Newsflash: Eco-Art extended through June 22nd

June 4, 2010 0 Comment
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Eco-Art Installation at the Artifact Design Group

Our current exhibition, Eco-Art: Materials, Recycled, Repurposed and Re-Envisioned at Artifact Design Group, 2 Hollyhock Lane, Wilton, Connecticut, has been extended through June 22, 2010.  For more information call Artifact at 203.834.7757 or browngrotta arts at 203.834.0623.  Make a day of it and visit The Dressmaker’s Art and Andy Warhol’s Flowers at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich or Tom Molloy at the Aldrich Museum in Ridgefield  through June 13th; assorted exhibits after that.
 

Eco-Art News: Eco-Site-ings

May 26, 2010 0 Comment

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Environmental aesthetics have come a long way from Birkenstocks and macrame.  The web features a wealth of sites that feature ecological conscious design.  Here are several we like: HAUTE*NATURE is an eco-guide to creative ideas, art and green products that blend high style with sustainability like the  Sit Bag Suitcase chair by maybedesign. http://hautenature.blogspot.com Then there’s treehugger.com the Earth Mother of all eco-sites. The site has regular sections on Design & Architecture, which highlighted Gyöngy Laky’s environmental architecture in 2008. Also a Fashion & Beauty section, which this week covers the (Re)Fashioning Fiber: New Horizons in Environmental Art and Fashion exhibition http://abigaildoan.blogspot.com at Green Spaces Gallery, which includes work by Ceca Georgieva and Abigail Doan.  You’ll also find eco-news, games, green buying guides and lots of How-Tos. Ranked by the Times Online as one of the 100 Best Blogs of 2009, treehugger.com also offers the occasional odd take on the topic, from the photo essay: Clouds that Look Like Boobs (yeah, these do) to the celebrity report: Football Player Leaves NFL, Starts Interning At a Small Organic Farm to eco-pop quizzes like: Is Your Sex Sustainable? Fair warning You can start out looking for a local place to recycle batteries and find yourself an hour later still engaged. Also enjoyable is http://www.ecouterre.com/about which is devoted to the future of sustainable fashion.  It was there that I learned about a “sweat shop” in Paris where you can rent sewing machine time by the hour and sip coffee or tea while you work, got a first glimpse of “vegan style” and learned about the FEED projects great looking Guatemalan ikat totes that provide nutrition for malnourished kids.

 

Then you may want to bookmark the Sustainability and Contemporary Art blog http://artandsustainability.wordpress.com which aims to cover the deepening relationship between contemporary art and notions of environmental sustainability which can include everything from eco-critique to a report on sustainability summer school. If you want to do more than just read about ecology and art. Then the Center for Sustainable Practice in the Art website  http://www.sustainablepractice.org should be your next stop. The Executive Director is Ian Garrett who teaches Sustainability in the Theatre Department at CalArts University.The site covers conferences, grants and exhibitions and offers book suggestions, too.

 

 

Eco-Art News: Outtakes

May 19, 2010 0 Comment
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YEW SPHERES and photo by Chris Drury

Several of the artists that are included in Eco-Art: Materials Recycled, Repurposed, Re-Envisioned have created environmental installations and other works that could not be included in the confines of the exhibit at Artifact Design Group which continues through May 31st. Here’s a sampling:

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BREATHING VESSELS and photo by Britt Smelvær

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GRAFTED WILLOW by Dorothy Gill Barnes photo by Cynthia Tinapple and PROTEST by Gyöngy Laky

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THRU THE WINDOW and photo by Lawrence LaBianca

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SNOW BALL EXPERIMENTS AND LANDSCAPE FOR MEN, burdock Burrs and photo by Ceca Georgieva

 

Technorati Tags: Ceca Georgieva, Chris Drury, Dorothy Gill Barnes, Eco-Art, Lawrence LaBianca, Britt Smelvær

 

Dispatches: The 13th International Triennial of Tapestry in Lodz

May 17, 2010 0 Comment
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Identification by Aleksandra Stoyanov, sisal and cotton, 250×80, 230x180cm

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Morning Night by Nancy Koenigsberg, Size: 78″ x 88″ 15″, coated copper wire and glass beads

The 13th International Triennial of Tapestry opened this week at the Central Museum of Textiles in Lodz, Poland.  The exhibition includes work by 130 artists from 51 countries.  Among the participants are Nancy Koenigsberg of the United States, Aleksandra Stoyanov of Israel and Anda Klancic of Slovenia.  The international jury, which includes Kyoko Kumai, Professor of the Nagaoka Institute of Art Design, Japan, has “highly commended” seven of the works in the exhibition.  One of the works commended by the jury was Footpaths, by Anda Klancic. During the Triennial, cities throughout Poland will present shows of fiberworks by local and international artists. The exhibition ends on October 31, 2010. Central Museum of Textiles. ul. Piotrkowska 282, 93 – 034 Łódź, Poland; (0 42) 683 26 84.

