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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Federica Luzzi and Naoya Takahara: Exercises in Being Like Others
June 4 – August 2, 2026
Mattatoio di Roma, Slaughterhouse
Piazza Orazio Giustiniani, 4
00153 Rome
https://www.mattatoioroma.it/mostra/federica-luzzi-e-naoya-takahara-esercizi-per-essere-come-gli-altri

In Rome, sculptures, installations, fragile sheets, fabrics, stitching, and false monuments transform the pavilion of a former Slaughterhouse into a visual journey in which each piece is a song and a constant fear of suffering violence to the body, to one’s own body, and to its play. The two-person exhibition features Federica Luzzi, an Italian born in Rome, and Naoya Takahara, a Japanese born in Ehime but living in Rome since 1977. Separated (soul is never accessible), each works for the other; each dreams of the other’s respective East and West. The exhibition highlights two cultures and a shared search for propitious places — Luzzi through the constant trepidation of the body, the paralysing feminine sense; Naoya with the only comfort of being childlike. 

Material Matters: Sheila Hicks and Shi Hui
Through August 2, 2026West Bund MuseumGallery 3
2600 Longteng Avenue, Xuhui District
Shanghai, China
https://wbmshanghai.com/en/exhibition/1452-event-material-matters

In this pair of solo exhibitions in Shanghai, visitors are captivated by how Sheila Hicks intertwines threads, colors, and histories, and engages with softness and monumentality. At the same time, they decipher the multiple lives Shi Hui gives to paper pulp, and revel in the ways her work rekindles Chinese artistic traditions.

Subconscious Surfaced
Through August 29, 2026 
Moderne Gallery 
1705 N American St. STE 3, 
Philadelphia, PA 19122
https://modernegallery.com/subconscious-surfaced/?mc_cid=ebd45972ba

Subconscious Surfaced is a group exhibition featuring works from the 1960s through the early 2000s. The exhibition, which includes the work of Norma Minkowitz, explores a shared thread of surreal, otherworldly sculptural form across a range of expressions, techniques, and contexts. A number of works in the exhibition were acquired by Marc and Diane Grainer, renowned patrons, collectors, and champions of the arts, who assembled a singular collection over the course of more than 45 years. On view are works featuring figures, narratives, and compositions drawn from deep within the subconscious, emerging from a realm beyond the threshold of immediate awareness.

Diedrick Brackens: gather tender night
Through August 23, 2026
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
701 Mission Street
San Francisco, CA
https://ybca.org/event/diedrick-brackens-gather-tender-night

Diedrick Brackens: gather tender night is the textile artist’s first solo exhibition in the Bay Area of California, featuring fifteen weavings created since 2020, that consider tenderness, migration, and connections with the natural world. Executed on the loom in hand-dyed, cotton fiber and acrylic yarn, Brackens’s works convey a masterful and meditative process of physical discovery and storytelling.

WRIT and WEFTED: Sally Van Doren, paintings and drawings; Nancy Koenigsberg, woven wire sculptures
Through June 21st.
Daphne:art Gallery and Advisory
Bantam, CT. Through June 21st. 
By appointment: daphneadeeds@gmail.com

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

Mark your calendar for the fall: Noguchi to Asawa: Designing Postwar America, which will include work by Ruth Asawa and Kay Sekimachi, among others. It will open at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on September 20, 2026.

Enjoy!

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This May in New this Week we presaged our Spring exhibition, Transformations: dialogues in art and materials, featuring works in which artists engaged with materials in intriguing ways. Landscape Accumulation #11 by Lewis Knauss is a powerful example of the materiality that we explored in Transformations. In this work, Knauss deftly combines linen, hemp, paper twine, paint, and reed in a work that references growth and memory. Alone, away from home at college, Knauss says he “was suddenly struck with nostalgia for the fields and forests of Macungie, Pennsylvania, where I was born. Increasingly conscious of how we create feelings of comfort from familiar places, the textile medium became my vehicle for expressing ideas about the importance of landscape.”

The next work we highlighted was Last Card Weaving  by Kay Sekimachi. Sekimachi is a fiber artist and weaver, known as a “weaver’s weaver” for her unusual use of the loom in constructing three-dimensional sculptural pieces. She has created tubes and handwoven strips like Last Card Weaving of cotton and linen using card weaving — an ancient technique traced back to the Vikings. Fibers are threaded through cards — keeping the cards in place controls the pattern. She demonstrates the technique in a short video from Craft in America. In the video, Sekimachi uses a board to hold the threads which was made by husband, noted woodturner, Bob Stocksdale.

