Spinning Straw Into Gold: ACC Gold Medalists and Fellows at SOFA Chicago and Online

October 30, 2011 0 Comment

5R CEDAR EXPORT BUNDLE. Ed Rossbach, plaited cedar bark from Washington state with heat transfer drawing, waxed linen, rayon and rags, 5.5″ x 11″ x 9″, 1993, ©Tom Grotta, 2011

This year at SOFA Chicago (November 4-6) the American Craft Council (ACC) will recognize 28 artists who have been awarded an ACC Gold Medal between 1994 and 2010 in a display at the Navy Pier, curated by Michael Monroe. The ACC awards recognize those who have demonstrated outstanding artistic achievement and leadership in the field for 25 years or more.  Since 1981, the ACC has selected just under four dozen artists working in Fiber to receive a Gold Medal for consummate craftsmanship and/or join its College of Fellows.  We’ve mounted an online exhibition of 21 these artists on our website, browngrotta.com, under Awards. Many of these artists are featured in the catalogs published by browngrotta arts and in the videos and other publications we offer. http://www.browngrotta.com/Pages/catalogs.php Works by Fellows and Medalists  Adela Akers, Dorothy Gill Barnes , Lia Cook, Helena Hernmarck, Gyöngy Laky, John McQueen and Norma Minkowitz are featured in our current exhibition,  Stimulus: art and its inception. Enjoy the show.

 

Press News: Stimulus: art and its inception — our 40th catalog now available

October 23, 2011 0 Comment

Stumulus catalog front and back covers

We are very (and this will date me) jazzed about our 40th catalog, Stimulus: art and its inception. It’s a departure for us, not in the variety of artists and number of countries represented — sculpture, ceramics, art textiles and mixed media by 55 artists from 14 countries — but in what’s new — images and statements designed to give readers a sense of each artist’s creative process. For each of the pieces highlighted in exhibition, the process of finding an image to illustrate the genesis  — whether an event, an object, an emotion, a place —  and of working with the artists to share something of that process in words, was stimulating for Tom and me.  We were also energized by working with Jane Milosch, Director, Provenance Research Initiative, Smithsonian Institution, and former curator, Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum, who writes about creativity and its embodiment in this exhibition in the introductory essay.

Stimulus Catalog: Norma Minkowitz Compound with Stimulus

The stimuli identified by the artists in this catalog is diverse. Current events, like the earthquake in Japan and global warming, inspired some of the artists,  including Norma Minkowitz, whose stitched wall work, Compound, illustrates the attack on Osama Bin Laden. “I began in a spontaneous, unplanned manner,” Minkowitz explains, “arranging lines and subtle patterns, until I had a feeling of the direction it would take. Suddenly the linear image took on the apparition of an aerial view of the compound that I had seen in a newspaper article. Compound combines a replica of the space and my vision of the event.”

Mcqueen, Bess, LaBianca, Serino, Henriksen, Akers, Bijlenga, Hunt, Walker

Several artists, including John McQueen, Nancy Moore Bess, Lawrence La Bianca and Naoko Serino of Japan, have taken Nature as their inspiration. In Serino’s case, Generating-3 was inspired by a Philodendron selloum, which she tended for 22 years before it finally bloomed. Others were inspired by the efforts of previous artists.  Ane Henriksen of Denmark, considered the work of coverlet makers from the 1800s; Adela Akers‘ work references Mbuti designs from Africa. Palimpsest 1, a wall piece by Marian Bijlenga, of the Netherlands, was composed by following the pinholes on the walls of Dutch masterweaver Herman Scholten’s studio to recreate the nearly erased surface.
Still other artists looked to their immediate surroundings. Trio 4, a sculpture of twine and newspaper by Kate Hunt, was inspired by the goats who share her studio. Echoed Surface, an energy-charged object by Randy Walker, was made from a charred and deformed badminton racquet that he found near his home;  Re-Tire,  is a basket Dona Anderson created from a tire chain she found by the roadside.
The catalog is 140 pages and contains 197 color photographs.  It can be purchased on our website: http://browngrotta.com/Pages/c36.php

 

Don’t Miss: Fiber Futures: Japan’s Textile Pioneers at the Japan Society in New York

October 19, 2011 0 Comment

Naomi Kobayashi, Kyoko Kumai and Takaaki Tanaka installation

We had the chance to attend the opening of Fiber Futures: Japan’s Textile Pioneers exhibition last month (which coincided with the addition of the Japan Society’s headquarters to the Landmark Preservation Commission’s roster of buildings in New York) http://www.japansociety.org/page/
programs/gallery. The exhibition is significant in scale — 15 artists, some with room-size installations — and in the comprehensive portrait it provides of the practice of textile art in Japan today. The materials, techniques and sensibility of the pieces varies widely. “During the past decade,” writes in her essay for the exhibition catalog,  Hiroko Watanabe, a professor at Tama Art University and one of the participants in the exhibition, “the unique softness and flexibility of fabric — qualities shared by no other material — have inspired these artists to move beyond mere mastery to create daring, original works that hold the promise of still more impressive advances in the years to come.” There are five related lectures and workshops coming up in November and December:

