Even if leisurely, life goes on, and we still have plenty of news to share.

The Loewe Craft Foundation Awards for 2026 were presented. Through its Craft Prize, the Loewe Foundation seeks to acknowledge and support international artisans over 18, of any gender who demonstrate an exceptional ability to create objects of superior aesthetic value. By identifying work that “reinterprets existing knowledge to make it relevant today while reflecting its maker’s personal language and distinct hand,” the Foundation aims to “highlight the continuing contribution of craft to the culture of our time.” Two of the artists that work with browngrotta arts were on the short list — Gjertrud Hals of Norway and Misako Nakahira of Japan. They join several other artists that browngrotta arts promotes who have made the shortlist in years past— Mercedes Vincente, Polly Adams Sutton, Yeonsoon Chang, Ferne Jacobs, and Simone Pheulpin, who was also awarded an honor prize. Separately, Loewe has worked with Jiro Yonezawa and Kay Sekimachi to create designs for products for the legendary leather goods retailer.

This summer saw Museum Acquisition action: This Old House by James Bassler will join the permanent collection at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. This Old House was featured in the Museum’s recent exhibition,  America 250: Common Threads. The adoption of a second work of art by another artist is in progress at a separate major US museum. The last 12 months have seen more acquisition activity. Last August,  Bowl with Black Centre, by Dail Behennah was acquired by the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, Massachusetts. In November, Lia Cook’s Su Series was acquired by the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and Neha Puri Dhir’s work Transition, was acquired by the John and Mable Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Florida. In January, four works of wearable art by Norma Minkowitz joined the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in California. 

Artists who work with browngrotta arts are featured in a number of Exhibitions in Canada, China, Europe, and the US. Jane Balsgaard’s work is on exhibit at the Vrå Exhibition in the  Art Building-Engelund Museum in Vrå, Denmark (through August 30th). Jeannet Leendertse is part of Water Proof: Maine Artists Reflect on their  Environment, at the  Wendell Gilley Museum in Southwest Harbor, Maine (through August 22nd). In Montreal, Canada, Mariette-Rousseau Vermette’s, Micheline Beauchemin’s, and Young-Ok Shin’s works are featured in Plot at the Baie-Saint-Paul Museum of Contemporary Art (through September 6th). The work of Eduardo Portillo and María Dávila is included in See You Tomorrow Under Other Skies at the  Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York City (through September 12th, with a summer break in August. Check hours). Gjertrud Hals’s work is part of the 
Personal Structures exhibition at the Palazzo Mora in Venice, Italy (through November 22nd).  Simone Pheulpin’s work is in Intertwined Breath: Contemporary Fiber Narratives at the  Taoxichuan Gallery in Jingdexhen, China (through November 25th). And, opening on August 25th, is a retrospective of Mary Merkel-Hess’s work at the  Brunnier Art Museum, Ames, Iowa (through January 31, 2027).

The fourth edition of the Homo Faber Biennial is titled An Island of Light and runs from September 1 – 30, 2026 at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini on San Giorgio Maggiore Island in Venice, Italy. Curated by the Michelangelo Foundation with artistic direction by Es Devlin, the event explores the relationship between light, materials, and the human hand. A number of artists who work with browngrotta arts will be part of the Biennial including Jiro Yonezawa, Christine Joy, Jennifer Zurick, Nancy Moore Bess, Simone Pheulpin, Polly Adams Sutton, and Gyöngy Laky. Homo Faber also maintains an online platform 
dedicated to craftsmanship that provides profiles of artisans worldwide.

In June, we served as Jurors for Make/Shift, an exhibition at the  Crown Gallery, Metro Art Studios in Bridgeport, Connecticut.  Artists were asked to submit work that “explores the space where material, process, and intention converge — grounded in techniques and materials traditionally associated with functional craft—ceramics, fiber, glass, wood, basketry, and other hand-based practices—reimagined through a fine art lens.” We reviewed more than 150 entries and selected over two dozen intriguing works — of glass, ceramics, jewelry, metal — but a preponderance of the entries were works of fiber. The exhibition will run from August 9th to September 19th.

Much of our summer has been spent on October Exhibition Planning. In Continental Drift: Encounters, North and South (October 17 – 25), we will explore art from North and South America from two different vantage points. First, we are gathering works by significant artists from the US, Canada, Chile, Venezuela, and Colombia, including Sheila Hicks, Lenore Tawney, and Carolina Yrarrázaval) many of whom are not just representative of their own countries but have a connection to other regions as well. Second, we will include work by artists from in and outside North and South America who cite art, artists, or experiences from these continents as an influence. We’ve been receiving deliveries from new artists from Argentina and Mexico, and viewed compelling works that artists created after a pilgrimage to another country or a study of an artist from elsewhere. And we’ve been in correspondence with Sarah Parrish, Associate Professor of Art History at Plymouth University, who’ll be writing the catalog essay for Continental Drift.

