Tag: Beauty is Resistance

In Print: Beauty is Resistance

November 19, 2025 0 Comment
Title Page Beauty is Resistance Catalog
Works by Abby Mackie and Randy Walker. Photo by Tom Grotta

If an exhibition takes place but there is no catalog to document it, did anyone see it? Certainly not enough people have seen it, as far as browngrotta arts is concerned.  That’s why we produce a catalog for nearly every exhibition we host.

Nnenna Okore spread

We had hundreds of people visit our Fall 2025 exhibition,  Beauty is Resistance: art as antidote. But we also cowry to share the remarkable works in Beauty with even more people through our installation video and Zoom talkthrough, both on our YouTube channel, and through the print version of the show, a catalog (our 61st), available on our website.

Yong Joo Kim Spread

The 132-page catalog contains 125 full-color images. There are full view and detail images of each of the featured works in the exhibition. There are statements about each work in the catalog. The works in the exhibition fell loosely into four subthemes: Reading Between the Lines, Threads of Memory, Radical Ornament, and Ritual and Reverence, and the catalog identifies the category that each work falls into.

Gizella Warburton Spread

Elizabeth Essner, Windgate Associate Curator at the Museum of Art, Houston contributed an insightful essay to the catalog, “Looking at Beauty.” Essner writes about the role of nature in many of the artists’ work — for materials, lessons, and poetic inspiration. She examines varying historic conceptions of beauty, subjective, objective, and embodied, and discusses the significance of prevailing cultural aesthetics. in summarizing beauty’s pivotal place in art, Essner quotes late art critic Peter Schjeldahl (1942 – 2022) who predicted that in the future, “beauty will be what it always has been and, despite everything, is now in furtive and inarticulate ways: an irrepressible, anarchic, healing human response without which life is a mistake.”

Lia Cook Spread

Order your copy on our website. If it’s a gift, let us know at art@browngrotta.com before December 15th and we will gift wrap your copy before we send it.

Kay Sekimachi Spread

Beauty is Resistance – Artists in the House

October 9, 2025 0 Comment

The opening of Beauty is Resistance: art is antidote (October 11 – 19) is right around the corner. This Saturday afternoon October 11, 2025 at the opening we’ll be joined on Saturday afternoon by five of the 36 artists in the exhibition.

Here’s a preview of works by these artists that will be included. if you can If you can attend the opening, be sure to ask them about their pieces. (If you can’t attend, you can order a catalog or attend our Zoom talkthough on November 11th — more on that below.

Fragment by Blair Tate
21bt Fragment, Blair Tate, woven and knotted: linen, hemp cords, aluminum rods, 34 x 44”, 2025. Photo by Tom Grotta

Blair Tate’s Fragment (Reading Between the Lines) is a weaving made of elements — broad strips, larger and smaller blocks, and connecting cords. The elements are constructed and coordinated to suggest balance and imbalance. “I want the whole to feel tenuous, unsettled,” Tate says, “and in this way allude to the ubiquitous condition of change that defines our current times.”

Construction by Jin-Sook So
2jss Konstruction II, Jin-Sook So, electroplated steel mesh, 2004. Photo by Tom Grotta

On Saturday, we’ll also be joined by Jin-Sook So, via Sweden (and sometimes Korea). So’s work, Konstruction (Ritual and Renovation), is an innovative painted and electroplated textile made of steel mesh. The work is informed by bojagi,  a traditional Korean wrapping and layering technique. So has sought to reinterpret bojagi’s cultural and aesthetic essence through a contemporary lens, creating a dialogue between tradition and modernity.

Curiosity Under Fire by Wendy Wahl
46ww Curiosity Under Fire, Wendy Wahl, Inked 1987 Academic American Encyclopedia pages, elm, stainless steel, rusted steel, 69″ x 51″ x 18″, 2025. Photo by Tom Grotta

At the turn of the 21st century Wendy Wahl began to view printed paper, particularly encyclopedias, from an elemental standpoint and as a material for expressing the ephemeral and the everlasting. Encyclopedia pages are used as a material  in works like Curiosity Under Fire (Reading Between the Lines)in part because the medium can be the message. The purpose of paper has changed, yet for over two millennia it has played a significant role in the identity of cultures and the relationship to their environments. “Each time I deconstruct a discarded encyclopedia book,” Wahl says, “I revisit that which has come before, bound in stillness, yet part of the present moment, asking me to re-see in ways that engage my mind, body and spirit.”

Frozen in Time by Norma Minlkowitz
120nm Frozen in Time, Norma Minkowitz, black crocheted book and personal items, 21.5″ x 15.625″ x 3″, 2023-2025. Photo by Tom Grotta

Works by Norma Minkowitz are often emotionally evocative. Frozen in Time (Threads of Memory), her work in Beauty is Resistance, is an example. The work is centered on remembrance, memory becomes tangible. Minkowitz wraps once-used personal items—combs, brushes, a diary—in dark threads as though there is a secret or story hiding between the pages of the book that is sealed and therefore can never be revealed. “Memories are a snapshot of the past that hasn’t been affected by the present,” Minkowitz says. “However, the act of remembering can also change the memory itself. I ask the viewer to be a participant in interpreting my work.“

Ocean by Nancy Koenigsberg
84nak Ocean, Nancy Koenigsberg, coated copper wire, 32″ x 32″ x 3″, 2025. Photo by Tom Grotta

Ocean (Radical Ornament) by Nancy Koenigsberg is a meditation on movement and endurance, rendered in blue, green, and black wire—an industrial material shaped into an evocation of tides, currents, and undertow. Its layered blue surface suggests water through reef or net. The work offers a vision of the sea as an archive of transformation. In Ocean, wire becomes wave, and pattern becomes persistence. 