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FOOTPATHS II by Anda Klancic photo Francesco Montenero

Technorati Tags: Tapestry, Triennial of Tapestry

Technorati Tags: Tapestry, Triennial of Tapestry, Kyoko Kumai, Nancy Koenigsberg, Aleksandra Stoyanov

Eco-Art News: World Beach Project

May 14, 2010 0 Comment
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Pattern made by Sue Lawty on a south Devon beach

Sue Lawty World Beach Video

If you have ever aspired to be an Eco-Artist, the World Beach Project is your chance. A global art project devised by Sue Lawty while she was artist-in-residence at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the World Beach Project is open to anybody, anywhere, of any age. Building on the experience many of us have of making patterns on beaches and shorelines, this project combines the simplicity of making patterns with stones with the complexities of shape, size, colour, tone, composition, similarity and difference. Lawty’s idea for this project has always been based around patterns made with stones. That means no seashells, seaweed, driftwood or other flotsam and jetsam commonly found on beaches.

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Lawty has explained her inspiration: “The idea for the World Beach Project arrived in my head fully formed and in an instant. It popped up by way of responding to the response to my work using small stones, which in its turn, is a response to the land – specifically, rock. Whether a line of quartz splitting a rock face or a huge folded mountain range, the structure of rock talks of the structure of our planet. It is like a map of time – the earth drawing itself on a massive scale. And whether stones are satisfyingly smooth… or like long thin fingers… or beautifully, almost purely round; whether they are knobbly, shiny, dull, crinkly, holey, patterned or plain, black or white – they reflect the language of their making i.e. how they look in this de-constructed state is as a direct result of their construction, probably millions of years ago. I find this exciting. World Beach was conceived as a global drawing project; a stone drawing project that would speak about time, place, geology and the base instinct of touch. Drawings made on shorelines all over the world, which although erased by the next tide or rains, would be collected within the V&A to become a permanent record of the individual human desire to make pattern. To pick up a rock, is to touch base. Touching stones gives us a primal, spiritual connection with the earth. When we handle a stone, we hold in our hands a small drawing, a tiny piece of the map; we are holding time. That’s why.”

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‘Hells Mouth, North Wales ‘ Jess Hutchinson

It’s easy to get involved.  More than 800 people have participated from Ross Island, Antarctica to Cape Town, South Africa.  Go to the map and pick your favorites. (Some of ours: Rarotonga, Oceania, Mt. Hood, Washington, Klive Beach and Eastbourne.) Watch Sue Lawty explain how to get involved in the project by watching the World Beach Video . Then go to the V&A website for instructions on adding your art http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/textiles/lawty/world_beach/ for instructions on adding your art

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Technorati Tags: Art Installation, Sue Lawty

Eco-Art News: Green by the Foot

May 10, 2010 0 Comment
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photo courtesy of dominicwilcox.com

Field is a magical installation by Dominic Wilcox made of 500 eco-friendly shoes whose laces rise in unison and grow toward’s the window’s light. View the video at the artist’s website: http://www.dominicwilcox.com/field.html or see the installation in person at the Salone del Mobile at Entratlibera c.so indipendenza 16 / 20129 milano / italy / tel. +39 02 70006147 until July 2010.
 
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photo courtesy of dominicwilcox.com

 

Eco-Art News: Entre glace et neige exhibit in Italy

May 7, 2010 0 Comment

 

lake Concordia by Chris Drury

Land artist Chris Drury is one of more than 30 international artists included in the exhibition, Entre glace et neige. Nature’s processes and energies, which opens at the Centro Saint-Bénin in Aosta, Italy on May 15th and runs through October 26, 2010.  The exhibition, curated by Laura Cherubini and Glorianda Cipolla, investigates the relation between art and nature, focusing on elements such as ice and snow, icons of the natural transformations of matter. Valle d’Aosta, the exhibitions locale, offers an exemplary perspective on the dialectical shifts between water, ice and snow – in their aesthetical, scientific and ecological aspects.

