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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. 

Here’s another selection of singular art works by prestigious artworks from the US, Europe, Asia and Israel.

Polly Barton’s woven ikat “paintigs” like By the Sea, are influenced by geography. Barton was born and raised in the Northeast, trained to weave in Japan, and has lived most of her life in the American Southwest. Her work reflects these disparate locales. 

In Jennifer Falck Linssen’ elegant vessel, Enfold, the Japanese stencil (katagami) has been recontextualized. Linssen explore the stencil’s sculptural possibilities, combining carving, stitching and metalwork. She starts with a series of sketches, exploring and refining the form, pattern, and identity of the piece. In the sculpture’s final state, it is dyed, painted patinaed, and varnished. Linssen, who also studied in Japan, now lives and works in Wisconsin.

Mia Olsson’s pieces, like Traces 4 Relief, are made of sisal fibers, dyed and formed in a technique of her own. The sisal fibers used by the Swedish artist are shiny and reflect the light, even more when formed in relief. The colors are richly saturated — engaging the viewer on each viewing.

In At Grand Montets, Naomi Kobayahsi presents a framed paper-and-thread construction. Well-known Japanese artist Kobayashi is known for such sculptures that are generally much larger, filling a wall as panels or a ceiling in a circular shape. With At Grand Montets, the viewer can appreciate the light and stillness that are highlighted in her work, on a smaller scale. 

A whimsical Red Dress of red copper threads is the creation of Gali Cnaani of Israel. Cnaani is interested in the linear structure of textiles and in exploring the light and its affects on the exposed copper threads.

The fine print: Order today and we’ll ship by tomorrow (though due to COVID we can’t guarantee the shippers’ delivery schedule). If you’d like us to gift wrap your purchase, email us at art@browngrotta.com, as soon as you have placed your order. To ensure we know you want gift wrapping, don’t wait to contact us — we generally ship as soon as the orders are received. Quantities are limited.

If you have reached those people on your list who have everything, and you are still stumped, we may be able to help you out. Below is a select grouping of objects and wall art from accomplished artists around the world. We guarantee there’s a one-of-kind choice here for anyone aesthetically oriented.

Little Star, Christine Joy’s willow sphere without beginning or end, evokes the eternal and nature in a single object. Joy, a Montana artist,constructs her sculptures to appear as if they are moving, growing and animated, as though the shapes had been cut from a tree or pulled from moving water. “I want them to sit still,” she says, “unchanging, yet to the eye of the viewer to flow, to move around and back again, to carry the movement of life.” 

Japanese artist, Naoko Serino, works in jute, a remarkably adaptable material that provokes references to biological structures. Serino’s three-dimensional sculptures, like Existence, encapsulate light and air, appearing deceptively fragile. Her work that exudes a comfortable energy, always in balance with its surroundings.

A paradoxical combination of contemporary art language and ancient handweaving technique is evident in the work of Irina Kolineskova who has emigrated from Russia to Germany. “I like old, black-and-white photos very much,” she says,”and I play with images from these pictures, using silhouettes, details of dress, signs of a profession. I make collage and then replicate collage in woven technique.”

Wood was integral to the artistic practice of the late Markku Kosonen of Finland who created this ingenious Four-Tier Curly Birch Bowl. An important aspect of his work was the ability to express things; craftsmanship alone was not enough. “What begins as an ordinary utilitarian object soon turns into a creative work” he said. “The purpose of work such as this is to appeal to one’s emotions. For me, arts and crafts entail a spiritual processing of material, linking humanism to objects.”

Marian Bijlenga of the Netherlands has a fascination with dots, lines and contours that is evident in artworks like, Color Grid. Rather than draw on paper, she draws in space, using textile as a material and leaves enough distance between the structure and its aligning wall to create what she refers to as a “spatial drawing.”

The fine print: Order for the holidays by December 14th and we’ll ship by the 15th (though due to COVID we can’t guarantee the shippers’ delivery schedule). If you’d like us to gift wrap your purchase, email us at art@browngrotta.com, as soon as you have placed your order. To ensure we know you want gift wrapping, don’t wait to contact us — we generally ship as soon as the orders are received. Quantities are limited.

Five carefully curated gift ideas from $600 to $900 to gladden your every day. Artists from the US, the UK and Japan have created a range of inspiring items to please you or those on your gift list.

The small print: Order for the holidays by December 14th and we’ll ship by the 15th (though due to COVID we can’t guarantee the shippers’ delivery schedule). If you’d like us to gift wrap your purchase, email us at art@browngrotta.com, as soon as you have placed your order. To ensure we know you want gift wrapping, don’t wait to contact us — we generally ship as soon as the orders are received. Quantities are limited.

Even as summer nears to its end, we’re still heating up at browngrotta with all kinds of new artwork. During the month of August, we highlighted a few very talented artists, including: Marianne Kemp, Mary Merkel-Hess, Heidrun Schimmel, James Bassler.

