The first work we highlighted was Karyl Sisson’s Pepsi Faux Pot. For years, Karyl Sisson has been collecting things like sewing notions — buttons and zippers, womenʼs vanity items — bobby pins, hair pins, and curlers, and paper drinking straws like the straws in Pepsi Cola Faux Pot. “I like the idea and practice of recycling and am drawn to undervalued and overlooked materials,” Sisson says. “These common, manufactured objects, reminiscent of my childhood, are the building blocks of my sculptures and wall art, while simple interlocking techniques found in basketry and needlework are usually the method of construction.”

Our video of Simone Pheulpin’s Nova, part of the Eclipse series, gives viewers an opportunity to see up close the remarkable alchemy involved in this artist’s work. In Pheulpin’s hands humble strips of cotton become remarkable objects that evoke natural phenomena. She uses a method of her own devising, using neither glue or stitches. “I’m very, very interested in the roots, the layers, everything that is natural,” Pheulpin says. “The concretions, the accumulations, I love that, that’s the basic nature, the basis of my inspiration. I really like everything that is linear, everything that is repeated, piles of wood, walls. I love the walls, also by the sea, for example, the flowing water, the marks in the sand, the desert, the dunes, all that.” Pheulpin’s work will be part of a deep dive into materials in our upcoming exhibition, Transformations: dialogues in art and materials (May 9 – 17, 2026). 

Barcelona-based artist Aby Mackie also approaches “humble” material in innovative ways — in her case, discarded textiles and household remnants are repurposed as fine art. Sourced from the streets of Barcelona, in works like Between Order and Chaos, she reimagines overlooked materials as powerful reflections on memory and value. In Barcelona, the contents of entire homes are often either thrown into the streets or auctioned off at Encants Vells market. The creation of Mackie’s work is driven by the selection and repurposing of objects and textiles from these sources in order to explore ongoing cultural themes, including materialism and consumerism. Mackie’s work will also be included in Transformations in May.

The inspiration for Lizzie Farey’s work comes from the inherent qualities found in the natural materials around her Scotland location. Using willow, birch, heather, bog myrtle, and many other locally grown woods, her work ranges form traditional to organic sculptural forms — much of it pushing the boundaries of traditional technique.  In Willow Ball – 2 and Pussy Willow Bowl, willow seems to have been plucked unchanged from its natural surroundings, yet, with shape and color, the artist adds more. The works achieve Farey’s aim, to create baskets as reminders of the intense pleasure of nature – taking viewers to a place and a time that is universal.

Mariette Rousseau-Vermette was a noted Quebec-based Canadian tapestry artist who pioneered innovations in fiber art during the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Rousseau-Vermette created weavings in which she experimented with scale, form, material, and color, which became known as tapestry-paintings. In Verticles dans le bleu the artist incorporates metal tubes wrapped in wool to create dimension and interest. Rousseau-Vermette’s work mixing optical fibers and wool will be included inTransformations in May.

In Charred Black 2, part of his Seven Baskets series, John Garrett fashions welded wire mesh into a vessel shaped by conflict and renewal. Inspired by images of war-torn landscapes, layers of paint, metal leaf, and bound wire evoke structures scarred and rebuilt, holding both destruction and resilience within their forms. “I had seen many pictures of the destruction of wars in Sudan, Ukraine, Israel, and Gaza,… Piles of debris littered landscapes,” Garrett says. “My painted paper baskets looked to me like structures distressed and damaged and covered in dust.”  Forms were painted and repainted and became new again while speaking of horrors between the layers. Shiny metal leaf covered the interiors and exteriors of others. Charred Black 2 was wrapped with rings of plied wire and tied down with more wire or fabric, bringing to mind a structure awaiting more layers of concrete or plaster. 

In the 1970s, when she was in her 40s and early 50s, Dorothy Gill Barnes taught herself basketry through books, independent study, occasional classes, and connections with traditional makers, also drawing inspiration from contemporary artists and emerging developments in the field. Within a decade, her strikingly original works—crafted from natural materials—gained national and international recognition. Barnes delighted in revealing the ingenuity of nature, from animal-made forms to processes of growth and decay. Her work invites viewers to slow down and truly notice. In Spalted Maple Looking Glass, she has created an interactive experience: a glass lens, frames a small twig, magnifying both the object and its hollow. Through the lens, the tiny scene appears vast — refashioning something ordinary into a moment of wonder.