 

 

 

Using different techniques and expressive strategies – from painting to photography, from film to sculpture and installation – the artists in Entre elace et neige have dealt with natural phenomena representing the solid states of water. Work by established artists such as Anish Kapoor, Mario Merz, Salvatore Scarpitta, Hamish Fulton, Lawrence Carroll and Salvo will be present alongside work by younger artists such as  Elisa Sighicelli, Massimo Bartolini, Hans Op de Beeck, Christian Frosi, Lucy+Jorge Orta and Loris Cecchini to investigate the way art reflects on natural energy, in its dual aspect of a dangerous, and currently endangered, universe. In the exhibit, Jana Sterbak’s Dissolution creates impractical ice chairs, while her videoFévrier depicts a Montreal ice-skating rink with clear Brueghel quotations. Anish Kapoor celebrates sun and moon with a white marble mountain. Walter Niedermayr portrays the huge emptiness of mountains, punctuated by tiny figures. Chris Drury captures the life of an iceberg and offers the equivalent of a glacier’s electrocardiogram.

 
Drury’s work, Basket for the Crows, is included in Eco-Art: Materials Recycled, Repurposed, Re-Envisioned, at Artifact Design Group in Wilton, Connecticut through May 31, 2010. He is a Curator’s Choice artist in The Green Museum.

Technorati Tags: Chris Drury, Environmental Art, Eco-Art

Summer Stock: Artist Lectures, Classes and Workshops

April 25, 2010 0 Comment

Here’s a list of opportunities to connect this summer with artists that browngrotta arts promotes:

Dorothy Gill Barnes in her studio

Dorothy Gill Barnes
May 30th to June 11th

From Nature: Textiles/Sculpture, Penland School of Crafts, Penland, North Carolina ;
Using mostly materials gathered from the Penland landscape, students in this class will construct vessels or sculptures that honor nature using a variety of techniques: carpentry, sewing, weaving—whatever is appropriate to local materials and suitable to individual inspiration. We will work with respectfully harvested heavy and delicate barks, grasses, wood, vines, and roots.

Dail Behennah at COLLECT 2009

Dail Behennah
May 30th to June 11th

Line, Light, and Shadow: An Approach to Basketry Construction, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Deer Isle, Maine;
The shadows that baskets cast and contain are often complex and beautiful and you will be encouraged to consider this aspect of the structures that you make. Ways of joining hard and soft materials will be demonstrated and, if necessary, invented in order that 2D and 3D forms can be constructed. Demonstrations, exercises, and discussions will provide inspiration, which will enable you to develop your own ideas. Participants will be encouraged to make samples, 3D sketches, and a more considered piece of work.

Nancy Moore Bess holding Glacial Planes at SOFA NY 2010

Nancy Moore Bess
May 16th to 22nd

Japanese-Inspired Baskets, Snow Farm, Williamsburg, Massachusetts;

Some traditional Japanese Baskets require only fifteen minutes and a smile. Others can consume the length of an entire workshop, no matter its length. Each example in this workshop can lead to hours of experimentation and dozens of variations.

July 23rd

Wrapping Flowers — Japanese Style , Berkshire Botanical Garden, Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
In Japan, presentation influences so much – food, flowers, tea. But Japan is not the only culture this worksop will be inspired by. Their are wonderful exsiting flower arrangement traditions from many cultures and this worksop will draw from them.

August 6th to 10th

Pillow Baskets: Screen and Paper, Peters Valley Craft Center, Layton, New Jersey; Contact: Jennifer Brooks; www.petersvalley.org
A wide variety of hardware store screening can be cut, folded, woven and stitched into lovely vessels. A covering of bits of handmade papers creates a luminescent skin. Years of travel to Japan and teaching has exposed Nancy Moore Bess to a wide range of vessel forms. Her passion for Japanese Packaging influences all that she creates.

Green Sculptures by Ceca Georgieva

Ceca Georgieva
Weekends from May to September

Green Summer Workshops, Ceca’s garden in the Vitosha Mountains near Sofia, Bulgaria. Email us at art@browngrotta.com if you’d like more details. The workshops will focus on dyeing with natural dyes using old traditional Bulgarian recipes.

Sheila Hicks Reflected in her Deck Weaving

Sheila Hicks
July 2010; exact date to be determined

Global Intrigue II 4th International Textile and Fibre Triennial , Museum of Decorative Arts and Design, National Museum of Art, Riga, Latvia
The exhibition opens July 9th at the Arsenals Exhibition Hall and runs through September 5, 2010. Sheila Hicks, one of two specially invited artists, will speak and exhibit work.

