Who Said What: Ada Louise Huxtable

June 25, 2012 0 Comment

Ethel Stein preparing a warp, photo by Tom Grotta

What has set handcrafts apart, and always will, is the individual vision and extraordinary skill of those who create a unique, material work that can range from the practical to the abstract. The union of that vision and skill has an emotional charge lacking in impersonal articles of mass production, delivered with an unapologetic emphasis on the delight of the thing itself. That kind of direct, pleasurable response is almost totally lacking in the gloom and grunge of the arts today.

“Coming in from the Cold,” Wall Street Journal, December 22, 2011.

Guest Post Alert: Carol Westfall

June 13, 2012 0 Comment

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Felt Balls for Peace, Carol Westfall, felted wool with barbed wire, 3″ each, 1994, photo by D. James Dee

We’ve uploaded a new guest post, Textiles and Politics by Carol Westfall. “Textile art is no exception to the rule that art both drives and documents political upheaval,” she writes. This post examines the textile in relationship to national and international political issues, including war, population control, energy and natural resource use and economic inequality. Westfall will be among the presenters at the Textile Society of America’s 13th Biennial Symposium in Washington, DC in September.

Art Event: Wendy Wahl Speaks at the Flinn Gallery, Greenwich, Connecticut, Sunday, June 10th

June 6, 2012 0 Comment

Wendy Wahl works on her installation “Uncovered Grove” at Newport Art Museum. The show will run through February 3, 2008. (photo by Jacqueline Marque)

This Sunday at the Flinn Gallery in Greenwich, at 2 p.m. artist Wendy Wahl will speak about her works of recycled encyclopedias and industrial paper. Wahl is one of 31 artists whose work is included in Paperworks: material as medium at the Flinn, curated by Kelly Eberly, Barbara Richards and Rhonda Brown and Tom Grotta of browngrotta arts in Wilton, Connecticut.

26ww SEEDS(of knowledge) WB vol.18/19 Wendy Wahl World Book encyclopedia pages on inked panel 21.25″ x 34.25″ x 1.625″, 2011

“I love the materiality of books,” says Wahl. Her “branches” of encyclopedia pages reference a medium in transition. Wahl began working with encyclopedias in 2005, though she had created works of industrial paper before that. Her works of repurposed encyclopedias address a set of ideas including accessibility and accumulation, synthesis and sustainability. Installations from this series have appeared at the Newport Art Museum and the Bristol Art Museum in Rhode Island and the Fuller Craft Museum of Art in Brockton, Massachusetts.

FlinnGallery installation of Paperworks: material as medium

“Digital media has led such artists as Wendy Wahl to re-evaluate the potency of the printed word,” Akiko Busch wrote in an essay in the catalog The 10th Wave III, “Wahl finds different ways to reconfigure the pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica; the leaves may be stacked into forms that suggest an alternative forest of knowledge or tightly scrolled and packed within a frame, making for a composition that suggests a cabinet of hidden knowledge, those archives of information that are at once visible and concealed, at hand and remote.”

26ww Seeds(of knowledge) WB vol.18/19, Wendy Wahl, World Book encyclopedia pages on inked panel, 21.25” x 34.25” x 1.625”, 2011, photo by Tom Grotta

Wahl ‘s work can be found in the permanent collection of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum (New York, NY) and the American Embassy in Tashkent, Uzbekistan (through the Art in Embassies Program). She has exhibited throughout the world at venues such as the Contemporary Jewish Museum (San Francisco, CA), the Newport Art Museum (Newport, RI), the University of Wollongong (Australia), and the International Textile Convention (Kyoto, Japan). Her work is regularly reviewed on the Encyclopedia Britannica Blog.

PAPERWORKS Installation at the Flinn gallery

The Flinn Gallery is open daily from 10 – 5 pm on Monday – Wednesday, Friday and Saturday; 10-8 on Thursday and 1-5 on Sundays. The Gallery is sponsored by the Friends of the Greenwich Library. It is located on the second floor of the Greenwich Library at 101 West Putnam Avenue, Greenwich, CT 06830. For more information contact the Gallery, 203-622-7947; email: curator@flinngallery.com or browngrotta arts, 203-834-0623; email: art@browngrotta.com.

Area Art Scene: Three Events in Greenwich

May 25, 2012 0 Comment

Art Greenwich exhibit

Three art events worth visiting in Greenwich, Connecticut: Docked at Delamar Greenwich Harbor this weekend is the floating exhibition, Art Greenwich on the luxury yacht, Seafair http://www.expoships.com.

Marko Remec’s tower of Bible pages at Fernando Luis Alvarez Gallery

We attended the Art Greenwich opening last night and got an eyeful. The participating galleries feature work by contemporary artists in all media including paintings, photography, sculpture, installations and video. Among the artists whose work is displayed are Jasper Johns, Louise Nevelson and Chuck Close.

