Tag: Bob Stocksdale

HeArt-ists: Creative Couples

February 14, 2018 0 Comment
Power couples in the art world abound: Pablo Picasso and François Gilot, Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, Georgia O’Keefe and Alfred Steiglitz. Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Joseph and Anni Albers among them (see the In Good Taste, blog post, “12 Prolific Artist Couples,” for more: https://www.invaluable.com/blog/12-prolific-creative-couples/?utm_source=brand&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=weeklyblog&utm_content=blog020818). At browngrotta arts we’ve worked with several such couples or with one of such a pair. In honor of Valentine’s Day, a toast to them:
Power Couple Kobayashi's at browngrotta arts

Masakazu and Naomi Kobayashi installing Cosmos 98 at browngrotta arts for the opening of Tradition Transformed: Contemporary Japanese textile art & fiber sculpture

Masakazu/Naomi Kobayashi:
Masakazu and Naomi often collaborated on projects in the years before his death. In their collaborations, in the US, Israel, Singapore, France and JapanMasa and Naomi, generally created individual works that were installed together. Masa once explained the impetus behind their cooperative works: “These works express a shared vision and such common themes as the tranquility of nature, the infinity of the universe and the Japanese spirit. Naomi and I work in fiber because natural materials have integrity, are gentle and flexible. In my own work, I search for an equilibrium between my capacity as a creator and the energy of the world around me.”
Power Couple Rossbach/Westphal

Ed Rossbach and Katherine Westphal in their apartment in Berkley California

Ed Rossbach/Katherine Westphal: Ed Rossbach and Katherine Westphal were both innovators — he a maker of nonfunctional art baskets; she in her work with xerography and art quilts. The pair loved to travel and images and influences from those visits appear in their work in various ways. Images from the American West, including bison and feathers, appear in both Rossbach’s baskets and drawings and in Westphal’s wall hangings of tapas bark. Westphal made color photocopies of photos she took on their travels through Europe, Asia and the Middle East, and with a heat transfer process, inserted these images into her quilts and wearable art. Rossbach took photo images and reconstructed them with stitching and pins.

Power Couple Marriage in Form

Marriage in Form Set
Bob Stocksdale/Kay Sekimachi, Pistashio wood and Japanese paper with fibers, 1999

Kay Sekimachi/Bob Stocksdale: Kay Sekimachi and her late husband, woodturner Bob Stocksdale, collaborated to create an entire series of work, exhibited across the US as Marriage in Form. Sekimachi used his turned wood vessels as a form to shape her own ber vessels from hornet’s nest paper. Sekimachi applies a base layer of Kozo paper to a wood form, then laminates the hornet’s nest paper. The resulting objects appears delicate and ethereal but is actually stiff and stable.

Power Couple Claude Vermette and Mariette Rousseau-Vermette

Claude Vermette and Mariette Rousseau-Vermette, painting and tapestry

Claude Vermette/Mariette Rousseau-Vermette: For several decades, this couple worked in separate studios, in different media, in different ways. Yet, as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Baie St. Paul, Quebec noted when mounting a posthumous retrospective of Vermette’s paintings, ceramics and sculpture and Rousseau-Vermette’s tapestries, they shared “a common spirit, strong affinities and correspondences, links of course emotional and intellectual, the same historical and sociological context and the crossing of an important period of time.”

Debra Sachs_ Marilyn Keating

Debra Sach’s/Marilyn Keating’s joint exhibition, Going Solo & Tandem at the Stockton College Art Gallery, NJ 2014

Debra Sachs/Marilyn Keating: Sachs and Keatings met in the early 1970s when they were students at the Moore College of Art in Philadelphia. They were married in 2014. Their works — made spearately and together are showcased at The South Jersey Museum of Curiosities — not a physical location but a website they share (http://www.sjmoc.com/index.htm). Their individual works take different directions. Keating’s is more narrative, including depistions of fish, birds, bugs and dogs. Sachs describes herself as more design oriented. When they collaborate as they have in public commissions like Waders and Flockers 2011 at Stockton College, they divide the work — Keating builds the structure; Sachs completes the designs and paints the surface.
John McQueen/Margo Mensing: This couple, he a sculpture and basketmaker, she a poet and artist whose multimedia installations incorporate sculpture, ceramic and textiles, have exhibited together in New York, Massachusetts and New Zealand. In New Zealand, Mensing carved words into tree trunks.  “Marks made here,” she carved, “are no more than scars on these upstart upstanding trees – as brief as grass.”
Leon/Sharon Niehues: Leon and Sharon Niehues have created baskets together, including a basket-in-a-basket woven for the White House Collection of Contemporary Crafts created during the Clinton Administration. The couple moved from Kansas to the Ozarks in the 70s and learned basketmaking from by a book by the Arkansas Extension Service that explained how to make a white-oak basket from a tree. In his individual work over the last several years, Leon has focused on reinterpretingclassical and traditional forms.
To Love…