Netherlands based artist, Marianne Kemp is known for using unconventional weaving techniques with horsehair – to create works of character that combine texture, color and movement.

This vibrant and striking piece was created by the talented Mary Merkel-Hess. In her creative process, Merkel-Hess is never one to pass up inspiration. In fact, she aims to create a life of constant creativity, and she does this through her work.

German-based artist, Heidrun Schimmel exclusively stitches her works by hand. She is passionate about the connections between thread and time and thread and humanity as they are interwoven into human existence.

Jim Bassler is renowned textile artist whose time in the armed services gave him the opportunity to see the world. That experience introduced Bassler to the craft traditions of Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. During Bassler’s travels, the ethnic textiles served as inspiration and a foundation for his work.

Next week, we will be launching our Volume 50 exhibition and catalog. We’re excited to launch, as we know you’re going to love what’s in store – you’ll even be seeing work by familiar artists like James Bassler and Mary Merkel-Hess. The exhibition is open live for safe viewing from 1 to 6 p.m. on Saturday 12th and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. from Sunday September 13 – 20th. To reserve your time slot go to eventbrite, https://www.eventbrite.com/e/volume-50-chronicling-fiber-art-for-three-decades-tickets-118242792375 or
to learn about our online Exhibition programming check our calendar at browngrotta.com.

Stéphanie Jacques wrote about identity for browngrotta arts’ latest exhibition, art + identity: an international view. Here are Jacques’ thoughts on the topic:

“At the present time, the notion of identity seems to me to be a dimension in constant movement. I can distinguish, however, one coherent element, a sort of red thread : the desire to assemble all that is scattered. 

“Winter 2015, in my studio notebook, I draw a human face.  A woman’s face.  Tears in the form of feet and hands stream from her eyes. That winter, I continued working on a series of sculptures which will become the work Ce qu’il en reste.  A small human figure stands upright. She is in balance.  Hanging from her pelvis is an assemblage of cubes and parallelepipeds which tumble to the floor. 

“Summer 2016, after 15 years of living in the country, I move to a new studio, in town. There, the first thing I make is a series of monotypes. Inspired by the drawing of the previous winter, this time, I engrave an image of the woman’s face on a sheet of linoleum. With each new print, another face appears. Little by little, an open mouth takes the place of the tears.  Blue…. Red…., on this white paper, like an unconscious trace, areminder of the violence which is spreading throughout Europe at that time.  Violence moreover, which still continues today. This face has something to tell.  

“Applying the coiling technique, I stitch bundles of white thread.  First comes an eye, two eyes, then the mouth, the whole face.  Between my hands, a soft and damaged material takes form. One senses anger. It is the first time I create a human face, a mask. ‘Without a doubt one of the most ancient forms of expression of human culture’ so a book on the subject informs me. On a table, are two looped legs covered in plaster. They will find their place, on top of this head. 

“That summer, I spend hour upon hour sewing, cubes and parallelepipeds made of willow and stitching with waxed linen thread.  Small, medium, large.  Assembled and tinted with India ink, they form a structure into which I may enter.  

“Oh Joy ! I dance in my studio, searching somehow through my movement, a relationship with this form. I set up the camera and take photos. My face is veiled. The frame is fixed. As the shooting advances, a story appears. I decide on four images.  Four attempts at materializing this constant transformation, at bringing life to this form.  A series of portraits follows. This time, sitting on a chair, my appearance is modified by wearing an object, a sculpture. Each image incarnates a new state, another state. 

The process here described is necessary for these images to exist. They are not an end in itself but a document of what has passed.Certain emotions, intuitions, propel me to make certain objects. More and more, I feel the need to record their creative impact and this physical sensation which passes through my body as it is positioned in space and time. It is my way of questioning the identity of these forms.  Using image is a means to make them fall from their pedestal.”

Stéphanie Jacques
April 2019

Below, we share thoughts from Federica Luzzi about her works, White Shell Tongue, n.2, White Paper Shell and White Shell. The works were featured in browngrotta arts’ recent exhibition, art + identity: an international view.

“From a simple daily gesture, observing the white, knotted shapes just finished and resting on my black, low and Japanese-style lacquered table, White Shell Tongue was born. My mother bought the table many years ago and it has always been a reason of great attraction for me, every object projected far away on it; you have to sit down on the ground to use it. Also, a turquoise silk kimono brought for me by parents from SoHo, New York, when I was 6-7 years old. My father, Mario Luzzi, was an expert and journalist in jazz music, and in the 70s and 80s, my parents’ house in Rome was a continuous coming and going of American and European musicians who also stayed with us — Ornette Coleman, Don Pullen, Muhal Richard Abrams, Max Roach, Noah Howard, Paul Bley e Byard Lancaster.