Lewis Knauss in Front of RETURNING GRASSES

Lewis Knauss
August 10th to August 14th

Fiber and Handmade Paper into Sculpture (and Artist in Residence) , The Bascom, P.O. Box 766, Highlands, North Carolina 28741

Mia Olsson TRACES 6 RELIEF Detail

Mia Olsson
June 28th to July 4th

Dyeing with Plants , Sätergläntan, College of Handicrafts, Knippbodarna 119, SE-793 4, Insjön, Sweden

August 9th to 13th

Free Embroidery, Black on white, White on black, White on white…, Sätergläntan, College of Handicrafts, Knippbodarna 119, SE-793 4, Insjön, Sweden

Technorati Tags:
Ceca Georgieva, Dail Behennah, Dorothy Gill Barnes, Lewis Knauss, Nancy Moore Bess, Sheila Hicks, Artist Lectures, Artist Workshops, Artist Classes

Sneak Peek: Ritzi Jacobi at SOFA New York 2010

March 31, 2010 0 Comment

browngrotta arts will present two recent works by art textile pioneer Ritzi Jacobi in its exhibit at SOFA New York 2010. Since the late 1960s, Jacobi’s work, created first with Peter Jacobi, and since the 80s alone, has produced large tapestry reliefs that underscore the sculptural possibilities of fiber. In these works, Jacobi “draws” in three dimensions, creating light and shadow with fiber cables and bundles of wrapped fibers. Jacobi places viewers in the midst of a “shingled, edgeless terrain,” writes Robert Bell, Senior Curator of Decorative Arts and Design at the National Gallery of Australia, “allowing us to navigate its complexity with our senses of touch, smell and sight. Without the distraction of a visible or literal narrative, we are encouraged to examine the minutiae of the structure, and become an active partner in Jacobi’s textile architecture as we subconsciously reconnect its discordances.”

Jacobi’s individual and collaborative works are found in museums around the world, including the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, New York; Detroit Institute of Art, Michigan, National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Japan; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands; National Gallery of Modern Art, Rome, Italy; and Bellerive Museum, Zurich, Switzerland.

We are excited about exhibiting two quite different, yet representative, works by Ritzi Jacobi at SOFA New York. The tension and tactically in her work is always exciting for viewers. In Blue Zone myriad shades and tones of a single color create additional intensity. In Floating Matter there is a complexity of surface and structure — by summarizing cable elements in various techniques, the single particles generate a vivid, pulsating pattern. In either case, technique has become secondary to the overall composition.

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Contemporary Tapestry, SOFA NY, Tapestry, Ritzi Jacobi, Coconut Fiber

Sneak Peek: Wendy Wahl’s branches at SOFA New York 2010

March 25, 2010 0 Comment
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Next month, Rhode Island-based artist Wendy Wahl will exhibit branches, an imposing interactive sculpture constructed from discarded and deconstructed Encyclopedia Britannicas inside the Park Avenue Armory in New York for the Sculpture, Objects and Functional Art (SOFA) exposition. From April 15th through the 19th, branches will flank SOFA’s entrance inside the Armory and stand approximately nine-feet high, six-feet deep, and eleven-feet wide. Viewers will be encouraged to move through the sculpture, whose form and materials will serve as a contemporary reflection on the ancient idea of the Tree of Knowledge, “We are thrilled to have Wahl frame this year’s edition of SOFA New York with her provocative work that will doubtlessly energize veterans and newcomers alike,” added Mark Lyman, President, The Art Fair Company and Founder/Director of SOFA.

“I love the materiality of books,” explains Wahl, “and branches is a tribute of sorts to a medium in transition. It’s a wonderful opportunity to continue my exploration at SOFA in New York City—the center of the rapidly changing publishing industry. I want the fair’s audience to think about how they get their knowledge and to question their relationships to the natural world. What are the connections between nature and language? How does the existence of a multitude of new ways to communicate alter our understanding of meaning and significance?” The installation will continue a series that Wahl began in 2005, which addresses a set of ideas including accessibility and accumulation, synthesis and sustainability. Previous installations in the 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.

“Digital media has led such artists as Wendy Wahl to re-evaluate the potency of the printed word,” Akiko Busch wrote last fall 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.”

Wahl’s work is represented by browngrotta arts of Wilton, Connecticut. The gallery will feature other examples of Wahl’s work in its SOFA New York 2010 installation in booth 204. Wendy 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).

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SOFA NY, Art Installation, Wendy Wahl, Encyclopedia Britannica