The Garden of Diverging Paths II is a recent work in flax by Irina Kolesnikova. Kolesnikova had emigrated from Russia to Germany. Current world events placed the themes of time and anxiety about the various consequences of what is happening or what might happen front of mind for the artist. In The Garden of Diverging Paths II, Kolesnikova’s alter ego reappears. He is often unsure of himself and his abilities. It seems to him that someone important is in charge controls his destiny. Should he step forward? Or stay where he is and wait for things to resolve themselves somehow? It is that tension between uncertainty and choice that Kolesnikova depicts in her intricately woven works.

Dans le creux de ta main (In the hollow of your hand) is a compelling sculpture by Stéphanie Jacques made of copper and flax. “If I sculpt,” Jacques says,” it is because I want to express something that I cannot manage to put into words. Sculpture is a different language (and there are plenty of other languages).” What interests Jacques about sculpture is that “it occupies space; it has an impact upon it.” Jacques also likes it when there is space within the sculpture—when there are openings, transparency. “[O]bserve [Jacques’s] voids and shadows carefully,” influential UK artist Mary Butcher tells us, of Jacques’s work, “as they are rich with meaning.” 

Enjoy these and more to come in June!

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Textile artist Aby Mackie works from a former bread factory in Barcelona’s Poblenou district, where domestic life and studio practice share the same uninterrupted space. Here are reflections on the materials, histories, and instincts that drive her work.

In a fading corner of Poblenou, textile artist Aby Mackie lives inside a former bakery where nothing is polished away, not the industrial scars, not the clutter of family life, not even the ghosts held in cloth.

Barcelona has always known how to reinvent itself, Mackie says. Warehouses become galleries, fishermen’s quarters become boutique hotels, factories soften into loft apartments advertised in the language of “authenticity” and “creative living”. But in Poblenou, the city’s old industrial heartland, some buildings still resists the smoothness of redevelopment. For now, at least.

On an unassuming street between construction sites and old workshops stands a former bread factory dating back to the early 1900s. It operated as a working bakery until 2015.  Today it is home to the textile artist Aby Mackie, her husband Laurence and two teenage children, two cats, a dog, and an ever-shifting ecology of cloth, furniture, ceramics, books and salvaged objects. 

“There’s never really a distinction between work and living here,” Mackie says. “The work exists inside the house, and the house exists inside the work.”

The statement feels literal. Folded textiles spill from shelving. Fabrics wait half-stitched across large tables. Antique chairs hold piles of cloth in various states of repair and transformation. Kilim rugs overlap beneath olive-green 1960s leather seating. Mid-century shelving bows gently under the weight of books, vessels and material samples. The walls are layered salon-style with vernacular ceramics, found mirrors, tapestries, paintings and objects gathered from Barcelona’s Encants flea market or rescued from the street.

That accumulation mirrors Mackie’s artistic practice. Working predominantly in textiles, she deconstructs existing fabrics, often domestic linens and once-intimate household cloths, before reassembling them into tactile works that retain visible traces of their earlier lives. Her pieces hover somewhere between fine art, archaeology, and repair.

“There’s a history embedded in textiles that interests me enormously,” she says. “A worn edge, a repair, a stain, those things aren’t imperfections to erase. They’re evidence of life lived.” Throughout the house, evidence is everywhere.

In the bathroom, collections of hand mirrors are hung rhythmically rather than symmetrically, multiplying reflections and fragments of light. In the open-plan living space, the skeletal base of the building’s enormous former oven remains intact, anchoring the room like an industrial ruin incorporated into domestic life. Part of the metal oven pot make an improbable lamp shade. Nearby sits a 19th-century four-poster bed, improbably grand within the old factory volume.

Like much of Poblenou’s remaining industrial architecture, the former bakery is slated for demolition in the coming years as the neighborhood continues its transformation. Mackie understands the precariousness of occupying such a space. “There’s a temporary feeling to it now,” she says. “You know these buildings are disappearing one by one.”

Perhaps that impermanence explains why the house feels less decorated than inhabited, less concerned with permanence than with continual adaptation.

