Tag: Allies for Art

browngrotta arts Year in Review/Preview

Hi all!
We like to take a look back most Januarys. We make plans, and, more optimistically, resolutions for the New Year.

This year has been a busy one for us and next year is shaping up to be busier still! 

Below, a look back and  a look ahead for browngrotta arts. Hope you’ll add some of our upcoming activities to your schedule.

Exhibitions

Opening reception for crowdsourcing the Collective
Crowdsourcing the Collective exhibition. Photo by Ezco Productions

2022 
• More than 500 people attended our 2022 Exhibitions, Crowdsourcing the Collective: a survey of textiles and mixed media and Allies for Art: Art from NATO-related countries.

• After the in-person exhibitions ended, we posted the work on Artsy as exclusive on-line collections.

• We curated a Viewing Room in March. Featuring works in frames, it was entitled Art With an Edge: The Case for Frames.

Tom installing The Station/Kuala Lampur for our Upcoming Glen Kaufman Viewing Room exhibition. Photo by Rhonda Brown

2023
• We’ll host two in-person exhibitions next year, one in the Spring and one in the Fall. Add the Spring exhibition dates to your calendar now: April 29 – May 7, 2023

• We’ll be involved with three exhibitions at public spaces. We’ve loaned work to Norma Minkowitz: Body to Soul at the Fairfield University Art Museum in Connecticut, which opens January 27th and will loan several indigo works to the Denver Botanic Garden in Colorado for an exhibition that opens July 1st and we’ve partnered with the Flinn Gallery, Greenwich Public Library, Connecticut for Wordplay: Messages in Branches and Bark, which opens on March 30th. 

• We’ll present an online exhibition of the late Glen Kaufman’s work, Glen Kaufman: 1960-2010  in our Viewing Room on our new website.

• We will curate at least one other 2023 on-line exclusive exhibition in the View Room on the new website. Topic TBD.

Outreach

James Bassler Two Flags video

2022 Social Media:
• We have continued to post regularly on our social channels, FacebookTwitterYouTubeInstagram and our blog, arttextstyle. We’ve upped the amount of information we provide on Instagram and you’ve responded by engaging with us more.

• Our Instagram impressions are up 13.5%, engagements 12.6% and Instagram video views up 16.9%

• Our Facebook Engagements are up 32.1%  

• Page views on arttextstyle increased by 15%

• Our Instagram Net Follower Growth has grown 90.5%

• Our Total Net Audience has Grown 46%

2023 Social Media and Live Programs:
• We’ll continue our social media postings on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and arttextstyle, which will move to our new website when it launches.

• Gyöngy Laky and John McQueen will each speak on different dates at the Flinn Gallery in Greenwich in April in conjunction with the Wordplay: Messages in Bark and Branches exhibition that features their work. Tom will also speak at the Flinn during the Wordplay exhibition. More on dates and times to come.

• Tom will speak at the Ridgefield Library on Contemporary Art Textiles and Fiber Art on Sunday, April 16, at 2 pm and also at the Appraisers Association of America meeting in NYC in June.

Publications

Gyöngy Laky: Screwing with Order, assembled art, actions and creative practice; Allies for Art: Work from NATO-related countries; Crowdsourcing the Collective: a survey of textiles and mixed media art
Gyöngy Laky: Screwing with Order, assembled art, actions and creative practice; Allies for Art: Work from NATO-related countries; Crowdsourcing the Collective: a survey of textiles and mixed media art catalogs

2022
• We were pleased at the publication of Gyöngy Laky: Screwing with Order, assembled art, actions and creative practicethis Spring. It was designed by Tom features text by Jim Melchert, Mija Reidel and David M. Roth. You can buy it on our website and in the MoMA book store, among other outlets.

• We published a 148-page, color catalog for our Crowdsourcing the Collective exhibition.

• We published a 148-page, color catalog for our Allies for Art exhibition.

2023
• In early 2023, we will make available our fifth monograph, Glen Kaufman: 1960 – 2010.

• On March 15th Anne Newlands authoritative book on noted Canadian artist Mariette Rousseau-Vermette, Weaving Modernist Art: The Life and Work of Mariette Rousseau-Vermette will be published. It features many of Tom’s photos of Mariette’s work. We hope to make it available in the browngrotta arts’ site.

• We will publish a color catalog for our Spring “Art in the Barn” exhibition in April 2024.

• We will publish a color catalog for our Fall “Art in the Barn” exhibition in September-October 2023.

External Platforms

Artsy viewing room and 1stdibs browngrotta arts page
Artsy and 1stdibs

2022
• Art from browngrotta arts could be found on 1stDibs and Artsy in 2022. We created our first Artsy Viewing Room to showcase the work of Wendy Wahl and Norma Minkowitz, then-included in the Westport Museum of Contemporary Art Exhibition, Women Pulling at the Threads of Social Discourse, in Connecticut. Artsy included Yasuhisa Kohyama in its article: 5 Artists on Our Radar in June.