Hope you, too, are having a great summer!

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Color is a constant in art, while its potential for new and unique applications is limitless. Artists at browngrotta arts have taken the challenge to heart — finding inspiration in the teachings of Josef Albers, the art of Color Fields painter Mark Rothko, and systems of their own design.

In Bauhaus artist and teacher Josef Albers’s universe, color seduced and beguiled (The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation: https://www.albersfoundation.org/alberses/teaching/interaction-of-color). “These characteristics made color the most fascinating of art’s formal elements. Albers’s passion for color prompted his decision to launch what was possibly the first full-blown course in color ever given anywhere, and certainly the first based exclusively on direct observation of color’s behavior. . . . Color behaved. Color was magic.”

At Black Mountain College in the 1930s he introduced a color course unique at the time, followed by courses at Yale University and the publication of Albers’s landmark Interaction of Color in 1963, which crowned 30 years of effort.  His exercises focused on color in specific contexts, showing that if you put color A next to color B, or these colors next to those, you could anticipate certain results. Moving from simple to complex, with many exercises exploring the ramifications of a previous one, the course awakened the students to the quirks and variables of color behavior. The course was not a fixed body of color wisdom, but rather an ongoing inquiry in which solutions were not conclusions, but steps on an endless path.

Merja Keskinen engages in color experiments of her own navigating between following a system, as Albers did, and making room for discovery. Keskinen describes this generative uncertainty: “I work to see. The joy of discovery and the delight of experiencing colors are essential to me. The unpredictability and always-surprising color tones captivate me. I interpret life and the surrounding world with colors and explore the factors that influence color perception.” In works like, Rhythm of Colors, Keskinen works with a self-developed weaving technique, combining different-colored threads according to her preselected system, creating geometric square and rectangular shapes in various sizes whose surfaces produce a pixel-like optical blending — distinguishable as individual threads up close, but merging into wholly unexpected color combinations from a distance. Her work demonstrates that even the most rigorously systematic approach — mathematics applied to thread — contains inevitable surprise. The material collaborates, producing results the artist could not fully predict.

In his Threads I’ve Carried series James Bassler takes Albers’s Color Theory as a literal influence. The works reflect what the artist learned in his first “Color” class at UCLA in1953 once he realized that there was an “Art Department.” The head counselor at Santa Monica HighSchool had refused to allow him to take a Ceramics class because his GPA was too high. He pursued art, despite that first obstacle, and later Bassler would teach Josef Albers’s Color Theory at UCLA for some 25 years. This work is made of left-over warp and weft yarns from the past 65 years, including handspun and manufactured material, natural and synthetic dyed wool, silk, linen, cotton, and ramie. The result, is a four-selvaged weaving, a color study using complementary colors, In works from the series, Bassler explored a new bag of saved yarns, which presented new thoughts. “How bright or dark can I go before it upsets the whole idea,” he asks. “In this piece I pushed the subtle to almost disappear and the bright to almost overwhelm.”

Nancy Koenigsberg’s Chroma is the artist’s version of a painter’s palette which took her more than six months. to complete. The sculptural artwork of coated, colored copper wire is comprised of four horizontal rows of small squares and four vertical rows, occupying an area 26 inches square. Each individual square is created by sewing and weaving coated copper wire and building layers of the color to a depth of 2.5 inches. The color combinations and contrasts challenge and engage the viewer both visually and conceptually.

^{37sl Dictionary – Light Indigo, Sue Lawty indigo-dyed, natural hemp, linen, 21.5 x 13, 2026. Photo by Tom Grotta}

In her Indigo Cloth series, Sue Lawty explores the innumerable variations of blue. In one series, Notes on Blue, Lawty commissioned a range of linen and hemp hreads to be hand dyed with indigo by Jeanette Orrell in Wales. Lawty purposely requested a range of unevenly dyed shades across the tonal spectrum and then worked intuitively,  reading the weaving line by line as it progressed. In Dictionary – Light Indigo Woven Tapestry, she explores more gradations of blue. Lawty pursues the inherent qualities of any material with which she works, seeking “an understated restraint, balance, tension, rhythm: an essential stillness.”  In Lawty’s practice, color feels less applied than absorbed — as though the fiber had always held it within. 