Objects arrive constantly. Barcelona’s weekly ritual of leaving unwanted possessions on the street has become an informal sourcing network for the family. A discarded tapestry. A stack of ceramic plates. An abandoned chair with good bones.

“People leave incredible things outside,” Mackie says. “Things that already contain a life.” The city itself becomes part of the work.

Originally from Leicester, Mackie studied in Nottingham before traveling extensively in her 20s. She arrived in Barcelona 23 years ago intending only to learn Spanish before moving onwards to Mexico. She never left.“Apart from a short time living in Chile, Catalonia became home very quickly,” she says.

That sense of rootedness exists in tension with her practice, which is fundamentally about transformation. Cloth is cut apart, reconstructed, layered, distressed, and repaired. Histories are preserved but altered. Critics increasingly situate her work within conversations around sustainability, material memory and the politics of domestic labour. Yet inside the former bakery, theory feels secondary to touch.

The atmosphere of the house is overwhelmingly tactile. Aged leather. Glazed clay. Raw wood. Woven wool. Fraying linen. Oxidised metal. Every surface invites handling.

Even the architecture participates in this material conversation. The factory was never aggressively renovated after the bakery closed. Rather than erasing its industrial character, Mackie and her family have adapted themselves to the building’s existing logic.

During the day, textiles move constantly through the space. Materials are cut on dining tables. Cloth dries near bookshelves. New works lean casually against antique furniture. The boundaries between production and domesticity collapse entirely.

“The house isn’t styled around the practice,” Mackie says. “It’s produced through it. That distinction matters.

Many artists speak about blurring art and life, but here the overlap feels genuinely unresolved. Family existence leaves visible marks. Teenagers move through spaces filled with fragile artworks. Pets sleep beneath unfinished pieces. Daily routines interrupt concentration. Nothing is isolated or protected from the mess of ordinary life.

And perhaps that is what gives both the work and the house their unusual emotional texture. Textiles, after all, are among the most intimate materials humans produce. They absorb bodies, habits, histories, and time. Mackie’s practice depends upon recognizing that emotional residue rather than sanitizing it away.

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In the catalogs we produce for most exhibitions we curate (63 to date) we often include detail shots. In the volume for Transformations, however, we’ve highlighted installations — specifically, groupings of works made of the same materials, executed by different artists in strikingly different ways. We’ll take up the details here instead.

Feathers in art symbolize flight, spirituality and transformation. In Transformations, we’ve combined works that incorporate feathers by Chris Drury, Lewis Knauss, and Dominic Di Mare. Di Mare’s Mourning Station #4 is one of a series of altars, rune, and letter bundles. They remind of ancient ritual objects, of religious mysteries from vanished civilizations. An egg is concealed beneath the feathers. Di Mare suggests a spiritual path and also conjures memory and rebirth.

Another material we have explored in Transformations is metal, which offers unlimited options for expression. Stainless steel filaments are molded and woven by Kyoko Kumai while colored titanium is woven.

Lead becomes cryptic calligraphy in Sue Lawty’s hands and copper wire becomes figures in Mary Giles’ work and three-dimensional sculpture when layered by Tsuroko Tanikawa.

Elemental fibers are often the choice of artists at browngrotta arts. In Transformations, cotton, ramie, linen, jute are among the traditional fibers featured. Flax gets a wall of its own. Susie Gillespie and Irina Kolesnikova create fiber paintings of flax, with images of a cottage and a curious character, who Kolesnikova calls her alter ego. Also paired are a walnut bark box by Masako Yoshida stitched with flax thread and Stéphanie Jacques’ humanoid flax sculpture mounted on a copper plate. 

And there are more — seaweed (Jeannet Leendertse), clay (Toshiko Takaezu, Yasuhisa Kohyama, Valerie Pragnell, Stéphanie Jacques), stones (Christine Joy, Dorothy Gill Barnes, Stéphanie Jacques), and willow (Dail Behennah, Esmé Hofman, John McQueen, Stéphanie Jacques) just to name a few.