2023
• Art from browngrotta arts will again be found on 1stDibs and Artsy in 2023. We’ll be adding videos on Artsy to give viewers even more information about available works.

Please join us. We’d love to see our views grow in 2023.


Make a Day of It: Events to Visit on Your Way to Allies for Art at browngrotta arts


On your way to see Allies for Art: Work from NATO-related countries at browngrotta arts (October 8-16, 2022)? Here are some other venues of interest in browngrotta arts’ neighborhood or nearby.

1. Aldrich: 52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone
Through January 8, 2023.
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum
258 Main Street
Ridgefield, CT 06877
Tel 203.438.4519
6.2 Miles

South Gallery: Aldrich
South Gallery, left to right: Grace Bakst Wapner, Calving, 2020; Stella Zhong, Every Other Chopped, 2021; Merrill Wagner, Inlet, 2010. Photo by Tom Grotta

Aldrich: 52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone (https://thealdrich.org/exhibitions/52-artists-revisiting-a-feminist-milestone) celebrates the fifty-first anniversary of the historic exhibition Twenty Six Contemporary Women Artists, curated by Lucy R. Lippard and presented at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in 1971. 52 Artists showcases work by the artists included in the original 1971 exhibition, alongside a new roster of 26 female identifying or nonbinary emerging artists, tracking the evolution of feminist art practices over the past five decades. 52 Artists encompasses the entirety of the Museum (approx. 8,000 sq. ft)—the first exhibition to do so in The Aldrich’s new building which was inaugurated in 2004.

2. From the Pen to the Knife
From October 15 – November 27, 2022
Westport MoCA
19 Newtown Turnpike
Westport, CT 06880
Tel. 203-222-7070

Marion Christy, Untitled
Marion Christy, Untitled. Photo courtesy of the artist

From The Pen To The Knife features the watercolor paintings of Marian Christy. Christy was a pioneer of the Knifed Watercolors® style, a process that creates original watercolors using only palette knives and puddles of paint.  

3. Grace Farms
365 Lukes Wood Rd.
New Canaan, CT 06840
Tel. 203-970-1702

Grace Farms. Photos by Tom Grotta

Always a rejuvenating place to visit,  Grace Farms is a scenic 80-acre cultural and humanitarian center in New Canaan, Connecticut. Schedule a tour or make a reservation for one of Grace Farms’ unique events. Visitors must schedule a visit in advance. Admission is free. (https://gracefarms.org/visit/

4. Leaves: The Endangered Species of New England
Through December 1, 2022.
Fairfield University Art Museum, Bellarmine Lawn
1073 North Benson Road
Fairfield, Connecticut 06824
(203) 254-4000
(https://www.fairfield.edu/museum/leaves/

Alan Sonfist, Leaves
Alan Sonfist, Leaves: The Endangered Species of New England (Installation view), 2011, aluminum, on loan from the artist.

The leaves installed on the Bellarmine lawn are on loan to the Fairfield University Art Museum for the next year from the American artist Alan Sonfist (b. 1946), best known as a pioneer of the Land or Earth Art movement. These four larger-than-life aluminum sculptures of leaves were created in 2011 and represent several of New England’s most beloved native trees: the American Beech, the American Chestnut, the Burr Oak, and the Sugar Maple. The sculpted leaves act as reminders to honor and protect the trees, and as a warning that failure to do so could result in their extinction. 

The museum is working with the Biology Department, the Environmental Studies Program and the artist, around a series of programs to be presented in the spring of 2022 to highlight these sculptures, along with climate change and endangered species.

5. Yale Art Gallery: Three New Thematic Displays of Asian Art
1111 Chapel Street (at York Street) 
New Haven, Connecticut
(203) 432-0600
(https://artgallery.yale.edu/news/three-new-thematic-displays-asian-art

Detail: Sultan Tughril III
Detail: Sultan Tughril III, from a Manuscript of Hafiz-i Abru’s Majma’ al-tawarikh. Photo: Yale University Art Gallery.

Yale Art Gallery’s collection of Asian art comprises nearly 8,000 works from East Asia, South Asia, continental Southeast Asia, Iran, Iraq, and Turkey and spans the Neolithic period to the 21st century. Highlights of the collection include Chinese ceramics and paintings, Japanese paintings and prints, and Indian and Persian textiles and miniature paintings. Due to the sensitivity of these artworks to light and climate, they are rotated out roughly every six months. 