Experiments in color were the hallmark of members of the Color Fields movement of the 1950s and 60s.  Color Fields artists, among them Mark Rothko, created abstract paintings featuring large areas of solid color, flat surfaces, and a unified single-image field.  Rothko’s work with color was a potent influence for fiber artist Mariette Rousseau-Vermette. The Canadian artist saw an exhibition of the Rothko’s works in Italy in 1958. It was pivotal in inspiring her “to produce strictly artistic works in weaving,” Anne Newlands wrote in Weaving Modernist Art: The Life and Times of Mariette Rousseau-Vermette (Firefly Books, Richmond Hill, Ontario, 2023, p. 32). Throughout Rousseau-Vermette’s life, Newlands says, Rothko triggered “compositions with floating blocks of color, soft edges and her signature brushed wool technique to create a blending of colors and a sense of inner light.” Her interest in Rothko “marked her as a colorfield artist-weaver, fueling her ambition to create large-scale tapestries that would engulf the viewer and employ powerful chromatic contrasts of light and dark to evoke an emotional response.” 

Scott Rothstein also works in fields of color in vivid embroideries of silk like Untitled #71. “I have felt compelled to explore the subtleties of basic visual elements for 20 years,” he explains. “I find the simplest elements to be the most profound. A line, created by twisting threads, can have infinite possibilities. Two areas of color, in equal amounts, placed consecutively, might suggest harmony or contradiction.” 

However articulated, these explorations of color and its potential intrigue and engage the viewer just as they the artist.

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In Just Past Dead Center, the late John McQueen, plaited elm bark to create a whimsical tree sculpture. Originally a part of the Hechinger Collection, it was exhibited at City Museum, Saint Louis, Missouri, (and elsewhere) in Tools as Art: The Hechinger Collection. The work also appears in the book, Tools as Art: The Hechinger Collection, by Pete Hamill, New York, 1995. Throughout his career, McQueen created objects that explored the idea of what a basket truly is with wit and wordplay.

Linda Bills transforms tulip poplar bark into elegant sculptural baskets that honor the material’s natural beauty. In Arrowhead #2 (Algoma Basket), she has used peeled and unpeeled bark, subtle color, and waxed linen stitching to create a vessel that is both refined and deeply rooted in nature. The woven panels are marked and lightly colored and the stitched knots are made of waxed lined thread. The inside of the bark is on the outside.  Bills scrubbed the bark, with plain water, to remove the dirt accumulated during its life in the woods.  Introduced to bark as a basketry material by John McQueen in the 1980s, Bills has gone on to expand her practice into large-scale sculpture, drawing, and printmaking—allowing each medium to continually inspire the next. Some of Bills’s sculptures created shadow drawings on the floor or wall which peaked her interest. In the mid-2000s she began making actual drawings, on paper. Prints followed. Ultimately, inspiration came full circle, sculpture inspiring drawings and prints and those, in turn, inspiring sculpture and installations.

In The Yarns I’ve Carried series, James Bassler has developed a contemplative method for weaving more than 65 years of leftover warp and weft yarns into a quiet meditation on color, memory, and time. The series reflects what Bassler learned in his first “Color” class at UCLA in 1953 and references Josef Albers’s Color Theories, which Bassler later taught at UCLA for 25 years. The works transform wool, silk, linen, cotton, ramie, and handspun fibers into a vivid study of complementary color. As Bassler notes, this four-selvaged weaving is a work that rewards slowing down — and truly looking.

Bassler works with no end of warp and weft threads — wool, silk, linen, ramie, agave, sisal, Oaxaca brown cotton, coyuchi, and a contemporary, warmer brownish orange, coyuchi spun on the spinning device designed by Mohandas Gandhi in India. The pieces in The Yarns I’ve Carried series are very quiet. “Most of the interest, for me, Bassler says, “is focused on the vibrancy of the complementary color squares. Viewers will have to put down their phones to concentrate on it though I don’t know if that is still possible in our contemporary society.”

Aby Mackie is a textile artist who works with repurposed and existing materials through a material-led methodology. Through processes including layering, cutting back, stitching, gilding, and reconfiguration, Mackie transforms materials while often preserving aspects of their original character within the final composition. Much of her repurposed material comes from the Encants Vells market in Barcelona, Spain. In works like From Order to Chaos, 6, Mackie combines traditional and non-traditional textile techniques with a fine art approach. Each piece evolves through a sequence of material-led decisions, where every intervention informs the next, resulting in works that reflect an ongoing dialogue between process, material and form.