Lin Yan Gray City #4, Amy Simon Gallery

We’ve got works  of paper in our sites for obvious reasons and we found several interesting works, including Chris Perry’s Ripple, at the the Brenda Taylor Gallery, Marko Remec’s intriguing tower of Bible pages at Fernando Luis Alvarez Gallery and Gray City #4 by Chinese artist, Lin Yan, who has been inspired by Obama’s call to rebuild America “…block by block, brick by brick, calloused hand by calloused hand,” at the Amy Simon Gallery. The Seafair is open until 7 p.m. on Monday.

 

 

Chris Perry’s Ripple, at the the Brenda Taylor Gallery

Paperworks: material as medium, which features more than 80 works, remains open today at the Flinn Gallery in the Greenwich Library just up the hill from the Seafair,   until 5 p.m.,and again beginning next Tuesday, May 29th through June 21st. For more information, call: 203-622-7947. Finally, as you travel Greenwich Avenue between these exhibitions, check out the retail locations featuring works by 131 artists as the city celebrates its 15th Art to the Avenue.

PAPERWORKS: Material and Medium at the Flinn gallery

Exhibition News: Sourcing the Museum at the Textile Museum in DC through August 19th

May 14, 2012 0 Comment

Sourcing the Museum Lia Cook inspired by Syrian 6-7th century and Egyptian 550-625 coptic textile

For Sourcing the Museum, 11 artists (Olga de Amaral, James Bassler, Polly Barton, Archie Brennan, Lia Cook, Helena Hernmarck, Ayako Nikamoto, Jon Eric Riis, Warren Seelig, Kay Sekimachi, and Ethel Stein) were invited by renowned textile designer Jack Lenor Larsen to artists explore the Museum’s historically and culturally varied collections. The resulting exhibition includes 12 new artworks that the artists created, displayed alongside the fabrics that inspired them. The historical textiles highlight the wide scope of the Museum’s collections, ranging from rare Pre-Columbian and Late Roman weavings to Japanese kimono and Central Asian ikats.

 

Sourcing the Museum Helena Hernmarck re-envisiones this 9th-century Egyptian fragment

Helena Hernmarck, for example, re-envisioned a 9th-century Egyptian fragment in an abstract, loose weave. “It was the color that won the day,” she says,”and getting to closely study what an 1100-year-old thread looks like woven in a carpet. There is pile in the carpet, and that made me think, in this case I would weave a looser structure to capture the illusion of pile. This is an oxymoron, since pile is the fiber being seen into its cut, and I am letting the fiber, lying down flat, carry that message. A challenge: but to me, this kind of time-consuming, visually intimate study of something greatly enlarged, is rewarding. I find the advantage of making the plastic strips carry the structure, means I am allowed flexibility how I weave the wool weft — it feels more like sketching than weaving. And it has volume, the volume of puffy wool threads, lending an extra dimension. In other words, this is a double weave, with the lower layer made with the plastic strips; and the upper, plain weave and soumak layer, made with wool, linen and cotton threads. It is the first time I have tried loosening the surface structure like this, still aiming to give an illusion of depth.”

Ethel Stein inspired by a 19th century robe , central asia, Uzbekistan and Bukhara, photo by Tom Grotta

According to the Washington’s Post (“At the Textile Museum weaving tradition into art,” Danielle O’Steen, 3/24/12), Sourcing the Museum “feels fresh and raw…” O’Steen describes the connections that the artists made between old and new as, “loose, and maybe fleeting in the grand scheme of a textile tradition. But the strength of Sourcing the Museum lies in its premise, as it challenges contemporary practitioners to consider a history of traditions, and maybe even embrace lost legacies.” The exhibition continues through August 19, 2012. The Museum is at: 2320 S Street, NW, Washington, DC 20008-4088;Phone: (202) 667-0441.

Art News: Paperworks: material as medium — Grethe Wittrock

May 9, 2012 0 Comment

Among the artists whose work will be included in Paperworks: material as medium, at the Flinn Gallery of the Greenwich Public Library (May 10th – June 21st) is Grethe Wittrock. Using ancient techniques to create contemporary work, Wittrock’s meditative process of repetition allows her to create simple, strong, poetic works of art. She handweaves, knots and braids thousands of strings of silk, gold and paper yarn, custom dyed in Japan. “[Textiles’] softness and flexibility and the way you can shape it, either as a fabric or a yarn, appealed to me,” Wittrock says. “Structures, texture and surfaces are essential to my work and textile can play these roles.” Wittrock’s work has been exhibited through-out the world in cities such as Copenhagen, London, Munich, Hong-Kong, Paris, Sao Paolo and Kyoto. She has won numerous international awards and in 2001 she received a prestigious three-year grant from the Danish Art Foundation. During the 1990s she produced a paper-based clothing line and large-scale commission works for companies and institutions.

