Ruth Asawa: Retrospective
Through February 7, 2026
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street
New York, New York
https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5768

An expansive retrospective of the eloquent work of Ruth Asawa has traveled to New York from San Francisco MoMA. The exhibition coincides with the artist’s 100 birthday, the exhibition includes some 300 objects that highlight the core values of experimentation and interconnectedness pervading all dimensions of Asawa’s practice. The retrospective spans 60 years of Asawa’s ambitious career, presenting a range of her work across mediums, including wire sculptures, bronze casts, paper folds, paintings, and a comprehensive body of works on paper. The artworks are accompanied by a rich array of archival materials—photographs, documents, and ephemera—that illuminate her public commissions, art advocacy, and meaningful, lasting relationships with members of her community.

New Work: Sheila Hicks
Through August 9, 2026
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
151 3rd Street
San Francisco, California
https://www.sfmoma.org/exhibition/new-work-sheila-hicks/

Still at SFMoMA is Sheila Hicks’s first solo exhibition there, a site-specific installation in the museum’s New Work gallery. According to the museum, the works are inspired by objects, textures, and patterns observed in her adopted city or in her migratory life. Each draws from places with personal significance, from the cobblestones of her courtyard to the towering lighthouses of the rocky island of Ouessant, France and its treacherous and rugged landscape.

On Loss and Absence: Textiles of Mourning and Survival
Through March 15, 2026
Art Institute of Chicago
159 East Monroe Street
Chicago, Illinois
https://www.artic.edu/exhibitions/9772/on-loss-and-absence-textiles-of-mourning-and-survival

In the center of the country is a themed exhibition at the Art Institute in Chicago. Drawn primarily from the museum’s collection, On Loss and Absence brings together over 100 objects from diverse cultures dating from antiquity to today to reveal the ways people use textiles to sustain spiritual beliefs, understand death, cope with grief, remember those who have passed, and heal from trauma, both personally and collectively.

Back on the East Coast, there are five exhibitions of interest — two in Connecticut, two in New York and one in New Jersey. 

Stitching Time: The Social Justice Collaboration Quilts Project 
Through December 13, 2025
Fairfield University Art Museum
1073 Benson Road
Fairfield, Connecticut
https://www.fairfield.edu/museum/exhibitions/current-exhibitions

At the Fairfield University Art Museum, Stitching Time features 12 quilts created by men who are incarcerated in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as Angola Prison. These works of art, and accompanying recorded interviews, tell the story of a unique inside-outside quilt collaboration. The exhibition focuses our attention on the quilt creators, people often forgotten by society when discussing the history of the US. criminal justice system. Also on view in the gallery will be Give Me Life, a selection of works from women artists presently or formerly incarcerated at York Correctional Institution, a maximum security state prison in Niantic, CT, courtesy of Community Partners in Action (CPA). 

Jeremy Frey: Woven
Through October 26, 2025
The Bruce Museum
1 Museum Drive
Greenwich, Connecticut
https://brucemuseum.org/exhibitions/jeremy-frey-woven/?gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=19816342960&gbraid=0AAAAADFvx1CiuOUzWvTKKQPD8aRSirAut

You have just a few days to see the first major retrospective of Jeremy Frey’s work. Jeremy Frey: Woven presents a comprehensive survey — 50 baskets — from 20 years of Frey’s prolific career. A seventh-generation Passamaquoddy basket maker and one of the most celebrated Indigenous weavers in the country, Frey learned traditional Wabanaki weaving techniques from his mother and through apprenticeships at the Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance. While Frey builds on these cultural foundations in his work, he also pushes the creative limits of his medium, producing conceptually ambitious and meticulously crafted baskets that reflect not only his technical skill as a weaver but also his profound ecological knowledge of and connection to the Passamaquoddy ancestral territory of the Northeastern Woodlands.

In New York City there are two opportunities to celebrate the work of remarkable artist Kay Sekimachi, who turned 99 last month. 

Kay Sekimachi: a personal archive
Through November 1, 2025
Andrew Kreps Gallery
394 Broadway
New York, New York
https://www.andrewkreps.com/exhibitions/kay-sekimachi2

This exhibition of works by the Berkeley-based artist Kay Sekimachi, was organized in collaboration with browngrotta arts. It includes rare, early works from Sekimachi’s personal archive — weavings and assemblages.  The exhibition is the first of the artist’s work in New York since 1970.

Sixties Surreal
Through January 19, 2026
Whitney Museum of Art
99 Gansevoort Street
New York, New York 
https://whitney.org/exhibitions/sixties-surreal

One of Kay Sekimachi’s innovative and celebrated monofilament weavings is included in Sixties Surreal at the Whitney. Sixties Surreal  is an ambitious, scholarly reappraisal of American art from 1958 to 1972, encompassing the work of more than 100 artists. This revisionist survey looks beyond now canonical movements to focus instead on the era’s most fundamental, if underrecognized, aesthetic current—an efflorescence of psychosexual, fantastical, and revolutionary tendencies, undergirded by the imprint of historical Surrealism and its broad dissemination. The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive catalog and a playlist.