Watch for more highlights in August!

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In an art landscape increasingly drawn to fiber and textile practices, Carol Shaw-Sutton stands out as someone who has been doing this work — with rigor, curiosity, and consistency — since long before it was considered mainstream. Her practice is a reminder that fiber is a language capable of carrying myth, memory, and meaning as powerfully as any other.

Some artists find their medium. Carol Shaw-Sutton’s found her. At age five, recovering from burns to her hands, she was taught to knit as part of her physical therapy. What began as a clinical exercise in dexterity became something else entirely — a quiet, absorbing way of looking closely at the world. That early encounter with thread set the course for a career that has spanned more than five decades and established her as a respected voice in contemporary fiber art.

A Life Woven from Many Threads
Shaw-Sutton’s visual language didn’t come from a single source. As a child, road trips through the American Southwest introduced her to Indigenous craft traditions, including the coiled ceremonial baskets of the Hopi. Around the same time, she watched her family’s Japanese gardener bundle backyard vines using nothing but the vines themselves — a small, practical act that left a lasting impression about how material could be both functional and beautiful.

These influences converge in a practice built on what she has called ancient and modern processes working side by side: coiling, wrapping, looping, knotting, and weaving, often using natural materials like willow, linen, wood, and feathers. The results are sculptural, immersive, and frequently large in scale — installations that can stretch many feet across a gallery while still carrying the intimacy of handwork.

Themes That Run Through the Work
Critics and curators consistently point to a recurring set of concerns in Shaw-Sutton’s output: loss, longing, repair, and the search for wholeness — cultural and environmental alike. Writer and critic Betty Park described her pieces as objects laden with meaning, functioning less like literal narratives and more like myths open to many readings.

That mythic quality is deliberate. Shaw-Sutton has spoken about wanting her work to sit at the intersection of the deeply personal and the broadly human — pieces that reference her own body and history while also gesturing toward larger questions about nature, culture, and time. Titles and series such as Our Bones Are Made of Stardust and Staying Alive reflect this dual register: intimate and cosmic in the same breath.

Recognition and Collections
Shaw-Sutton’s accolades include multiple National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist Fellowships, a Fellowship from the American Craft Council, and honors from institutions in Japan and France, among others. Her work resides in numerous major public collections, including the de Young Museum in San Francisco, the Oakland Museum of California, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, the Mint Museum in North Carolina, and the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne, Switzerland — a testament to how thoroughly fiber art rooted in ancient technique has found a home in the contemporary art world.

Continuous Significance
For over 30 years, Shaw-Sutton taught at California State University, Long Beach, where she chaired the Fiber Program starting in 1990. She is now Professor Emerita there, having shaped generations of fiber artists during her tenure. Her influence extends well beyond her own studio practice — a reminder that some of the most significant contributions in art happen in the classroom as well as the gallery.

“At its root, Shaw-Sutton’s work is traditional,” Betty Park has written, “yet also highly original, elegant and eloquent in its form and concept. She has stepped into an unknown land that somehow feels like home.” For anyone interested in where contemporary textile art has been, and where it might be going, Carol Shaw-Sutton’s body of work is essential viewing.

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With the US currently elbowing its continental neighbors in a political context, it seemed an apt time to examine the gentler ways in which art and culture nudge one another and may wind up altered as a result. The term “continental drift” refers to the slow, tectonic movement of land masses — a process that both separates and reshapes. The exhibition draws an analog between geology and culture: artistic traditions, too, migrate, collide, and transform across the vast territories of North, Latin, and South America. This exhibition brings together works by artists from across the hemisphere. alongside works that bear the imprint of those traditions — whether through material, technique, imagery, or sustained encounter with place and people.

Among the artists from the Americas that will be included are renowned Canadian weavers Micheline Beauchemin and Mariette Rousseau-Vermette. Rousseau-Vermette exemplifies the migration of artistic influences from one continent to another. After graduation from the École des beaux-arts in Montreal in 1948, Mariette (then Rousseau, later Rousseau-Vermette) looked to the United States to further her education, unlike her fellow students who took their cur from Europe and travelled to France. She was inspired by a 1947 issue of Life magazine in which an article titled “Top Weaver” introduced her to the innovative Dorothy Liebes studio in San Francisco, where Rousseau-Vermette became an apprentice. “… [T]his magnificent woman was radically changing textiles in the United States, she was returning them to art,” Rousseau-Vermette said. 