Marion Hildebrandt studied at the University of California, where she received degrees in the decorative arts and home economics. The artist lived and worked in Napa Valley, California, where she collected the plants — grasses, branches, pine needles, and bark — that she used to make her baskets. She employed the same materials that Native Americans used when they inhabited the area. Like them, Hildebrandt appreciated the natural materials that surrounded her, utilizing her artistic vision to create artistic art forms into structural objects like #r165.

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We began with Polly Barton’s Salvia Sclarea (Clary Sage). In 1978, Barton went to Japan as an exchange student where she visited a weaving studio filled with incredibly colored dyed silk. She returned to Japan in 1981 to study weaving at the Oomoto School of Traditional Arts where she discovered that weaving was her calling. She learned silk weaving from the man who warped the looms of living national treasure Fukumi Shimura. As Barton developed her artistic process, she realized that seeing how painter Helen Frankenthaler — for whom Barton had served as an assistant — impregnated her canvases with pigment, gave her “permission” to build up layers of color in her woven ikat works.

In Salvia sclerea — which inspired the title of this piece is the herbaceous plant clarey sage. This work incorporates an image of the plant that moves in and out of view depending on thow the light hits it.

Another work that connects with Nature is Laura Foster Nicholson’s Being Here. Bees are a metaphor for the soul, Nicholson says. Her work Being Here, is from a series of works involving bees and bee hives. Nicholson often reflects gardens and scenes of domesticity in her tapestries. “I have been a beekeeper, and always felt that it was magical and a true privilege to don a bee suit and stand among thousands of busy, humming honeybees. Being Here is the culmination of a body of work about moving through pain to the state of grace that is acceptance.  The orb of shimmering insects represents the final opening up to the transformation.”

Yeonsoon Chang has created an eco-friendly resin to use in creating sculptural works of hemp and polyester mesh. Recurring themes in Chang’s work include time, space, and the myriad relationships that intertwine them. Chang’s process requires 12 complex and meticulous steps, including refining, dying, ironing, and sewing, all of which require considerable mental focus. She considers it her calling to bring to life the spirit of Korean craft, allowing it to breathe and resonate through works like Matrix III-201612. Chang was a Loewe Foundation Prize nominee and the first Korean artist to have her works acquired by the renowned Victoria & Albert Museum in the UK. Her work was also featured in the Cheongju Craft Biennale in 2025.

Inside-Outside by Dorothy Gill Barnes is an excellent illustration of the artist’s remarkable way with wood (the name of browngrotta arts’ 2023 monograph, Dorothy Gill Barnes: A Way with Wood, in fact).  Bark—from pine, spruce, elm, basswood, mulberry, and many other trees—played a seminal role in her work. She cut or tore bark in strips and wove it into basket- or vessel-like forms, folded it into rectangular boxes and windows, pulled it back like a banana peel, and wrapped it around rocks. To add tension and contrast, she paired bark from different species of trees, different textures of bark from the same tree, and peeled or unpeeled surfaces. In Inside-Outside, she has paired wood strips with bark and strips without bark, weaving them to form the base and stitching the strips to form the sides.  

More works to come in February!

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During our recent trip to Washington, DC we visited Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction, through July 28, 2024 at the National Gallery. We are not going to pout about the fact that it has taken a few decades for contemporary fiber art to make it into the hallowed halls of the National Gallery. We are just going to revel in this expansive textile coming out party — an exhibition that challenges, however belatedly, the hierarchies that often separate textiles from fine arts.

The 150 objects in Woven Histories highlight a diverse range of transnational and intergenerational artists who have shaped the field including: Ruth Asawa, Anni Albers, Lenore Tawney, Kay Sekimachi, Sheila Hicks, Rosemarie Trockel, and Diedrick Brackens. There are also painters and sculptors like Agnes Martin and Eva Hesse whose work also played a role in modern abstraction. 

Curated by Lynne Cooke, the exhibition offers “a fresh and authoritative look at textiles — particularly weaving — as a major force in the evolution of abstraction.” Basketry is given prominence. Cook notes in the book that accompanies the exhibition, Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction, that basketry was a moribund artform in the mid-60s, when Ed Rossbach began his “[s]triving for expressive content, signification and meaning” within basketry’s time-tested techniques. The exhibition highlights others creating basket referents, including John McQueen, Dorothy, Gill Barnes, Martin Puryear, and Yvonne Koolmatrie.