And in New Jersey …

Toshiko Takaezu: Dialogues in Clay
October 31, 2025 – July 5, 2026
Princeton University Art Museum
Princeton University Campus
Princeton, NJ
https://artmuseum.princeton.edu/exhibitions-events/exhibitions/toshiko-takaezu-dialogues-clay

The groundbreaking ceramic artist Toshiko Takaezu (1922–2011), who taught at Princeton University for almost three decades will be celebrated in Toshiko Takaezu: Dialogues in Clay beginning October 31st. Drawing from the Museum’s deep holdings of Takaezu’s ceramics, Dialogues in Clay explores the artist’s experimental practice, including her signature “closed” forms and painterly glazing. Placing Takaezu’s sculptures in conversation with the work of teachers and contemporaries who embarked on parallel pathways of innovation—including Helen Frankenthaler, Maija Grotell, Robert Motherwell, Isamu Noguchi, Lenore Tawney, and Peter Voulkos,— alongside reflections by her students, the exhibition positions Takaezu as one of the most important ceramic artists of the twentieth century.

Much to Enjoy!

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In planning your trip to browngrotta arts in Wilton, Connecticut for Blue/Green: color, code, context between April 28th and May 6th take some time out of your schedule to visit a few other exhibitions going on in the area.

A short 15-minute drive from browngrotta arts, the Westport Arts Center’s current exhibition HandMade: Women Reshaping Contemporary Art features a diverse array of work from 15 leading female fiber and textile artists, including Ghada Amer, Anna Betbeze, Ligia Bouton, Orly Cogan, Lesley Dill, Terri Friedman, Sermin Kardestuncer, Sophia Narrett, Faith Ringgold, Miriam Schapiro, Judith Scott, Beverly Semmes,  Rosemarie Trockel and Margo Wolowiec. The exhibition also features work by three browngrotta arts artists, Chiyoko Tanaka, Carolina Yrarrázaval and Norma Minkowitz. Curated by Elizabeth Gorayeb, the Executive Director of the Wildenstein Plattner Institute, Inc—a New York-based non-profit committed to art historical research—the exhibition examines the role of women in reshaping what has historically been considered “fine art.” Additionally, the exhibition demonstrates how fiber and textile materials allow artists such as Faith Ringgold and Sophia Narre to examine topics such as race, gender and sexuality. HandMade: Women Reshaping Contemporary Art will be on view at the Westport Arts Center through June 2nd. For more information visit the Westport Arts Center website HERE.

Ala Ebtekar’s Zenith V at Long, Winding Journeys: Contemporary Art and the Islamic Tradition. Photo: Katonah Museum of Art

Next stop, the Katonah Museum of Art’s exhibition Long, Winding Journeys: Contemporary Art and Islamic Tradition. The exhibition looks at a group of artists of Middle Eastern and South Asian descent whose work engages the diverse forms of Islamic visual tradition to explore religion, culture and socio-political issues today. The title of the exhibition “Long, Winding Journeys: Contemporary Art and the Islamic Tradition” was inspired by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Ayad Akhtar’s essay The Breath of Miraj. Akhtar’s The Breath of Miraj conveys the manner in which Islam and its history can inspire creative life to become a “long, winding journey.” While making the pieces included in the exhibition, artists utilized some of the century-old forms that define Islamic art, such as calligraphy, miniature painting, geometric patterning, textiles and architecture. Long, Winding Journeys: Contemporary Art and Islamic Tradition will be available for viewing until June 17th, for more information on the exhibition visit the Katonah Museum of Art’s website HERE.

Boris Mikhailov (Ukrainian, b. 1938), Untitled from the series Sots Art, 1975-1990, Gelatin silver print hand-colored with aniline dyes on paper at Hot Art in a Cold War: Intersections of Art and Science in the Soviet Era

Hot Art in a Cold War: Intersections of Art and Science in the Soviet Era will be on view until May 20th at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut. The provocative exhibition probes into the consequences of innovation in science, technology, mathematics, communications and design during the Cold War. The exhibition juxtaposes the art made during the Cold War in opposition to state-sanctioned Socialist Realism with artifacts from the nuclear and space programs to explore the triumphs and tragedies unleashed by humankind as it gained the power to both leave the Earth and to destroy it. Produced from the 1960s to the 1980s, the items on view in Hot Art in a Cold War address themes of international supremacy and hegemonic power during a turbulent period marked by the ever-escalating competition for nuclear supremacy and the space race. “The Bruce Museum prides itself in being a museum of both art and science and in finding the interconnections between the two,” states Dr. Daniel Ksepka,  Bruce Museum Curator of Science and co-curator of Hot Art in a Cold War. The exhibition allows visitors to  “see how the triumphs of the space program and anxieties about nuclear arms were captured by period artists. Likewise, many of the scientific objects are works of art in their own right. The elegance of Sputnik, for example, is as striking and undeniable as its impact on the space race.” For more information on Hot Art in a Cold War: Intersections of Art and Science in the Soviet Era visit the Bruce Museums website HERE.

Last but not least, the Wilton Historical Society’s new permanent exhibition Connecticut History, Wilton’s Story is now available for viewing. Through artifacts and objects, the Wilton Historical Society aims to shine a light on Wilton’s roots and connections, as well as the evolution of the town since the colonial period. For more information on  Connecticut History, Wilton’s Story visit their website HERE or call the Wilton Historical Society at 203-762-7257.

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