For Ferne Jacobs, an innovative American artist, whose work will also be included, a workshop with noted Colombian artist Olga de Amaral was one way in which she was exposed to avant-garde, structural approaches to thread that has led her to create dramatic fiber sculptures. Jacob uses ancient techniques in her work, including coiling, particularly prominent among Indigenous peoples of the American Southwest. 

From Chile, Carolina Yrarrázaval cites her encounters with American artist Sheila Hicks as formative. Traditional textiles are another significant touchstone for Yrarrázaval. Throughout her career, she has investigated textile traditions across diverse cultures, with particular attention to pre-Columbian techniques. 


From outside North and South America, we’ll be featuring work by artist Trine Ellitsgaard. Ellitsgaard grew up in Denmark. It was there she trained as a weaver, but for the last 20 years she has lived in Oaxaca, Mexico. Her work has a Scandinavian sensibility. There are influences from her adopted home to be seen, as well, including using black-dyed sheep’s wool skirts of the Chamula women of Chiapas in her works and other materials found there — horse-hair, palm, gold thread, plastic, paper, silk, sisal, seeds — deftly blending the organic and the inorganic. Other individuals whose work will be included in Continental Drift have cited artists from the US as having an impact on their art. For Hisako Sekijima and Jiro Yonezawa of Japan it was John McQueen. For Stéphanie Jacques of Belgium and Tim Johnson of the UK it was Ed Rossbach.

The practices of these artists, and the others who will be included, are an apt descriptor of the premise explored in Continental Drift. Each influence absorbed, each tradition studied, contributes another dimension to the tiers of weaving, years of research, and volumes of texture that distinguish these artists’ work.

We’ll be publishing a full-color catalog to accompany Continental Drift, with an essay by Sarah Parrish, Associate Professor of Art History, Plymouth State University, Massachusetts, Research Fellow, Fiber Sculpture: 1960 to the present, ICA, Boston. .

Join us in October! More information to come.

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2026 is America’s 250th Anniversary. Museums across the US are offering options for celebrating this milestone. We’ve gathered images and information from some of the compilations we found most intriguing. These exhibitions broaden the lens through which we view the past. They make space for indigenous people, women, immigrants, and enslaved Americans, while giving a hat-tip to the founding fathers and to flags and other symbols of praise and protest.

For Which It Stands…
Through July 25th
Fairfield University Art Museum
1073 North Benson Road
Fairfield, CT 06824
https://www.fairfield.edu/museum/exhibitions/catalog/2026/for-which-it-stands/

In our backyard,  and well worth a visit, is For Which It Stands… is at the Fairfield University Art Museum for just two more weeks. This exhibition examines depictions of the American flag through more than 70 works by a diverse group of artists, beginning during WWI with Childe Hassam’s shimmering Italian Day, May 1918 and continuing to the present day. Work in a variety of media is included from Jasper Johns, Faith Ringgold, Robert Rauschenberg, Shepard Fairey, and Julie Mehretu, Gordon Parks, and others. For Which It Stands… challenges viewers to consider who the American flag truly represents and whether justice is available to all.

Life, Liberty, and Los Angeles
Through January 31st
Autry Museum of the American West
4700 Western Heritage Way
Los Angeles, CA 90027-1462
https://www.theautry.org/exhibitions/life-liberty-and-los-angeles

The expansive exhibition, Life, Liberty, and Los Angeles, explores the meanings behind some of the most powerful words in the Declaration of Independence. Los Angeles, from its beginnings, has been a place of competing claims to life, liberty, and happiness. This exhibition shares the stories of diverse Angelenos and how their ideas of life, liberty, and happiness inspired the city’s growth and amplified the opportunities and contradictions expressed in the nation’s founding principles. The 125 objects on display are deliberately eclectic. Political buttons, family photographs and papers, commissioned installations, even a 1967 Mark VII vehicle from Disneyland’s Autopia attraction and a can of Los Angeles smog, are installed alongside contemporary artworks.

American Stories: From Revolution to Rockwell
Through October 26th
Norman Rockwell Museum
9 Glendale Road, PO Box 308
Stockbridge, MA 01262
https://www.nrm.org

This sweeping exhibition portrays how artists – from the Revolutionary War era to today – emblazoned the ideals and evolving story of America. American Stories: From Revolution to Rockwell illuminates how iconic imagery created over centuries helped to reflect and shape what it means to be American. The exhibition includes original paintings, prints, book illustrations, broadsides, posters, advertisements, and digital media, from the Museum’s expansive holdings as well as major loans from important institutions and private collectors across the country, including the Smithsonian Museum. As New England Public Media notes: “From iconic masterpieces to everyday media, these works chart the nation’s … enduring pursuit of freedom. The exhibition places Rockwell’s iconic images in a broader national context, spotlighting illustration’s role in illuminating America’s ambitions, achievements, and struggles.”