LECTURE
Mastermind in Textile: An Evening with Dai Fujiwara
Wednesday, November 16, 6:30 PM;
WORKSHOP
Free-Form Saori Weaving Workshop
Sunday, November 20, 10 AM
Sunday, November 20, 1 PM
WORKSHOP
Irresistible Colors: Shibori-Dyeing Workshop
Saturday, December 3, 1 PM
WORKSHOP
Nature’s Inspiration: Embroidery Workshop
Saturday, December 10, 1 PM
WORKSHOP
Nature’s Inspiration: Embroidery Workshop
Saturday, December 10, 1 PM
All at the   Japan Society, 333 East 47th Street, New York, New York (212) 832-1155.

If you cannot get to New York, or you just want to learn more, there is a catalog, Fiber Futures: Japan’s Textile Pioneers, produced by Yale University and available from browngrotta arts http://www.browngrotta.com/
Pages/b45.php. There’s also a free Fiber Futures app with images and artist statements  http://itunes.apple.com/kz/app/fiber-futures-japans-textile/id464150856?mt=8, and a video tour by Nihon NY,  on the exhibition, Episode 18,  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RE1X279oDVo.

Make a Day of It! Stimulus and Other Art Events Nearby

October 16, 2011 0 Comment

If you plan to come to Wilton between October 22nd and November 1st for Stimulus: art and its inception, consider adding a stop at one of our other local art venues to your trip. There are several exhibitions to choose from — all within 20 minutes of browngrotta arts:

Jessica Stockholder, Hollow Places Court in Ash-Tree Wood (partial installation view at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield), 2011 Courtesy of the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York

Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

Jessica Stockholder: Hollow Places Court in Ash-Tree Wood, a collaboration of sculptor Jessica Stockholder, cabinetmaker Clifford Moran and screenprinter Gary Lichtenstein utilizing the wood from a ailing 100-year old ash tree from the Aldrich’s grounds.
258 Main Street, Ridgefield
Tuesday – Sunday, 12 pm to 5 pm.
http://www.aldrichart.org/exhibitions/stockholder.php

Norma Minkowitz at her New Cannan Library Opening

New Canaan Library

Drawn to the Edge: Sculpture and Drawings by Norma Minkowitz
151 Main Street, New Canaan
Monday -Thursday 9 am – 8 pm; Friday – Saturday 9 am – 5 pm; Sundays 12 pm – 5 pm
http://newcanaanlibrary.org

Silvermine Arts Guild, Joe Saccio, Elegy for Clint, Homage for Motherwell, Wood, 6′ x 3′ x 14″

Silvermine Arts Guild

Memory and Metamorphosis, an exhibit of sculptural works in a variety of sizes and materials, including wood, paper and fiber bindings, by Joseph Saccio.
Discovered Masterworks: The Extraordinary Collages of Larry Lewis, the Director’s Choice exhibit that features works by reclusive artist, Larry Lewis, as seen in the collage books that he began in the late 60s and continued to produce until his death in 2004.
1037 Silvermine Road, New Canaan
Sunday: 1 pm – 5 pm; Monday -Tuesday: By Appointment; Wednesday-Saturday: 12 pm – 5 pm
http://www.silvermineart.org

Westport Arts Center

Love: In The Eye Of The Beholder, a members exhibition juried by David Kiehl of the Whitney Art Museum
51 Riverside Avenue, Westport
Monday – Friday, 10 am – 4 pm; Saturday – Sunday 12 pm – 4 pm
http://westportartscenter.org/ev?genre=exhibitions#11valove

Update: Books Make Great Gifts 2010

October 8, 2011 0 Comment

Last December, in our who’s-reading-what survey, artist Kyomi Iwata selected Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 as the best book she read in 2010. (Lena McGrath Welker also selected Haruki Murakami, in her case, Kafka on the Shore , as her favorite read for 2010.) At the time, 1Q84 had yet to be translated into English, but there’s good news.  A massive volume (944 pages) will be released in an English translation on October 25, 2011.  http://www.amazon.com/1Q84-Haruki-Murakami/dp/0307593312. From Amazon, the book is: “A love story, a mystery, a fantasy, a novel of self-discovery, a dystopia to rival George Orwell’s—1Q84 is Haruki Murakami’s most ambitious undertaking yet: an instant best seller in his native Japan, and a tremendous feat of imagination from one of our most revered contemporary writers.”