On view through November are three new thematic displays of Asian Art including: Understanding an Eighteenth-Century Indian Album which brings together several manuscript pages featuring exquisite paintings of musical modes, given to Yale in 1939 and 1940. Second, Chinese Painting between War and Revolution, 1830–1950 highlights the vibrancy and experimentation with Western and Japanese visual traditions that characterized Chinese painting during the tumultuous period between the Opium War (1839–42) and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Finally, celebrating the varied rendering of cherries in paintings, woodblock prints, lacquer, and metalwork, Sakura: Cherry Blossoms explores the longstanding Japanese fascination with the beauty of this delicate blossom as a symbol for the ephemeral nature of life and its pleasures.

Have great trip! We look forward to seeing you at browngrotta arts:

Allies for Art: Work from NATO-related countries
Saturday October 8, 11 -6
Sunday, October 9, 11-5
Monday, October 10 to Saturday October 15, 10 – 5
Sunday, October 16, 11 to 6
276 Ridgefield Road

Wilton, CT 06897

203-834-0623


Who’s New in Allies for Art? Anneke Klein and Aby Mackie

We are excited to include the work of five artists new to browngrotta arts in our upcoming exhibition, Allies for Art: Work from NATO-related countries (October 8-16). Among these artists are Anneke Klein of the Netherlands and Aby Mackie who lives and works in Spain.

Detail: 1-2akl Family and Labels, Anneke Klein, hemp, cotton, linen, acrylic paint, 21.5″ x 21.25″, each. Photo by Tom Grotta

Anneke Klein of the Netherlands was originally educated as a goldsmith. Her passion for weaving was born from her struggle with hard and cold materials. In order to pursue her preference for warmth and softness in materials, she retrained herself as a weaver.  After a period of designing and manufacturing clothing, she worked on a commission for the American minimalist Richard Tuttle for his exhibition in the Vleeshal of the Frans Hals Museum and for Alexis Gautier in the Bozar Museum Brussels. She developed her own style for wall objects. As a goldsmith she learned to express in miniature. It suits her, and she often applies that approach in her textile works as an element for rhythm and repetition. “I create a variety of shapes, textures and structures to express my imagination of social themes,” she says. “It is an ever-growing process inspired by instinct and intuition, an investigation, a translation, as if looking through a symbolic lens at the everyday and the things that touch me emotionally. It stimulates social awareness in myself and probably the viewer, too.”

Detail: 1-2am Between Chaos & Order 5 & 6, Aby Mackie, gilded gold lead deconstructed and reconfigured antique textiles, 72″ x 24″ each, 2022. Photo by Tom Grotta

For Aby Mackie, an emerging artist who lives and works in Spain, the very act of making artwork is political. Mackie responds to current economic and social inequities in her country, particularly in housing and food, by confronting consumerism head on. “Everything I buy, from the materials for my artwork to the clothes that I wear, the furniture in my house to the books that I read, I buy second hand — recycling, reusing, reimagining — standing against the insane consumerism that adds to that sense of us all living in a system that is broken.” Mackie reconstructs textiles — cutting, painting, stitching, weaving and gilding them … a process of deconstruction and transformation. “The materials that I use,” she says, “are sourced from the local flea market, a practice that was born out of necessity to find cheap (but unique, high quality, interesting, often sumptuous) and free materials to use in my artwork. I go at the end of the day and buy up all the unwanted antique cloth, clothing, and domestic textile, collecting the discarded, such as flamenco dresses, Spanish plates, antique dolls, horse collars integrating them into my practice.” In Mackie’s hands, these “discards” are given a new life as elegant and engaging artworks. A rich mix of influences can be seen in Mackie’s work in terms of concept (the found object sculpture of Picasso, Miro, Tapies, Grau-Garriga), techniques and materials (Anatsui) and subject matter and aesthetic sense (Basquiat, Schwarz), inviting the viewer to create their own connections and interpretations and encouraging a personal storytelling through materiality.

Join us at browngrotta arts in Wilton, CT
for Allies for Art: Work from NATO-related countries (October 8-16):

Exhibition Schedule:
Opening & Artists Reception (300-Visitor Cap)
Saturday, October 8th: 11AM to 6PM  
Viewing Dates & Times (40 visitors/ hour)
Sunday, Sunday October 9th: 11AM to 6 PM
Monday, October 10th – Saturday, October 15th: 10AM to 5PM 

Final Day (40 visitors/ hour)
Sunday, October 16th: 11AM to 6PM  

Address
276 Ridgefield Road Wilton, CT 068977

Safety protocols
Eventbrite reservations strongly encouraged • We will follow current state and federal guidelines surrounding COVID-19 • As of August 1, 2022, masks are not required • No narrow heels please (barn floors)

RESERVE YOUR TIME: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/allies-for-art-work-from-nato-related-countries-tickets-392833123447

Contact Information
P: 203.834.0623
E: art@browngrotta.com