An Indigenous Present
Through September 27th
Frist Art Museum
919 Broadway
Nashville, TN 37203

An Indigenous Present, a thematic exhibition spanning 100 years of modern and contemporary indigenous art, is another example of a reimagined view of the past. The exhibition includes significant works by 15 artists who use strategies of abstraction to represent personal and collective narratives, describe specific and imagined places, and build upon cultural and aesthetic traditions. Co-organized by artist Jeffrey Gibson, member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent and representative for the US at the Venice Biennial in 2024, and independent curator Jenelle Porter, the exhibition offers an expansive consideration of indigenous art practices, highlighting a continuum of elders and emerging makers. 

America 250: Common Threads
Through July 27th
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
600 Museum Way
Bentonville, Arkansas 72712 
https://crystalbridges.org/events/america-250-common-threads

In America 250: Common Threads, an early engraving of the Declaration of Independence anchors a group of historic documents displayed alongside textiles, paintings, toys, and other works from 1776 to the present. The exhibition considers how artists and national leaders document American history. The exhibition explores the symbols artists turn to when celebrating or commenting on the United States: George Washington’s many faces, eagles appearing across books, baskets, and coverlets, flags seen as quilts or as documentation of the moon landing, and more. Contemporary artists featured in the exhibition, such as Robert Colescott, Kay WalkingStick, Howard Finster, and our own, James Bassler, continue to revisit national symbols and explore their resonance. The exhibition also features live quilting, as local quilters and quilting guilds work in the galleries to piece quilt squares made by K-12 students across Arkansas and designed by artist Basil Kincaid.

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Recognized as a Master of the Medium Award by the James Renwick Alliance, US artists Mary Giles’ unique ability to manipulate materials such as waxed linen, porcupine quills, metal, paper, silk, and copper wire allowed her to craft intricate sculptures and vessels that blur the lines between the natural and the imagined. This juxtaposition exudes messages of both strength and fragility, inviting viewers to contemplate the symbiosis of these elements. In accepting the award, Giles said of her work: “I interpret and express explored communication and intimacy in relationships. The results are reflected in my figural work. I admire the directness and honesty I see in tribal art and I try to incorporate those qualities in my own.” In Anointed Procession, human-like figures of different sizes are linked, raising questions of hierarchy and human interaction.

One theme recurring in our recent exhibition,Transformations : dialogues in art and materials, is the tension between system and discovery. Merja Keskinen describes this generative uncertainty: “I work to see. The joy of discovery and the delight of experiencing colors are essential to me.” In works like Horizontal Colors I, Keskinen combines different-colored threads according to a preselected system, creating geometric shapes whose surfaces produce a pixel-like optical blending — distinguishable as individual threads up close, but merging into unexpected color combinations from a distance. The works are based on consideration of color theories and an examination of the factors that influence the artist’s experience of color, The design approach, Keskinen says, is an implementation of a self-developed weaving technique, which combines various sized pieces and formations of diversely colored elements.

In creating The Last Card Weaving, renowned US weaver, Kay Sekimachi, created a necklace-like object of black, polished cotton. Sekimachi used card weaving — which dates back to the Vikings. “Essentially, you need a deck of cards with holes at each corner,” explains Sekimachi, who turns 99 this year. “The warp threads get threaded through the holes, and the cards are turned to make a shed. To weave a tube, the weft enters the shed from the same side, after the weaving is done it gets pulled into a tube.” 

Bruxelles – Série Éclosion is a quintessential work by French textile sculptor, Simone Pheulpin. Pheulpin’s self-developed technique is based on the meticulous, repetitive folding of strips of unbleached, cotton canvas. Pins, hidden in the heart of each work, hold her works together. In the crags and crevices Pheulpin creates, a universe unfolds, sometimes mineral, sometimes vegetable, reflecting the natural world.

Mariette Rousseau-Vermette was a pioneer of modernist tapestry and one of Canada’s most prolific and influential artist-weavers. Rousseau-Vermette wove hundreds of radiant large-scale tapestries that complemented the cool interiors of modern architecture. Like Mauve-Noir-Rouge her works combined luminous colors with soft wool that she specially sourced for its sumptuousness. She exhibited across Canada and internationally and attracted prestigious commissions from the private and public sectors, including commissions for theater curtains at the National Arts Centre, Ottawa and the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC.