All Hicks/All the Time — Check Out the Sheila Hicks Wiki at the Mint Museum

September 30, 2011 0 Comment

Colored Alphabet by Sheila Hicks 1982

The third incarnation of Sheila Hicks’ retrospective opened at the Mint Museum in Charlotte, NC on October 1st and runs through January 29, 2012. In its previous two venues, Sheila Hicks: Fifty Years, was well reviewed and the book that accompanies the exhibition contains beautiful photos. http://www.
browngrotta.com
/Pages/b39.php  The Mint’s Wiki on Hicks, however,  raises the bar — adding another component to the retrospective and extending the exhibition’s impact beyond it’s closing date. http://mintwiki.
pbworks.com/w/page/
33119575/Sheila Hicks:
Fifty Years  Extraordinarily comprehensive, the wiki provides considerable detail about Hicks’ early education and career and features links to everything from a 1971 review in Design Journal of her exhibition of reinvented rugs in Rabat, Morocco to a video tour of her work as an “art treasure” of Nebraska and her 2004 Oral history interview with the Archives of American Art of the Smithsonian.  Wandering from link to link offers an art textile historical and world tour (Macchu Picchu to King Saud University to Cour de Rohan, Paris; the Ford Foundation to the Fuji CIty Cultural Center to Target Headquarters). Be sure to take a look.

Sheila Hicks: Fifty Years
Mint Museum Uptown at the Levine Center for the Arts
500 South Tryon Street
Charlotte, NC 28202
704-337-2000; http://www.mintmuseum.org/upcoming-exhibition.html

September Site-ings from New York to LA and Como to Cheongju

September 13, 2011 0 Comment

rush-hour-shanghai, photo by Grethe Sorensen

September offers an abundance of exhibition openings of interest. On Sunday the 11th, Connecting opened at the Ostrobothnian Museum in Finland (Museokatu 3 – 4, 65100, Vaasa, Finland; +358 (0)6 325 3800; http://museo.vaasa.fi/w/?lang=3&page=9. Ending on November 27th, the exhibition features 40 artists from Norway, Denmark, Finland, Sweden and Germany, including Grethe Sørensen.

Serino_japan society

On Friday the 16th, it’s Fiber Futures: Japan’s Textile Pioneers at the Japan Society in New York (333 East 47th Street, (212) 832-1155; http://www.japansociety.org/gallery, through ). Six artists represented by browngrotta arts — Kiyomi Iwata, Naomi Kobayashi, Kyoko Kumai, Hisako Sekijima, Naoko Serino and Hideho Tanaka — are included. (We’ll have more on the opening and the exhibition next week).

Aerie by Lizzie Farey, photo by Tom Grotta

On Wednesday September 21st the Cheongju Biennale opens in Korea (through November 30th; http://eng.okcj.org/home/contents/view.do?menuKey=277&contentsKey=137) which includes Randy Walker, Chang Yeonsoon and Lizzie Farey.  On Saturday the 24th, Energhia — 2011 Miniartextiel Como opens in Italy.

Lightwear 2006 by Anda Klancic

Installed through November 20th, the exhibition features dozens of international artists, including Anda Klancic and Gyöngy Laky (former Church of San Francesco and other locations, Como, Italy; 011-39-31-30-56-21; http://www.miniartextil.it.

PRESENCE/ABSENCE: IN THE FOLDS by Lia Cook photo by Tom Grotta

The ambitious International Kaunas Biennial,  Textile 11: Rewind-Play-Forward  takes place from September 22nd to December 4, 2011, in Kaunas, Lithuania The Biennial offers a rich programof diverse events – collective and individual exhibits, performances, workshops and a series of conferences organised by the European Textile Network (ETN) – aimed at examining the conceptual evolution of visual and textile arts. On the 23rd, in “Rewind into the Future” several speakers, including Lia Cook, Cynthia Schirra, Reiko Sudo  and Chunghie Lee, will discuss how to empower textile culture for the future, why it is important and what is to be done for the upcoming generation. Lia Cook will also show work from her latest research project in cooperation with the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine including jacquard weavings and a video, in a satellite exhibition About Face. http://www.bienale.lt/2011/?p=375&lang=en  Elsewhere, the Fondation Toms Pauli, which played an important role in the International Tapestry Biennials of Lausanne (1962-1995), will exhibit the works of some of the artists represented in its collection of twentieth-century textile art, such as Magdalena Abakanowicz, Jagoda Buić, Kati Gulyas, Ritzi and Peter Jacobi, Jean Lurçat, Maria Laszkiewicz, Wojciech Sadley and Mariyo Yagi http://www.bienale.lt/2011/?p=391&lang=en.  For more information, visit the Biennial’s website http://www.bienale.lt/2011/?page_id=2&lang=en  or ETN’s http://etn-net.org.