Join us to see these and many more artworks. 

Exhibition Details:
Beauty is Resistance: art as antidote
October 11 – 19

browngrotta arts
276 Ridgefield Road 
Wilton, CT 06897 

Times:
Saturday, October 11th: 11AM to 6PM [Opening & Artist Reception] 
Sunday,  October 12th: 11AM to 6PM
Monday, October 13th through Saturday, October 18th: 10AM to 5PM
Sunday, October 19th: 11AM to 6PM [Final Day] 
Safety protocols: No narrow heels — we’ve got barn floors.

Can’t make the exhibition? You can get a copy of the exhibition catalog on our website or sign in to our Zoom presentation,  Art on the Rocks: an art talkthrough with a twist — Beauty is Resistance Edition.

Sneak Peek – Beauty is Resistance: art as antidote Opens in Less than a Month

September 24, 2025 0 Comment

The opening of our Fall 2025 “Art in the Barn” exhibition, on October 11, is just a few weeks away.

Despite headwinds from tariff confusion and new shipper policies, we have compiled an expansive group of works from Europe, Asia, and North and South America. The few examples below illustrate the breadth of ways that the artists in Beauty is Resistance have made aesthetic attractiveness a purposeful mode of expression. 

Wendy Wahl Rebound Overlap
Wendy Wahl, Rebound Overlap 2025, Photo by Tom Grotta

Twenty years ago, Wendy Wahl noticed that the printed and bound versions of encyclopedias were being disposed of at an alarming rate, and soon after, most encyclopedias were no longer obtainable in that format. Encyclopedias have existed for around 2,000 years. From the specific to the general, the encyclopaedia can be described as a summation of knowledge from a particular worldview. Wahl uses these discarded volumes to make art — such as the three pieces in this exhibition, Book Matched, Curiosity Under Fire, and Rebound Overlap — that brings awareness to what can happen when access to information is denied and discarded.

Nnenna Okore, Vogue
Nnenna Okore, Vogue, 2009. Photo by Tom Grotta

Artist, educator, and environmentalist Nnenna Okore who studied in Nigeria uses ordinary materials, repetitive processes, and varying textures to make references to everyday Nigerian practices and cultural objects. “ I am invested in changing the function, meaning, and historical or social context of my materials,” she says. “By transforming them from their original state of being and employing deconstructive and reconstructive techniques, these materials inevitably assume new lives, different personalities, and cultural significance.” 

Neha Puri Dhir, Detail of Luster of Time
Neha Puri Dhir, Detail of Luster of Time, 2023. Photo by Tom Grotta

Neha Puri Dhir’s Luster of Time reflects on the beauty of aging and the stories embedded in the passage of time. The work, which involves pleating and stitch-resist dyeing on silk, reveals delicate lines and textures that evoke the growth rings of a tree or the patina formed on weathered metal. The deep circular form at the center suggests a meditative stillness, grounding the viewer amidst the rhythmic folds. Each stitch and crease becomes a quiet testimony to memory, impermanence, and transformation. “This piece celebrates time as a collaborator,” Dhir says, “turning fabric into a canvas where aging itself becomes a mark of grace and resilience.” 

Misako Nakahira, Triptych
Misako Nakahira, Unlayered #HPO, Y, B, 2025. Photo by Tom Grotta

Masako Nakahira continues her exploration of stripes in these small but animated set of weavings. Inspired by “illusions,” a method of expression used in painting, these works are based on the theme of overlapping layers. Although this image appears to overlap visually, the layers do not actually exist in the structure. “This makes us wonder what human perception seeks between reality and illusion,” she says. “I would like to continue to question the boundary between the two through textiles.”

Join us in October to view work by these and 30+ other international artists who celebrate beauty as a form of defiance, cultural preservation, and political voice. 

Exhibition Details: Beauty is Resistance: art as antidote
October 11 – 19
browngrotta arts
276 Ridgefield Road Wilton, CT 06897 

Times:
Saturday, October 11th: 11AM to 6PM [Opening & Artist Reception] 
Sunday,  October 12th: 11AM to 6PM
Monday, October 13th through Saturday, October 18th: 10AM to 5PM
Sunday, October 19th: 11AM to 6PM [Final Day]

Schedule Your Visit

Safety Protocols: No narrow heels, please. We have barn floors.