Art on Display and In Print. In The Realm of Nature: Bob Stocksdale & Kay Sekimachi in San Diego

October 27, 2014 0 Comment
Kay Sekimachi, paper tower, photo by Tom Grotta

Kay Sekimachi, paper tower, photo by Tom Grotta

74b PISTASHIO 6

Pistashio Bowl by Bob Stocksdale, photo by Tom Grotta

In the Realm of Nature: Bob Stocksdale & Kay Sekimachi at the Mingei International Museum in San Diego, presents an inspiring, retrospective view of work by two of America’s foremost pioneers in wood and textile art. Kay Sekimachi (1926-) and Bob Stocksdale (1913-2003) married in 1972. Seen together, their 50 years of work has a true poetic resonance.

Hailed as a father of American woodturning, Bob Stocksdale revitalized the craft of lathe-turned bowls, beginning in the 1950s. In his exquisite works, he unveiled a compelling beauty in diseased and in rare woods, of which many are now endangered. Serpentine or ellipsoidal shapes— seemingly impossible to turn— are among his innovations. The exhibition features, for the first time on view, an example of his one-of-kind furniture.

Kay Sekimachi is an influential master of complex weave structures in both off-loom and on multiple-harness loom techniques. Transparent marine creatures were the inspiration for the interlocking hangings in monofilament (fish line) that she created in the 1960s. With these majestic pieces she ascended to the forefront of contemporary fiber art during the 1960s and 1970s. Her work is included in the current exhibition Fiber: Sculpture 1960-present at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, Massachusetts through January 4, 2015. Throughout her 60-year career she has created unique works of art in such natural materials as skeletal leaves, hornet’s nest paper and grass. The exhibition includes examples of her translucent sculptural hangings and room dividers, along with other woven forms – accordion-formatted books, vibrant scrolls, seamless nesting boxes and jewelry. The Mingei is at 1439 El Prado, San Diego, California, 92101. Open Tuesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. For more information: ph. 619.239.0003; web address: http://www.mingei.org.

In the Realm of NatureExhibition curator Signe Mayfield has authored a lush 210-page book to accompany the exhibition. In the Realm of Nature: Bob Stocksdale & Kay Sekimachi, available at browngrotta.com features scores of attractive object photos. It includes essays by Melissa Leventon (former Curator-in-Charge of Textiles at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and founding member of Curatrix Group of museum consultants) and John C. Lavine (former editor of Woodwork Magazine and furniture maker.)

Summer Site-ings: Exhibitions from Coast to Coast

July 12, 2011 0 Comment

CRADLE TO CRADLE by Gyongy Laky ©2007 Tom Grotta

If you vacation in the East, Midwest or West this summer, you can see work by artists represented by browngrotta arts. In Washington, D.C, at the Textile Museum, is Gyöngy Laky’s work is included in Green: the color and the cause through September 11, 2011.

FB 1008, Kay Sekimachi ©2008 Tom Grotta

At the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, Massachusetts, you can see Loom and Lathe: The Art of Kay Sekimachi and Bob Stocksdale, through August 11th and All Things Considered IV, the National Basketry Organization’s biennial exhibition from July 30 to December 4th, which includes work by Kiyomi Iwata, Norma Minkowitz and Gyöngy Laky.

KIBUSO III, Kiyomi Iwata ©2010 Tom Grotta

BINARY TRACES: DREAM GIRL, Lia Cook, ©2005, Tom Grotta

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In Pittsburgh, Lia Cook is one of three female artists exploring race gender and culture in contemporary art production in Bridge 11, at the Society for Contemporary Craft through October 22nd.

Early Light, Mary Giles ©2006 Tom Grotta

Well represented in the Midwest, work by Mary Giles is included in Field of Vision: Artists Explore Place, at the Racine Art Museum in Wisconsin, through October 2nd and in Basins, Baskets and Bowls: Women Explore the Vessel at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts through October 23rd.

Legs, Norma Minkowitz, 6″x7″, 1974, Neusteter Textile Collection, photo by Bobby Hansson

In Colorado, at the Denver Art Museum, Norma Minkowitz and Lia Cook are among 14 artists included in Sleight of Hand, through December 31st.

TIMELINE, Lawrence LaBianca, photo by Lawrence LaBianca

Two stops in California: At the Bolinas Museum you’ll find Lawrence LaBianca & Wolfgang Bloch: Tracking Nature, through July 31st and at the Museum of Craft and Folk Art in San Francisco, you’ll find

MATRIX 112570 Chang Yeonsoon, ©2007, Tom Grotta

Chang Yeonsoon’s work included in Wrapping Tradition: Korean Textiles Now, through October 22nd.