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

arttextstyle

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

arttextstyle

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.

arttextstyle

Transformations: dialogues in art and material this May 9 – 17th at browngrotta arts will feature works from Japan, Korea, Venezuela, the UK, and the US that incorporate indigo. Every culture that discovered indigo seems to have felt the transformation as something more than chemical: the cloth goes into the vat one color and emerges another, steeped in a blue that belongs simultaneously to sky and sea and shadow. The plant’s leaves are dark green, and the mystical blue color is unveiled through a fermentation process — when a dyed article is exposed to air, the color transition occurs, starting from yellow to green, and ultimately resulting in the well-known indigo shade. 

What connects the artists in Transformations  who work in indigo — across continents and generations and very different formal concerns — is a relationship with the material that goes beyond color preference. Each has submitted to the discipline the dye demands. Indigo is not a paint you squeeze from a tube. It requires a living vat, careful chemistry, patience, and what practitioners often describe as ritual. It is a dye that demands discipline to use, with some indigo textiles taking thousands of hours to produce, requiring prolonged concentration akin to a meditative state. 

Hiroyuki Shindo discovered the dye as a student: he first encountered indigo while at Kyoto City University of Fine Arts in Japan in the late 1960s, when an older artisan told him he was the last of 14 generations of indigo dyers. Shindo was determined to prevent the art form’s extinction. Over decades, Shindo maintained indigo vats in Kyoto and developed a distinctive technique entirely his own. He developed his own system, utilizing wide flat troughs in which he laid small stones, watching carefully as the indigo was drawn slowly into the fabric, creating gradations of hue — from nearly invisible shadows to areas of nearly black — through a combination of natural process and his own invention. The white of the cloth, Shindo insisted, was as important as the dyed portions.

James Bassler took a journey to indigo. In 1960, a voyage home from a civilian job in England via a cargo ship through Asia proved transformative. On this journey he witnessed the importance of world crafts and their essential role in cultures — a spinning and weaving demonstration in Bombay and the dyeing processes of Indonesia and Japan. Bassler has since explored the wedge-weave structure of the Navajo, shibori from Japan, and the scaffold weave of pre-Columbian cultures in his textile work. Indigo is threaded through decades of his practice. In works, such as Cumbe, he has used indigo-dyed silk and linen warps in combination with an array of other natural fibers — ramie, sisal, pineapple, nettles — creating textiles that feel like accumulated knowledge made visible.

Japan and paint were Polly Barton’s route to indigo. As a young artist, she worked as a personal assistant to abstract expressionist painter Helen Frankenthaler, from whom Barton says she gained “permission” to build up layers of color in her own work. In 1981, she moved to Kameoka, Japan to study with master weaver Tomohiko Inoue, living in the religious heart of the Oomoto Foundation. Barton has spent over four decades exploring ikat, the ancient technique of binding skeins of yarn in calculated patterns before dyeing, which produces the distinctive blurred, feathered color transitions characteristic of the form. Indigo is central to her palette. Her work uses indigo alongside pigment, sumi ink, soy milk, and metal and silver leaf — materials that she layers to create luminous, meditative surfaces.

One of the foundational figures of American fiber art — and one of its great iconoclasts — Ed Rossbach taught for nearly three decades at the University of California, Berkeley, where he created works in almost every known textile technique during his five-decade-long career, experimenting with labor-intensive techniques such as Andean discontinuous warp weaving, Native American coiled basketry, European lace, and Indonesian ikat. Indigo appeared in his work as part of his deep engagement with global textile traditions. He used the dye not as an element in a restlessly curious practice that moved between the ethnographic and the anarchic — making a basket from plastic, a hanging from newspaper, a piece from tundra grass. Indigo was part of that global inventory, a dye he understood as one of humanity’s great shared materials.

Yeonsoon Chang takes indigo into the realm of philosophy. The Korean artist is known for creating ethereal works of starched indigo and was named Artist of the Year at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul in 2008. Chang’s signature material is abaca — a fiber derived from a species of banana plant — which she subjects to an elaborate 12-step process that includes starching, In her Matrix III series, she dyes the abaca fabric with indigo blue over thirty times, creating tightly stiffened material that pays homage to its disciplined creation. The Matrix series, she has said, illustrates the Asian perspective of the human mind and body as unified rather than separate — and the repeated dyeing, the compulsive labor, the rigid geometry are all in service of that idea.