On Sunday the 25th, Golden State of Craft: California 1960 -1985 opens at the Craft and Folk Art Museum, 5814 Wilshire Boulevard (at Curson), Los Angeles; 323.937.4230; www.cafam.org. The exhibition, which runs through January 8, 2012, surveys an extraordinary, innovative artistic period that blossomed in post-World War II California.

The-puzzle-of-Floating-World-#2 by Katherine Westphal

Working in a range of materials and forms—from furniture, ceramics, and metals to textiles, jewelry, and glass—artists such as Sam Maloof, Katherine Westphal, Ed Rossbach, Lia Cook, Arline Fisch and Marvin Lipofsky defined the ethos of the era and the West Coast way of life through their creations. The message that these artists presented resounded across the country, shaping how people perceived their homes and instilled art into their daily lives; it made people see the fabric of their environments in a remarkably new light. The exhibition is part of Pacific Standard Time, http://www.pacificstandardtime.org, a series of exhibitions, involving 60 cultural institutions, mounted in conjunction with the Getty, which celebrates the birth of the L.A. art scene.

 

Don’t Miss: Winged Weavers

August 31, 2011 0 Comment

Photograph by Johan Swanepoel/Fotolia via Princeton University Press.

Be sure to visit The Secrets of Winged Architects, a look at some of the most incredible nests in the bird world, in a slide show at Slate.com by Heather Murphy http://www.slate.com/id/2301690/. Murphy writes about Avian Architecture: How Birds Design, Engineer and Build, by Peter Goodfellow. a retired English teacher who has been studying birds since the 1970s. browngrotta arts’ fall exhibition, Stimulus: art and its inception, will feature Éclosion, a work by French artist Simone Pheulpin, that was inspired by a bird’s nest.
Simone Pheulpin

38sp ÉCLOSION
Simone Pheulpin
cotton
4.5″ x 7″ x 7.25″, 2011

Exhibition News: Flora and Fauna, Museum of Arts and Design, New York

August 27, 2011 0 Comment

Rhonda’s friends from high school in Arizona visited New York from LA and Philadelphia in early August. We talked up the Museum of Arts and Design and the High Line as must-see sites and met them at the Museum and had a terrific time. We were all Otherworldly: Optical Delusions and Small Realities (through September 18, 2011), which features artists constructing small-scale hand-built depictions of artificial environments and alternative realities, either as sculpture or as subjects for photography and video. These are worlds of “magic realism” conceived and realized through intense engagement with materials, attention to detail, and concern for meaningful content.

Dorothy Gill Barnes UNTITLED 1995

Gyöngy Laky Red Birds

Mary Merkel-Hess Tall Grass

Tom & Connie McColley Along the Path

There were also some remarkable pieces in A Bit of Clay on the Skin: New Ceramic Jewelry (through September 4, 2011). Flora and Fauna, MAD about Nature (through November 6, 2011), however, was less successful. There were individual works that we liked, including Steffen Dam’s Marine Forms, Wayne Higby’s Mesa Gap and Beth Katelman’s Folly and the works pictured here (two of which were sold to collectors by browngrotta arts, and the Gyöngy Laky work that lead us to contact her about representation back in the 90s). But by mixing works featuring motifs from Nature, like fish and flowers and butterflies, with works made of branches and bark and other natural materials, the curator has created a bit of a mashup — two exhibitions with very different sensibilities installed as one.  Museum of Arts and Design, 2 Columbus Circle, New York, NY 10019, 212-299-7777, http://www.madmuseum.org/see.

Dispatches: Art in situ on Monhegan Island, Maine

August 24, 2011 0 Comment

We visited Monhegan Island inMaine http://www.monheganwelcome.com earlier this month in search of seafood and photos and some of Maine’s most beautiful coastline.  The island has no paved roads — but miles of trails, that are easy to navigate thanks to Monhegan Associates’ trail maps available in stores and trailside boxes all over the island.  Visitors are advised not to miss the shipwreck, lighthouse, museum, and the many

artists’ studios open to the public and to appreciate the abundant plant life and bird population. One of our favorite sites, however, was not listed in any of the literature.  We were delighted when we stumbled upon an art colony of tiny structures populating Trail 11. Reminiscent of the World Beach Project https://arttextstyle.com/2010/05/14/eco-art-news-world-beach-project, in which beachgoers create sculptures of stones, visitors to Trail 11 have created small sculptures of sticks, bark, pinecones, leaves and shells. Some are more accomplished than others, but it was the sheer

volume that impressed us.  We stopped counting at 100, but until then, we had great fun looking behind tree roots, around rocks, in branches and creeks to find as many as we could.  And, we couldn’t leave without making a contribution; Carter, our budding artiste, created the word “ART” out of large sticks.

Carter’s contribution to trail 11, Monhegan Island photo by Tom Grotta