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Another exhibition, time for another catalog. The volume for this Spring’s exhibition, Transformations: dialogues in art and materials, is our 63rd (57 catalogs, 6 monographs). With work by 79 artists highlighted in Transformations, the catalog was bound to be a big one. In fact it weighs in at 164 full-color pages. The works in Transformations were installed to illustrate the varying ways artists used the same material — whether traditional, silk, cotton, sisal or more unusual, feathers, horsehair, and jute. The catalog essay explores additional themes.

Making and Meaning
Some artists in Transformations take their materials beyond physical characteristics— asking viewers to feel, remember, or reconsider. Stéphanie Jacques describes this approach with characteristic directness: “[P]lant matter is not the subject of my work. It is a means among others… But this means is not trivial. It connects me to what man has always done, shaping what he needs with his hands from what he sees around him. What matters to me is to talk about what is alive.” Jacques constructs sculptural forms that are humanoid but less than literal, using volume to give life to an unfilled interior space — speaking of the movements of the body, desire, intuitions, something that pushes from the inside and overflows. For Hisako Sekijima the subject is not the material alone; it is the dynamic interplay between what the material will and will not do, and what the maker can discover within that negotiation. 

The Material as Its Own Message
For some artists, the material does not carry meaning so much as it is the meaning. Sue Lawty and Yasuhisa Kohyama work at opposite ends of the material world —one with fiber and stone, the other with clay and fire — but they share a conviction that the deepest outcomes come not from overriding what a material wants to do, but from creating conditions for it to reveal itself.

Material as Cultural Memory
James Bassler and Eduardo Portillo and María Dávila ask us to attend to where materials have been — to the long human histories encoded in fiber, dye, and weave structure. For these artists, meaning is inseparable from origin; the biography of a material is part of what the finished work contains. Bassler has spent decades drawing from Navajo wedge-weave, pre-Columbian scaffold weave, and Andean shibori, accumulating a global inventory of material knowledge. Portillo and Dávila traveled extensively in China and India to study indigo dye-making, silk sericulture, and handweaving, learning that fiber is a vehicle for understanding other cultures. Their Azul Indigo series emerged from looking for blue in their Venezuelan mountain landscape. 

Between System and Surprise
One theme recurring in Transformations is the tension between system and discovery. Merja Keskinen describes this generative uncertainty: “I work to see. The joy of discovery and the delight of experiencing colors are essential to me.” Norie Hatakeyama works with factory-made paper-packing tape, an experimental material that enables her to break free from traditional limitations. By submitting an industrial material to the ancient technique of plaiting, she transforms both: the tape becomes sculpture, and the sculpture raises questions about what we mean by “natural.”

Drawing with Material, Drawing in Space
Several artists treat fiber not as the medium of weaving but as an instrument of drawing itself. “Instead of drawing on paper,” Marian Bijlenga says, “I draw in space by using textile as a material.”After rejecting weaving as too slow, she discovered horsehair as an element — stiff enough to stand on its own, allowing a new kind of freedom. Kyoko Kumai has spent decades achieving something similarly paradoxical with stainless steel. She has written of her chosen material with wonder: “Thin pieces of stainless steel wire create a richly expressive fabric that does not stand solidly, cleaving the air. It has its own language fluttering above the floor; breathing and melting into the air.” 

The works in Transformations demonstrate how material intelligence, at its highest level, transcends the categories of craft and fine art altogether.

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We wish you a successful solstice and celebrate it with art. The summer solstice in art spans thousands of years, evolving from ancient astronomical monuments to romanticized folklore and expressive modern landscapes. Among the most famous is Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), by Charles Burchfield (1893 -1967). Burchfield wanted to celebrate “this great moment when the sun and earth meet in their greatest intimacy—a truly mystical event—” by painting one of his grandest landscapes.

The primary hues are vibrant and earthy. They include sunny yellow and gold to represent the sun, peak solar energy, joy, and illuminations and lush geen: to symbolize fertility, abundance, growth, and the vibrant earth. Also featured in solstice celebrations are fiery orange and red to reflect passion, courage, and the transformative energy of fire like that in My Sun for Everyone by Lija Rage. Sky and water blue that echo the expansive summer sky, as you will see in Sol de la Tarde (by Eduardo Portillo and María Davíla, are yet another combination evoked by this event.