The Venezuelan partnership of Eduardo Portillo and María Dávila may have traveled the furthest — literally and conceptually — to arrive at indigo. Working together since 1983, they have been dedicated to exploring the intricacies of the material production of textiles, traveling extensively in China and India to study the traditional techniques of indigo dye making, silk sericulture, and hand-weaving. Indigo became central to a pivotal body of work rooted in place and longing. Looking for blue in their mountain landscape and realizing they could only find it in the sky, they merged their previous projects — the silk, the vegetable fibers, the natural dyes — into a series called Azul Indigo, exhibited in 2012, recreating the hours of the day: sunrise, noon, sunset, night, and the night’s shadows — their interest in blue shifting with the intensity of light according to the hour.

That labor-intensive nature of indigo, paradoxically, is part of its appeal for contemporary artists working in an era of infinite digital speed. The vat slows you down. It insists on process. It connects you — through fermented indigo leaves and wooden mallets and resist-tied threads — to every dyer who has stood at a vat in Kano or Kyoto or the Carolina Lowcountry, watching cloth transform in the air. William Morris was right. There is only one real blue dye. And in the hands of artists like these, its presence is spell binding.

Join us to see their work at Transformations:dialogues in art and material (May 9-17). 

arttextstyle

The first work we highlighted was Karyl Sisson’s Pepsi Faux Pot. For years, Karyl Sisson has been collecting things like sewing notions — buttons and zippers, womenʼs vanity items — bobby pins, hair pins, and curlers, and paper drinking straws like the straws in Pepsi Cola Faux Pot. “I like the idea and practice of recycling and am drawn to undervalued and overlooked materials,” Sisson says. “These common, manufactured objects, reminiscent of my childhood, are the building blocks of my sculptures and wall art, while simple interlocking techniques found in basketry and needlework are usually the method of construction.”

Our video of Simone Pheulpin’s Nova, part of the Eclipse series, gives viewers an opportunity to see up close the remarkable alchemy involved in this artist’s work. In Pheulpin’s hands humble strips of cotton become remarkable objects that evoke natural phenomena. She uses a method of her own devising, using neither glue or stitches. “I’m very, very interested in the roots, the layers, everything that is natural,” Pheulpin says. “The concretions, the accumulations, I love that, that’s the basic nature, the basis of my inspiration. I really like everything that is linear, everything that is repeated, piles of wood, walls. I love the walls, also by the sea, for example, the flowing water, the marks in the sand, the desert, the dunes, all that.” Pheulpin’s work will be part of a deep dive into materials in our upcoming exhibition, Transformations: dialogues in art and materials (May 9 – 17, 2026). 

Barcelona-based artist Aby Mackie also approaches “humble” material in innovative ways — in her case, discarded textiles and household remnants are repurposed as fine art. Sourced from the streets of Barcelona, in works like Between Order and Chaos, she reimagines overlooked materials as powerful reflections on memory and value. In Barcelona, the contents of entire homes are often either thrown into the streets or auctioned off at Encants Vells market. The creation of Mackie’s work is driven by the selection and repurposing of objects and textiles from these sources in order to explore ongoing cultural themes, including materialism and consumerism. Mackie’s work will also be included in Transformations in May.

The inspiration for Lizzie Farey’s work comes from the inherent qualities found in the natural materials around her Scotland location. Using willow, birch, heather, bog myrtle, and many other locally grown woods, her work ranges form traditional to organic sculptural forms — much of it pushing the boundaries of traditional technique.  In Willow Ball – 2 and Pussy Willow Bowl, willow seems to have been plucked unchanged from its natural surroundings, yet, with shape and color, the artist adds more. The works achieve Farey’s aim, to create baskets as reminders of the intense pleasure of nature – taking viewers to a place and a time that is universal.

Mariette Rousseau-Vermette was a noted Quebec-based Canadian tapestry artist who pioneered innovations in fiber art during the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Rousseau-Vermette created weavings in which she experimented with scale, form, material, and color, which became known as tapestry-paintings. In Verticles dans le bleu the artist incorporates metal tubes wrapped in wool to create dimension and interest. Rousseau-Vermette’s work mixing optical fibers and wool will be included inTransformations in May.