“Everyone’s dream: to know a foreign (strange) language and yet not to understand it: to grasp the difference in it …” writes Roland Barthes in the beginning of “The language unknown” in The Empire of Signs. Mine is a eulogy to the slowness of the gesture. A pure gesture that leads to the conscious cancellation of the subject, the beginning of that “visual vacillation” of which Barthes speaks when “the text does not comment on the images. The images do not illustrate the text”. A calligraphy whose author disappears taking “in some part of the world (down there) a certain number of ‘traits’ (graphic and linguistic terms) and with these traits deliberately forming a system,”writes Barthes. It is necessary to find a voice and a language that are foreign to themselves; a musical score, whose interpreter will read and imagine in a different way, moving away.

From Frascati’s DAPHE particle accelerator, which I had left to create this series of works, I have come to confirm my old intuition: in approaching each other, we do not recognize ourselves in an alien matter. 

Nostalgia is a feeling that I have felt since I was very young for Japan: a country that until a few years ago I had never seen but where I felt I had already been. In 2017, I presented my works for the first time in a solo exhibition, Shell, in Osaka, at the LADS Gallery, which mainly deals with Gutai artists and is directed by Toyoko Hyono San. Everything that I have always imagined of Japan began to take shape deeply, in particular when two of my works, usually exhibited separately, were put together there. The LADS Gallery, with its partially modifiable and openable space with sliding walls, has the possibility of creating a sort of niche that I immediately identified by visualizing the White Shell Tongue fine art print which, due to its vertical disposition, recalled to my mind the paintings or calligraphy on paper or silk, kakemono, displayed in the tokonoma, an intimate space of traditional Japanese houses. A sacred space where I put together my sculptural work made by knotting paper cord resting on a raised wooden structure.

As a woman, I never appear physically in the works, but it is through my body that I touch and look at things, entrusting my story to long and narrow strips of paper as ever-changing languages. But if writing is an act of “dispossession” as Marc Augé makes clear, in my idea of dissemination that void of speech is vibration; small invocations dispersed in the cosmos.

If you are in Miami, Los Angeles or Honolulu this summer be sure to visit these three not-to-be-missed exhibitions (and enjoy images from Hideho Tanaka’s recent solo show in Japan).

Sheila Hicks: Campo Abierto (Open Field)
April 13, 2019 -September 29, 2019
The Bass Museum of Art
2100 Collins Avenue 
Miami Beach, FL 33139
305. 673.7530

Grouping works of art from various periods, Campo Abierto (Open Field) explores the formal, social and environmental aspects of landscape that have been present, yet rarely examined, throughout Sheila Hicks’ expansive career.

Karyl Sisson: Fissures & Connections
May 11, 2019 –July 6, 2019
Craft in America Gallery
8415 W. Third Street
Los Angeles, CA, 90048M
323.951.0610

Los Angeles-based artist Karyl Sisson has a solo exhibition at the Craft in America gallery. The materials of everyday life, both past and present, are the fibers that Sisson weaves together to form sculptural and textured forms. Sisson draws inspiration from sources as diverse as Los Angeles’ landscape, microbiology, and fashion manufacturing. Glimpsing back at her work over three decades, pattern, repetition, and structure are unifying and focal themes that she explores dimensionally from her foundation in basketry and needlework. In her choice of reinventing undervalued materials, Sisson manages to confront domesticity and traditional gender roles. Her recent work with paper straws draws inspiration from cells and organisms, which inform the objects as she composes them and they grow seemingly naturally.

After studying painting and drawing at NYU, Sisson moved to Los Angeles and entered graduate school in 1983 at UCLA where she studied with Bernard Kester, one of the pioneering voices in the establishment of fiber as an art medium in the 1960s and 1970s. Ed Rossbach, Judy Chicago, Miriam Shapiro, Esther Parkhurst, and Neda al Hilali are among the artists who inspired her work and exploration of fiber early on.

Constellation—drawing in space by Marian Bijlenga
May 18, 2019 – August 04, 2019 
Honolulu Museum of Art
900 South Beretania Street
Honolulu, Hawaii 96814
808-532-8700

Marian Bijlenga, a Dutch contemporary artist, approaches mark-making with an innovative use of materials as a drawn “line.” Her unique constructions respond to the environment, echoing her interpretations of interconnected webs of fiber. Drawing on a non-traditional use of the sewing machine, these sculptures are mere whispers of dark and light, playing on positive and negative spaces, sometimes barely visible gestures as a shadowy effect.

Hideho Tanaka Sole Exhibition 2019, Emerging
May 25, 2019-May 3

Hideho Tanaka also had a one-person exhibition last month in Japan, Hideho Tanaka Sole Exhibition 2019, Emerging While he was engaged in education and research at Musashino Art University, in the Craft and Industrial Design Department for many years he usedfiber to pursue three-dimensional modeling expressionA novelist of a writer who was also a fiber artist, wrote monyaart: http://monyaart.jugem.jp/?eid=3778. The small works on the wall were organized in a grid. “I am overwhelmed by a large amount of ‘brooches,'” Monyaart quoted the artist. These are designs of two or three rectangles on which a hand-drawn image is superimposed. The exhibition also featured larger works were also displayed.