Join us at Transformations  through May 17th — many more images on our website: https://browngrotta.com/.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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First this month was Burning Bush by American Katherine Westphal. Westphal concentrated on surface, pattern, and decoration in textiles, quilts and clothing, as well as vessels. The use of fractured and random images, as featured in Burning Bush, became a signature of her work. In the catalog for the OBJECTS USA exhibition in 1970, Westphal wrote, “I was trained as a painter. I see things from that viewpoint. I build up; I destroy. I let the textile grow, never knowing where it is going or when it will be finished. It is cut up, sewn together, embroidered, quilted, embellished with tapestry or fringes, until my intuitive and visual senses tell me it is finished and the message complete.”

Next up was Aurora, an intriguing piece in titanium by Kyoko Kumai of Japan. In 1975, Kumai began using metallic thread for the warp in her tapestries. She started first with with stainless steel, then added titanium, which comes in many colors. Aurora, which is featured in Transformations: dialogues in art and materials (May 9-17), the upcoming exhibition at browngrotta arts, is made of crystal-finished titanium in artfully blended colors. “I am supremely happy if these works create a rich environment that surrounds the viewer,” she says, “arousing various mental images and liberating the spirit.” 

Jane Balsgaard is a Danish sculptor and painter Initially, working with paper did not interest her, but its potential for flight and refracting light captured her attention. Balsgaard spent time in Japan in the 90s, preparing for exhibits there. Works of paper and twigs, like Paper Sculpture 4, were the result. In her work, white paper often contrasts the dark color of the willow twigs, the skeleton framing the paper. Balsgaard is the recipient of an Artist’s Lifetime Grant from the Government of Denmark.

Between Two Sunsets by Baiba Osite explores the fragile threshold between collapse and regeneration, using materials that carry ecological and emotional weight. Driftwood washed ashore and fragments of plastic collected after the destructive floods in Jūrmala in Latvia become markers of the intertwined vulnerability of humans and nature. These remnants of civilization return as a visual reminder of the layers of pollution that shape our environment. Osite is known for her work with different fiber materials including driftwood, glass beads, wire, metal spirals, wool, and linen. Reconstruction is a means to new possibilities, multiple paths to renewal, she says. Osite’s work incorporating metal springs will be featured in Transformations.

See more at Transformations at browngrotta arts this May 9 -17: https://browngrotta.com/exhibitions/transformations-dialogues-in-art-and-material

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

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

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

By appointment: daphneadeeds@gmail.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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It could also be her ever changing nature that captures our attention. Her light illuminates our quietest and most contemplative hours. “In a dark sea of instability, the full moon in a richly deep blue sky is both reassuring and evocative,” says Laura Foster Nicholson. “Hints of reflective threads in Dark Moon aim to bring split seconds of insight and imagination, as do the stars.”

Or perhaps it’s simply the spectacle of moonlight. Paul Furneaux’s visit to the Norwegian fjords led to Fractured Moon, Fractured Mountain. He was particularly taken by the drama played on the fjords by the change of light, one half often shadowing the other — when translated to Fractured Moon, Fractured Mountain, it’s reminiscent of the drama of the familiar light and enigmatic sides of the moon.

It’s also magical, and mystical. Golden Moon, by Norma Minkowitz, has a large, intricate orb rising up. It is a symbol of illumination, insight and mystery. “The moon is a metaphor for beauty in this world,” she says, “as well as acting as a source of light in the darkness”. Golden Moon is one of a series of vessel forms that Norma Minkowitz been creating since the 1990’s. The vessels represent containers of different thoughts: some dark, some optimistic and some, like Golden Moon, ethereal.

The moon has been used by artists to express “longing, change, the spiritual, the mysterious, and the sorrowful, according to WikiArt, the Visual Art Encyclopedia. In When Darkness Comes Calling, John 
McQueen wanted to capture that magical moment when a full moon comes out in a dark sky. The light and dark contrast is achieved by surrounding the white birch bark of the moon with the darker back sides of the pine and birch barks. The title of the piece comes from the lyrics of a song by Lily Kershaw, As It Seems. In The Other Side of the Moon, McQueen makes a tongue-in-cheek observation about our obsession with the moon. One side of the vessel reads: Man made up the man in the moon. The second side says: The first self-serve in no man’s land.

Works inspired by the moon that reflects a visual language that crosses geography and history. Here are moon-inspired works from artists in Venezuela and the UK. Eduardo Portillo and María Davila use indigo to illustrate the night, the moon, the sky, the clouds, the dawn; moments of every day; moments filled with blue. 

Wishing you many lunar interludes and the mystical magic that accompany them.

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