In Charred Black 2, part of his Seven Baskets series, John Garrett fashions welded wire mesh into a vessel shaped by conflict and renewal. Inspired by images of war-torn landscapes, layers of paint, metal leaf, and bound wire evoke structures scarred and rebuilt, holding both destruction and resilience within their forms. “I had seen many pictures of the destruction of wars in Sudan, Ukraine, Israel, and Gaza,… Piles of debris littered landscapes,” Garrett says. “My painted paper baskets looked to me like structures distressed and damaged and covered in dust.”  Forms were painted and repainted and became new again while speaking of horrors between the layers. Shiny metal leaf covered the interiors and exteriors of others. Charred Black 2 was wrapped with rings of plied wire and tied down with more wire or fabric, bringing to mind a structure awaiting more layers of concrete or plaster. 

In the 1970s, when she was in her 40s and early 50s, Dorothy Gill Barnes taught herself basketry through books, independent study, occasional classes, and connections with traditional makers, also drawing inspiration from contemporary artists and emerging developments in the field. Within a decade, her strikingly original works—crafted from natural materials—gained national and international recognition. Barnes delighted in revealing the ingenuity of nature, from animal-made forms to processes of growth and decay. Her work invites viewers to slow down and truly notice. In Spalted Maple Looking Glass, she has created an interactive experience: a glass lens, frames a small twig, magnifying both the object and its hollow. Through the lens, the tiny scene appears vast — refashioning something ordinary into a moment of wonder.

Marion Hildebrandt studied at the University of California, where she received degrees in the decorative arts and home economics. The artist lived and worked in Napa Valley, California, where she collected the plants — grasses, branches, pine needles, and bark — that she used to make her baskets. She employed the same materials that Native Americans used when they inhabited the area. Like them, Hildebrandt appreciated the natural materials that surrounded her, utilizing her artistic vision to create artistic art forms into structural objects like #r165.

arttextstyle

This year’s Spring “Art in the Barn” exhibition at browngrotta arts is Transformations: dialogues in art and material. In Transformations, we’ll highlight the unique materials adopted by artists we represent, including lead, stones, feathers, seaweed, and coconut fiber. We’ll also explore the singular results achieved by different artists approaching the same material.

One of the those materials is linen — we’ll exhibit “quivers” by Gary Trentham, figures by Mary Giles, vessels by Carol Shaw-Sutton, and wall works by Chiyoko Tanaka, Sara Brennan, and new to browngrotta audiences, Merja Keskinen.

Merja Keskinen is a Finnish artist whose explorations of color and linen intrigued us. She is an illusionist, creating single surfaces that appear dimensional like that in Rhthym of Colors which gives the impression of a three-dimensional work. Her method provides additional surprises.”The texture and structure of the surface imitate woven fabric,” she says, “but I make the works without looms by braiding and sewing. I wind my yarn around frames of different sizes. Usually, the warp thread continues unbroken in the direction of the weft. I weave parts with a simple plait binding, threads of different colors cross each other vertically and horizontally, one over, one under.”

Keskinen’s explorations of color are equally mesmerizing. “I combine colors and threads according to a preselected system. The impressions and changes created by the colors are based on mathematical considerations and systematics. In parts of the works, the thread colors change a few threads at a time according to the chosen system.”

The colors blend optically; subtle shifts and delicate changes are optimized. In Horizontal Colors 1 and 2,  the starting point for each work is three colors — blue, red and yellow, and three different shades of the colors —  nine thin linen threads each. The combinations of three colors created different shades of brown. The combinations of two colors created different shades of violet, orange and green. The works consist of all 81 different color combinations according to Keskinen’s predefined system. Rhthym of Colors consists of 184 differently colored parts.

For viewers, the experience of Keskinen’s work is multifaceted. The different colored threads can be distinguished when viewed closely, when viewed from a distance, the color is formed by the combined effect of the shades. The third element that impacts the viewer’s experience is spatial. “The delicate works made of transparent, light structures take their final shape only when hung in the space…, “ Keskinen explains. “The colors live according to the space. The same work in different spaces can appear as different color experiences. Light plays an important role in shaping the works.”

The artist, who graduated with a Master of Arts degree from the University of Art and Design (now Aalto University) in 1988, lives and works in Helsinki. Keskinen’s career initially focused on industrial textile design and expert positions on textile collections for public spaces, eventually becoming a full-time visual artist. She has held several solo exhibitions and participated in group exhibitions with her works at home and abroad. Her commissioned work for the Finnish Embassy in Paris was completed in 2012 and for the Finnish Pensions Agency in Helsinki in 2020. The Textile Artists Association TEXO awarded Keskinen with the Textile Artist of the Year award in 2019. The Arts Promotion Centre has granted Merja Keskinen a 5-year state artist professorship grant for 2022–26.