Cultures around the globe have historically celebrated this celestail event. Its core symbolic meanings encompass several universal themes, including: Triumph of Light: The abundance of daylight symbolizes enlightenment, the shedding of darkness, and the awakening of the spirit; and Abundance and Fertility: Historically viewed as the height of the growing season, the solstice represents the earth’s fertility, blossoming, and a bountiful harvest.

Also included are  Life Balance and Duality: Despite celebrating the maximum sunlight, the summer solstice also quietly marks the day the sun “stands still” and the days begin to shorten. This duality symbolizes the delicate balance between light and dark, action and stillness, epitomized in Polly Barton’s Sun Dial. Also represented, New Beginnings: The energetic shift toward summer is often used as a symbolic marker to let go of old patterns, set new intentions, and manifest personal growth. Emotional Summer,  by Young-ok Shin, explores this theme.

We wish you all these and more. Happy Solstice!

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approach
Coming from a painting background where the possibilities seem endless, I am more and more fascinated by the limitations imposed by woodblock printing. What excites me is the level of individuality that comes through. It is such a direct, tactile process – its range of marks and qualities are unique.

The emphasis at Tama Art University (where I studied) was on students finding their own approach to this traditional technique. This is something that has stayed with me.For example, although at times I use the traditional kento system to achieve a tight registration, I often take more flexible approaches. I also like to combine the more controlled cutting adopted by many Japanese printers, with the freer expressive style more commonly associated with woodcut in the west.

One of the materials widely used in Tama is varnish. As this repels watercolor, it can be applied to the wood as a painterly addition to the mark-making process. Often a print will come about through a combination of planning and intuitive evolution. This can result in a print being one-off, or a series of variations. These may be resolved into a ‘final’ printed edition but just as often the creative impulse has taken its course.

paper
There are many hundreds of Japanese papers (washi), handmade specifically for watercolor printing. Selection can be quite a long process. The paper usually needs to be sized though Japanese paper gets stronger as it gets older, so sometimes sizing is unnecessary.

The size itself can take a couple of days to make. Its ingredients include nikawa, a type of animal glue, and alum. These are ground, melted in water, and evenly applied with a large soft dosa brush. Once the paper is dry, I try to leave it for several days to allow the size to settle in.

The paper is moistened by layering between several dampened sheets of newsprint. These are wrapped in layers of plastic that allows the moisture to spread evenly. It takes 2 to 6 hours for the paper to dampen ready for printing.

brushes
The brushes used to apply color to woodblocks are a mixture of horse and pig or deer hair. They look like shoe brushes, as you’ll see from the photo below. If the brushes are out of shape, I leave plenty of time for re-shaping as it can take all day.

Before use, the brushes are singed with fire, or a hot plate, and rubbed on a sharkskin, or modern metal equivalent. This splits the hair ends, and softens them, so that they hold more watercolor.

paints and pigments
I normally use gouache or watercolor paints, prepared in small dishes or used directly from the tube. If I want a richer color, I use pure pigments. These are ground in a pestle and mortar and mixed with a binder, such as gum arabic or animal glue. I’ll usually also mix them with some rice paste glue on the block itself.

baren
A baren is used to rub paper onto a colored woodblock. This is a disk about the size of a saucer, usually wrapped in a bamboo leaf, that fits in the palm of the hand.A printer will have several barens to achieve different effects. These may range from inexpensive machine wrapped card, to a skillfully crafted object made over several weeks. The latter cost anything from £300 to £1000. Ball-bearing barens are also popular.

Before use, the bamboo leaf has some light oil rubbed into it. The force of printing, and possibly dampness from the paper, will eventually split the leaf unless this is done. A press can be used instead of a baren, but you lose flexibility. Extra emphasis in areas and intended baren marks can be integral to the final work.

woodblock
Building up a printed image in layers may take several woodblocks. Blocks are selected for the different properties of their wood type. I tend to use shina veneer, which is relatively easy to cut and has a smooth grain. When I need a rougher surface, the shina can be burnt slightly and rubbed to raise the grain; alternatively I use other woods.

The wood is usually cut away to create a relief image for printing. Before printing the block is soaked with water. This keeps the color on the surface of the block, rather than being sucked into the wood.

printing
Color is evenly brushed in a thin layer onto the woodblock, then left until it appears to start to dry. At this point, a sheet of the dampened paper is put in position with the aid of a registration guide. A thin piece of paper, or plastic, is placed over the paper to be printed; then carefully but quickly rubbed over with a baren. This process is repeated for each color, building up the image in layers. For a rich saturation, I apply the same color again.

The results, we would add, speak for themselves!

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