Save the Date: Beauty is Resistance Opens at browngrotta arts on October 11th

August 20, 2025 0 Comment

We’ll be exploring Beauty as Resistance: art as antidote in our 2025 Fall “Art in the Barn” exhibition at browngrotta arts in Wilton, Connecticut. The exhibition will explore how aesthetic creation—particularly within textile, fiber, and material-based practices—serves as a form of defiance, cultural preservation, and political voice. In an age of political polarization, ecological crisis, and rampant commodification, beauty might seem like a luxury—or a distraction. But the artists in this exhibition harness the power of beauty not as escape but as agency: to mourn, to protest, to remember, to heal, and to imagine

Beauty is Resistance by Norma Minkowitz
Frozen in Time by Norma Minkowitz. Photo by Tom Grotta

Beauty is Resistance will bring together more than two dozen artists, spanning generations, mediums, and geographies. The works fall loosely into four subthemes. Norma Minkowitz’s Frozen in Time reflects Threads of Memory, artworks in which fiber as a tool to archive personal, cultural, and collective memory and experience. Minkowitz’s work is about once-used personal items, perhaps ancient relics, in ominous black, showing every detail in time. A diary, combined with combs, various brushes, documenting a persons lived life, hidden messages inside a book that can’t be opened, are all frozen in time. These tell a story or trigger a question for the viewer.  

Reading Between the Lines
Fragments Of A Life Lived 3 by Aby Mackie. Photo courtesy of Aby Mackie

Reading Between the Lines includes works that subtly or explicitly engage with, politics, ecology, and resistance. Aby Mackie, an artist located in Spain, works with discarded historic textiles, deconstructing and reconfiguring them. “In reworking with what was cast aside,” Mackie says, “my practice becomes a form of quiet resistance—honoring forgotten stories and reasserting the enduring significance of craft in the face of environmental and cultural neglect.” In the 80s, Ed Rossbach created aseries of assemblages, titled El Salvador. In the series, Rossbach used camouflage cloth and sticks to protest US covert activity in that South American country. More personal is Yong Joo Kim’s Weight of Commitment: 4 Years Old. For Kim, making art is less a means of expression and more a residue of her efforts to sustain her life under pressure and weight. She creates art works she hopes are seen as symbols of resilience, beauty, and the transformation of struggle into creation. Weight of Commitment illustrates that approach. “As light and shadow played across the work,” Kim says, “the silhouette of a child appeared—seemingly around four years old—floating in mid-air. This moment was meaningful, because it was completely unintended, and I made it while I was going through IVF.”

Collider by Randy Walker
Collider by Randy Walker. Photo by Tom Grotta

Randy Walker’s Collider reflects another of Beauty’s subthemes, Radical Ornament, in which art reclaims ornamentation, surface and structure as valid forms of protest and joy. Trained as an architect, Walker’s work straddles several boundaries of craft, sculpture, and installation.His works create dialogues — solidity and transparency; structural stability and collapse; visibility and invisibility.

Donald and his Habsburg Empire by James Bassler
Donald and his Habsburg Empire by James Bassler. Photo by Tom Grotta

Finally, for Ritual and Reverence, the fourth subtheme, we’ll exhibit work grounded in indigenous craft and sacred traditions reimagined. James Bassler’s Donald and his Habsburg Empire, is a comment on both the historical and the contemporary attitude of arrogance and entitlement that has existed throughout history. Bassler references the Habsburgs, the ruling family of Austria, 1276-1918 and of Spain,1516-1700, that gave the world elitism through birthright, with no regard to proven achievement, noting that today in the US, the Kardashian and the Donald Trump model has made the acquisition of vast sums of money and profit an alarming societal objective, an elitism that values profits over people. In 2016, Bassler was invited to an exhibition at the Museo Textile de Oaxaca in Mexico that utilized feathered yarn, created of Canadian feathers, by spinners in Mexico who based the yarns on ones created in the 17th century. “After reviewing all of the material, I couldn’t help but notice that on many of the ancient textiles in which the feathers were used promoted the double-headed eagle of the Habsburg Empire, a reminder to those subjugated as to who was in charge,” Bassler says. “With that in mind and knowing that the feathers came from Canadian ducks, it was a logical step to create the double-headed ducks. The Donald Trump arrogance factor developed as the presidential debates materialized.”

Other artists whose work will be exhibited in Beauty is Resistance include: Kay Sekimachi (US), Neha Puri Dhir (IN), Karyl Sisson (US), Naoko Serino (JP), Laura Foster Nicholson (US), Jin-Sook So (KR), Irina Kolesnikova (DE), James Bassler (US), Gyöngy Laky (US), Lia Cook (US), and Eduardo Portillo and María Dávila (VE). 

Reserve a time to visit Beauty as Resistance: art as antidote : HERE

Beauty as Resistance: art as antidote
October 11 – 19, 2025

Location: 
browngrotta arts, 276 Ridgefield Road Wilton, CT 06897 

Times:
Saturday, October 11th: 11AM to 6PM [Opening & Artist Reception] 
Sunday,  October 12th: 11AM to 6PM
Monday, October 13th through  Saturday, October 18th: 10AM to 5PM
Sunday, October 19th: 11AM to 6PM [Final Day]

Safety Protocol:
No narrow heels please — barn floors.