The artists in Transformation: dialogues in art and materials, including Merja Keskinen, all meet curator and historian Glenn Adamson’s definition of material intelligence, that is: “a deep understanding of the material world around us, an ability to read that material environment, and the know-how required to give it new form.” We hope you’ll come and see her work this May.

arttextstyle

Each March, New York becomes a global gathering place for collectors, curators, and lovers of Asian art. Asia Week New York (March 19 – 27, 2026) brings together the world’s foremost galleries, auction houses, and museums for 10 days of exhibitions and cultural programming. Here’s a guide to museum exhibits – https://asiaweekny.com/asia-week-march-2026-museum-exhibition-guide/ – from Chinese Porcelain at the Frick, to Hindu Devotional Prints, 1860–1930 at the Met, to a solo exhibition of work by Choong Sup Lim at the Korean Cultural Center. 

At browngrotta arts, it might as well be Asia Week all year long as we have a glorious group of contemporary textile and ceramic artists from India, Japan, and Korea whose work we promote. Asia Week 2026 gives us a good excuse to highlight a select group of their works. Whether you’re a seasoned collector or simply curious, it’s a great time to explore works from these countries in depth.

First up, are stitched and resist-dyed textiles from India by Neha Puri Dhir. Her works explore negative and positive space, reflecting ideas of balance and contrast. The textured surfaces, shaped by stitches and dye migration, add a tactile depth, emphasizing the labor-intensive process she undertakes.

browngrotta arts also promotes singular ceramics, sculpture, basketry, and wall works created by more than 20 artists from Japan. Among these works are ceramics by Toshiko Takaezu and Yasahisu Kohyama. We also show vessels and sculptures by several inventive basketmakers including a group that has studied with Hisako Sekijima — Norie Hatakeyama, Kazue Honma, Noriko Takimaya, Tsuruko Tanikawa, and Masako Yoshida — as well as Shoko Fukuda, Jiro Yonezawa, and Kosuge Kogetsu. Remarkable weavers are also represented, including Hiroyuki Shindo, Masako Nakahira, Jun Tomita, Chiyoko Tanaka, and Naomi and Masakazu Kobayashi.

Five Korean creators of innovative art textiles made of steel, paper, velcro, silk, and ramie are among those whose work we highlight. The effects of light and color in Jin-Sook So’s works of stainless steel reflect her years living in Korea and Sweden. Yong Joo Kim has reinvented velcro as a fabric to create evocative sculptures while Young-ok Shin explores ramie with great impact. Yeonsoon Chang transforms the “softness” of fiber, and transcends the material’s limitations with structures made of abaca fibers and Teflon-coated, glass-fiber mesh to which she attaches gold leaf. Sung Rim Park uses knots of paper, determining the shape and size of each knot based on the meanings and symbolism it holds. While the knots and fibers works that result may appear delicate, they have the power to shape space. 

Pictured here are just a sampling of the Asian artworks at browngrotta arts. Visit our website to see the entire group, by name, or filter by country: Yeonsoon Chang, Neha Puri Dhir, Shoko Fukuda, Norie Hatakeyama, Kazue Honma, Matsumi Iwasaki, Kiyomi Iwata, Yong Joo Kim, Naomi Kobayashi, Masakazu Kobayashi, Yasuhisa Kohyama, Kosuge Kogetsu, Kyoko Kumai, Maki, Nakahira, Nio, Park, Hiroyuki Sato-Pijanowski, Toshiko Sekiji, Hisako Sekijima, Kay Sekimachi, Naoko Serino, Young-ok Shin, Hiroyuki Shindo, Jin-Sook So, Toshiko Takaezu, Noriko Takamiya, Chiyoko Tanaka, Hideho Tanaka, Tsuroko Tanikawa, Jun Tomita, Mariyo Yagi, Jiro Yonezawa, Masako Yoshida. 

arttextstyle

There’s a moment in weaving — the Polish textile artist Lilla Kulka has described it — when the work surprises you. When the loom leads rather than follows. For Kulka, that surrender to process is fundamental: “In the process of weaving, I am often surprised at the direction my work takes,” she says. It’s a quietly radical statement from an artist whose career has been defined by refusing the expected.

Born in 1946 in Kraków, Poland, Kulka came of age in one of the great centers of European textile art — a city where the Academy of Fine Arts carries a legacy stretching back to 1818, and where fiber art was being radically reimagined in the postwar decades. She went on to become a professor at that same institution, shaping generations of Polish artists in her unique fabrics studio.