There are more than 50 artists whose work is included. The timeline is expansive — beginning with work created during World War I by Sophie Taeuber-Arp of the Zurich Dada circle, and continuing through to 21st century efforts to create community and celebrate the politics of identity by such artists as Ann Hamilton, Liz Collins, and Jeffrey Gibson. The exhibition will travel next to the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, from November 8, 2024–March 2, 2025 and then the Museum of Modern Art, New York, April 20–September 13, 2025. 

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If Wikipedia is to be believed, Pop-Up art exhibitions began in 2007 in New York City. They now occur all over they world. Pop-ups are generally temporary events, less formal than a gallery or a museum, often using unusual spaces. Their popularity has boomed since the oughts, including Banksy’s Dismaland which collected work by 58 artists in a rundown seaside town in the UK in 2015, Yasoi Kusama’s room that exploded with flowers in Melbourne, Australia in 2018, the Museum of Ice Cream (not technically a museum) currently in several locations including Miami, Boston and Singapore, and The Color Factory in New York City, Houston, and Chicago. Pop-Ups are often immersive, interactive, and collaborative like Meow Wolf in Santa Fe, which began in 2008 as a small collective of artists sharing an interest in publicly displaying their works and developing their skills. Meow Wolf now aims to “redefine the paradigm of art and storytelling to make a positive difference in the world.”

Fast forward to 2024: browngrotta arts has its own Pop-Up of sorts at JUICE Creative Group in Norwalk, CT. JUICE handles our social media, website development, event planning and other miscellany. It has loads of clients coming into its business and rental studio space each week. Now, select Juice visitors are able to view (and acquire) JUICE Art, a specially assembled group of works from artists who work with browngrotta arts.

In curating the collection, we were mindful of the JUICE ethos. It’s a brand and digital agency based in the US, with team members all over the world. JUICE takes pride in the team of brand experts, designers, marketers and tech geeks it’s built, and the vibrant creative culture it has fostered. To reflect that creativity and energy, we suggested works like Grethe Sorensen’s Out of Focus that references pixels from printing, Warren Seelig’s mechanical sculptures, Small Double-Ended and White Wheel, Gyöngy Laky’s playful Beach Sketch, made of electrical tape wrapped branches and Electricity/Energy by Mariette Rousseau-Vermette, a tapestry that incorporates wire.

Printed pages are another theme; the agency produces a lot of textual content. There are collages made of books and newspapers by Toshio Sekiji; works by Wendy Wahl of encyclopedia pages, and an interesting work by Mercedes Vicente that mixes string and spiral notebook pages and “hints” at writing. Photography, too, was a theme. In a room clients use, we placed a textile triptych made of photo images of Japanese tile roofs that are fragmented, silk screened, and metal-leafed made by Glen Kaufman along with works of paper by Gizella Warburton. On a floor of offices, there are photographs of fiber sculptures by Federica Luzzi, White Shell Tongue 1 and 2 beside a graphic tapestry by Gudrun Pagter.

In deciding what to display, we also collaborated with the JUICE team, including some works by artists they chose. John McQueen is a favorite of several team members. We included Intimate Domain, which includes a tree made of repurposed plastic surrounded by a frame made of small branches and cable ties and also Treed, a depiction of a tree where the drawing creeps off the page an onto the frame. Another popular artist was Canadian painter and ceramist Claude Vermette. There are two of his large canvases, one triptych and one small water color hung throughout the space. Also on the team’s list, works by Keiji Nio, Jo Barker, Dorothy Gill Barnes, Jiro Yonezawa, Chiyoko Tanaka and Jennifer Falck Linssen.

For us, a Pop-Up is a Good Op. The JUICE space looks better, clients and staff appreciate the work, and we get more eyeballs for some great works of art!

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Out of ideas for the ideal gift for a cherished friend or family member? Consider a work of art. It will make an indelible impression. In its Guide to Giving Art as a Gift, DecktheWalls.com notes “Even for the person who has everything, a piece of artwork makes an amazing gift. It shows forethought, effort and a flair for gift giving. Art is a wonderful gift for any occasion, whether it is for Christmas or Hanukkah, a baby shower, a wedding or thank you gift.” 