Art News: Paperworks: material as medium — Hans-Jürgen Simon

May 8, 2012 0 Comment

1hjs B-II/41, Hans-Jurgen Simon, newspapers, resin, lead sheet, 14.75″ x 86″ x 4.5″, 2002 photo by Tom Grotta

Working with Print Media is how Hans Jürgen Simon characterizes his work and simultaneously describes the material out of which he fashions his art. Simon, one of the artists in Paperworks: material as medium, which opens at the Flinn Gallery in the Greenwich Library in Greenwich on May10th, creates works from printed pages, some of which have not found their way to a reader. He dissects newspapers and returned books and magazine pages and finds new relationships, new materials and colortones, concentrating on the quality of the paper, the color and the typography of the media. The result: works that resemble landscapes and topographical forms in which the raw material has been encrypted, leaving for the viewer, according to one critic, “a camouflouaged trail” of letters and image fragments that reveals “a new structure of meaning.” In his studio in Georgsmarienhütte, Germany, Simon has been composing his imaginatively original and pure forms since 1991 and presenting them in public nationally and internationally since 1994. His work has been exhibited throughout Europe, including at  the Bikuben Paper Museum in Denmark, the Charmey Museum in Switzerland, the Rijswijk Museum in the Netherlands and the Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany. Paperworks: material as medium co-curated by Kelly Eberly, Barbara Richards and browngrotta arts, is at the Flinn Gallery from May 10th through June 21st. The opening is May 10th from 6 to 8 p.m.; there is a Curator’s Walkthrough on May 12th at 2 p.m. and an Artist’s Talk with Wendy Wahl on June 10th. The Flinn Gallery is in the Greenwich Public Library, 101 West Putnam Avenue, Greenwich, Connecticut 06830. For more information call: 203.622.7947.

Art News: Paperworks: material as medium — Eva Vargö

May 5, 2012 0 Comment


“We are living in the middle of the city pulse and are continuously overwhelmed by visual impressions and all kinds of information and on top of that we also very often have to make quick decisions. We all handle and cope with these issues in many different ways, but I do think we all need some quiet time – time for reflection to regain strength and energy in our daily lives,” says Swedish artist Eva Vargö, one of the 31 international artists whose work is included in Paperworks: material as medium, at the Flinn Gallery, Greenwich Library, which opens May 10th. Vargö deals with the life’s fast pace by weaving. “The working process is often repetitive and so it becomes meditative,” she says. “Mostly it gives me some peace of mind and my aim is to work at a slow pace. To be able to do one thing at a time without rush and to let go – to meet the unforeseen. I want to trust my intuition and my inner voice.” Vargö is a member of the International Association of Hand Papermakers and Paper Artists (IAPMA) and an Honorary Member of The Korean Paper Artists Association. Vargö’s husband was the Swedish Ambassador to Korea until last September and so she has spent considerable time in that country. Vargö’s work was included in last fall’s Swedish Contemporary Craft Art, at the Korean Foundation Cultural Center in Seoul, Korea. Her sophisticated weavings in Paperworks: material as medium incorporate old Korean book paper and ink-dyed paper string. The exhibition runs through June 21st. The opening reception is May 10th from 6 to 8 p.m.; there is a Curator’s Walkthrough on May 12th at 2 p.m. For more information contact the Flinn Gallery at (203) 622-7947.

Art News: Paperworks: material as medium — Miriam Londoño

May 3, 2012 0 Comment

Miriam Londoño studied art at Antioquia University in Medelin, Colombia and at the Arts Academy in Florence, Italy. While she lived in Medelin, Londoño worked as an artistexplained the text from an exhibition earlier this year at Galerie 106 in the Netherlands.”The finished works hang on the wall as transparent paper strips with ornate characters and the words a shadow cast on the wall. The graceful play of light and dark contrasts with the emotional character of the stories described there. This paradox of light and shadow frequently reappear in her work.” Londoño’s work has been exhibited in the US, the UK, and Australia, Europe, Asia and South America. Two of Londoño’s works will be included in  Paperworks: material as medium at the Flinn Gallery at he Greenwich Public Library, Greenwich, Connecticut from May 10th through June 21st, curated by Kelly Eberly and Barbara Richards and browngrotta arts. The Flinn Gallery is in the Greenwich Library, 101 West Putnam Avenue, Greenwich, CT 06830. For more information call: 203.622.7947.

Art News: Paperworks: material as medium — Takaaki Tanaka

April 30, 2012 0 Comment

Visitors to Paperworks: medium as message at the Flinn Gallery, at the Greenwich Public Library (May 10th – June 21st) will see Takaaki Tanaka’s show-stopping work, A Hardened Nest, at the entrance to the exhibition. A Hardened Nest was created by arranging threads tightly in space and then covering these threads with a paper fiber mixture which, once dried, hold its given shape in space. Combining prepared units, the artist has built a substantial wall of what he refers to as “nests,” which, he notes, are a fundamental starting point for many species of animal life. “I am interested in the way that fiber made from paper, a material harvested from plants, can take on a completely different aspect when it hardens to form a new shape inspired by the natural world,” says Tanaka. “The shapes become emotional shapes,” he says, that illustrate themes of nature, sense of touch and communication.” Tanaka’s work was featured in the exhibition and catalog for Fiber Futures: Japan’s Textile Pioneers at the Japan Society in New York 2011.