Kulka’s work defies easy categorization, which is precisely the point. She creates art on the intersection between fiber art, painting, and sculpture, and has spent her career dismantling the hierarchies that place one above another. As she puts it: “Rather than locking myself within the bounds of any one artistic tradition, I have disregarded such artificial barriers to expression.” The results are monumental. Works like Traces (1979) — woven in sisal and handspun wool, stretching nine feet tall — pulse with human presence without depicting it literally. Her early figurative vocabulary evolved into something more elusive: human shadows, outlines, traces of bodies rather than bodies themselves. These were meditations on the great mysteries of life — pain, power, love, faith — rendered in the language of horizontal and vertical lines. 

What makes Kulka’s work particularly charged is its context. She has acknowledged that the political situation in Poland made it difficult to present all of her work publicly in the 1970s and early 1980s. That the work survived and circulated internationally is a testament both to her determination and to the peculiar freedom that fiber art, long dismissed as craft rather than fine art, sometimes enjoyed under censorial regimes.

Her materials speak their own language. Sisal, wool, cotton, steel — she juxtaposes materials with diametrically different connotations, sometimes combining industrial slabs of steel with meticulously handwoven gobelin tapestries. Softness and hardness. The handmade and the industrial. The personal and the structural. It’s a visual argument about what it means to live in a body in a political world. Kulka’s work will be included in browngrotta arts’ upcoming exhibition, Transformations: dialogues in art and material (May 9 – 17, 2026).

Kulka’s work spans tapestry, painting, drawing, interdisciplinary activities, and exhibition design, and she has participated in over 300 exhibitions across 17 countries in Europe, the United States, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, and Israel. She has shown at venues ranging from the Central Museum of Textiles in Łódź — home of the prestigious International Triennial of Tapestry — to galleries in Vienna, Düsseldorf, Chicago, and beyond. 

The enduring relevance of Kulka’s vision was celebrated in 2025 in Krakow in a three-venue exhibition, Tempus Omnia Revelat (Time Reveals All). A comprehensive catalogue raisonné of the same name was published to accompany the exhibition that includes over 300 pages of illustrations and essays. Included are a lengthy interview with the artist and excerpts from a 2003 review by Professor Magdalena Abakanowicz. “Lilla Kulka works in techniques that did not exist before,” she wrote. “The blindness of convention may label them as weaving, yet they are magical, multilayered, and thought-provoking objects, appearing today with particular clarity against the backdrop of society’s dependence on mechanical techniques.”

For those encountering her work for the first time, the invitation is open. As Kulka herself says: “The abstract content of my work cannot be easily explained by the titles of each piece. I invite each viewer to search for and find an individual meaning in my work.”

arttextstyle

Light can also impact a viewer’s experience — influencing the narrative, highlighting focal points. In the works pictured here, light influences the viewer’s experience, creating one — or more —  works when light is shown on the art and a very different second work when shown without a light source. Straight on, light may turn a metallic-tinged work a brilliant white. When light is indirect, the highlight dim and new qualities emerge.

In Adela Akers’s Night Pyramid, a mountainscape comes into sharp focus when illuminated. The image is formed from small strips of foil integrated into the weaving. In Serene Countenance by Polly Barton, the artist uses metallic monofilament and metallic thread to create a subtle glimmer in shadow that transforms into a glowing orb when a light source is introduced. The weft’s metallic thread is brass wrapped around a nylon core, while the warp is a striped combination of silk and metallic-coated monofilament. Other examples of works incorporating metallic threads are Baiba Osite’s Lauks (Field in Autumn) and Animal by Lija Rage.

While living in Japan in the 1980s, Glen Kaufman developed a unique and complex technique in which light provides the finishing touch. He began by weaving a twill pattern in silk, composing collages of photographic imagery and silk-screening those images onto the cloth. He then further abstracted the imagery by applying metal leaf. “When I began using … photography, photo silk screen, metal-leaf application,” Kaufman said, “[it] was a unique use of those materials.”

Yeonsoon Chang also employs metallic materials, developing a method to adhere gold leaf to fibers. Her striking works blend innovative technique with references to classical Eastern philosophy. In works such as The Moon, the Stars, the Sun, light reveals shifting perspectives and diverse experiences. In one video, illumination transforms an already intriguing piece into something entirely new, bringing the metal leaf into sharp focus and casting compelling shadows through the mesh structure

In Kyoko Kumai’s hands, stainless steel mesh appears infused with light, an effect heightened when an external light source is added. Agneta Hobin’s works pull glimmers of light through stainless steel mesh and the unexpected use of mica.

