printed & Grinded Fabrics.

“Placing the fabric on the ground, I trace out the ground texture and surface of the fabric,” Tanaka explains. “The final color of the surface is not so important, more the effect achieved by the application of a certain soil, charcoal or choice of tool which helped translate the texture of the ground more readily into my ‘canvas.’ The true past tense of the verb to grind, ‘ground,’ also implies the earth, which can be used to embed, implant, erode and emboss its own surface into my work.” 

Tanaka’s work has been exhibited throughout the world: Europe, England, Australia, Israel and the US. It is included in the public collections at 

Museum of Arts and Crafts Hamburg, Germany; Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Passage de Retz, Paris, France; Kyoto City University of Arts, Japan; Central Museum of Textiles, Lodz, Poland. She was one of the artists featured at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the seminal exhibition, Structure and Surface: Contemporary Japanese Textiles  and in traveling exhibition, Texture & Influence, curated by Lesley Millar, for the University of the Creative Arts in the UK. She is among the artists profiled in the award-winning video, Textile Magicians.