Optical fiber provides an exciting medium for artists Wlodzimierz Cygan and Mariette Rousseau-Vermette. In Totems, a complex weaving takes on a new character when the optical fiber is lit and shifts in color. In Mariette Rousseau-Vermette’s Élégante, a slash of shimmering optical fiber creates subtle intrigue when unlit and serves as a dramatic counterpoint when illuminated. 

Several works for which light is an element or an enhancement will be included in browngrotta arts’ upcoming exhibition, Transformations: dialogues in art and materials (May 9 – 17). 

arttextstyle

Sue Lawty is recognized as one of Britain’s foremost contemporary textile artists. Her work encompasses weavings, constructed pieces, and drawings in both two and three dimensions, exploring rhythm, repetition, and interval. Lawty creates assemblages featuring thousands of tiny stones, like Coast, East Riding of Yorkshire 1-3, each smoothed by the sea and meticulously hand sorted, Whether making drawings and assemblages using tiny stones creating a kind of pixelated cloth, or weaving in linen, hemp, raphia, or lead, she talks of the “integrity of mark making intrinsic to particular thread or structure.” Lawtywill also be running an online workshop, Rhythm & Repetition in Woven Tapestry on Sunday, April 26  and May 3, 2026 on Zoom from 2 – 5pm GMT. To book your spot, visit the selvedge website HERE. 

The late Polish artist, Zofia Butrymowicz emerged as one of the pioneering East European textile artists in the 1960s. Butrymowicz excelled in the wool gobelin technique, utilizing handspun wools that were often rough and irregular to create striking and textured pieces. Color was a dominant theme for Butrymowicz. She frequently emphasized color, reflecting her deep interest in experimentation and new artistic expressions. Throughout her career, Butrymowicz’s contributions to the art world were celebrated globally. Her work was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s seminal Wall Hangings exhibition. Her legacy continues to inspire.

A leading figure in California’s celebrated fiber art community, Katherine Westphal was driven by boundless curiosity and creativity, exploring ceramics, quilting, fiber sculpture, photocopy collage, and wearable art with equal imagination and innovation. “Throughout her career, beginning with the batik samples she made for the commercial printed textile industry in the 1950s, [Westphal] incorporated images from her immediate world: street people in Berkeley, Japanese sculpture, Monet’s garden, Egyptian tourist groups, Chinese embroidery, images from newspaper and magazine photos, and her dogs…anything that struck her fancy wherever she happened to be at the moment – and she could put any or all of them into a repeat pattern.  Her wit and whimsy [were] legendary and her lively approach also inspired her husband [Ed Rossbach] to combine imagery onto the surface of his inventive baskets and containers,” wrote Jo Ann C. Staab in 2015 (“Fiber Art Pioneers: Pushing the Pliable Plane,” Retro/Prospective: 25+ Years of Art Textiles and Sculpture, browngrotta arts, Wilton, CT 2015.) Angels captured her interest in 1976 and resulted in the energetic embroidery Bicentennial Angels. The work is well worth a lookback in 2026, America’s semiquincentennial year.

For James Bassler, the inspiration for My Letterman Yantra was an exhibition commission. He was asked by Jack Lenor Larson to create a piece in response to one in George Washington University’s Textile Museum’s collection.  Bassler reviewed the museum’s digital images, doubtful that the dotted pixels on his screen, so far removed from their three-dimensional source, would prove inspirational.  But he was drawn to an image of a garment from Myanmar (then Burma), a shirt, embellished with yantras, auspicious signs and symbols, associated with cosmic powers that will bring good things to shirt’s wearer. As he is a runner, they reminded him of the race shirts he had been given over the years for participating in marathons, covered with logos and corporate symbols.  Why not, he thought, create a 20th-century version?  The Letterman Yantra is the result, with woven fabric, and embroidered designs that include rows of running “stick figures,” the number 262 and phrases to speed the imaginary wearer and runner, on. The curator pronounced the reimagined version a great success. Larsen wrote, “The two-sided jacket of James Bassler, with ikat-like patterning, is [ ] exceptional, created with a fugitive-dyed magenta yarn wicking into the adjacent areas. If wicking prints are extremely rare, his patterning of the back side, created by clamping and steaming together the patterned front and the plain back, is a unique and primitive form of transfer printing. Bassler has been successfully sourcing museums with varied and extraordinary results for a long time, and here he seems inspired to create a technique not yet in museums!”

arttextstyle