The benefits of viewing art are well documented — looking at art stimulates the brain and puts our innate knack for organizing patterns and making sense of shapes to use. In addition, viewing art boosts our mood. Looking at a painting, sculpture, or other artwork increases blood flow to the brain by as much as 10% — the equivalent of looking at someone you love. Choosing an art gift is an effective way to say, “Your well-being matters to me.”

Here are some suggestions for one-of-kind items that may be just what you are looking for.

Some come with their own boxes. We can wrap your gift if you order it this week.

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The holiday season is upon us. Beginning with Diwali, winding its way through Thanksgiving, Hannukah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, Boxing Day, and probably others, we’ll arrive at the promise of a New Year. We wish you many celebrations, satisfying meet-ups with family and friends, and moments of cozy comfort and joy over the next few weeks.

Many of those festivities will include food and drink and maybe games and they’ll take place around a table. On many of those tables there will be a centerpiece of some kind — flowers, candles, and often a work of art. In that spirit, we present several artworks that can grace a a table as well as a pedestal or shelf.

A browngrotta arts, we’ve been considering the transformative power of objects all Fall, their capacity to invoke memory and meaning. Our An Abundance of Objects exhibition can be seen in a Viewing Room on Artsy beginning November 22nd. Like those in The Domestic Plane: a New Perspective on Tabletop Art at the Aldrich Museum in 2019, the items in Abundance celebrate “the hand as means of creation, a formal frame of reference, and for the viewer, a source of both delight and tension …” And sometimes, they enhance our lives just by being beautiful. We wish you a season of as much beauty as you can muster.

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This year, we published three catalogs in conjunction with our Fall exhibition, Vignettes: one venue; three exhibitions. Plus our Spring catalog, that makes four for the year — perhaps a bit ambitious. but the subjects were well worth it. Here’s a look at the three most recent volumes, now available on our website.

Our comprehensive Glen Kaufman catalog, Glen Kaufman: Retrospective 1960 to 2010, contains more than 90 images of work created over a 50-year period. Kaufman had a remarkable and varied career as a commercial designer, exhibiting artist, and educator. It included study, teaching and administraion at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, a Fulbright in Denmark, work at Dorothy Liebes’ studio in New York City, study trips to the UK and many years managing the fiber program at the University of Georgia, where he spent half of each year in the University’s study program in Japan. The catalog includes examples of work across these years including macramés and double weaves from the early years, remarkable photo-fabric weavings made with metallic inks, and collages of kimono shapes made with fabrics Kaufman found at flea markets in Japan. Also featured in the Glen Kaufman catalog, is an essay by Ashley Callahan and independent scholar an author of Crafting History: Textiles, Metals, and Ceramics at the University of Georgia. Callahan writes that, During a career as a craftsman and teacher that spanned nearly six decades, [Kaufman] developed a knowledge of the history of techniques, mastery of techniques, and distinct artistic voice that earned him extensive renown.” 

Dorothy Gill Barnes: a way with wood is also photo-rich. This volume includes works that reflect many of the techniques she mastered and innovations she pioneered. There are works involving woven bark and folded bark, works in which she used power tools, and works incorporating glass blown by students at Ohio State University. There are also examples of “dendroglyphs,” works including bark that Gill harvested from trees that she had scarred months or years before. The catalog includes quotes from several observers of Barnes’ work, including Ann Hamilton. Readers will also find an essay by Ann Bremner a writer and editor who worked with Barnes for many years. Barnes’ environmentalism was longstanding and deeply felt, Bremner writes, “… the messages infused in her art are subtle and nuanced, guided by traditions that emphasize respect and shared responsibility for the world we live in.”

The volume promising an abundance of objects does not disappoint. An Abundance of Objects provides images of 80 intriguing objects, highlighting their appeal and attraction. These items have been made by more than 30 artists from the UK, US, Korea, Finland, Japan, Belgium, Norway, Venezuela, Canada, France, and New Zealand. Rhonda Brown added a short introduction noting the impact collecting has on clients and the desire collectors have for the handmade. “We’ve had our fill of disposable culture,” she quotes gallerist and collector Collier Calandruccio. “and people are looking for that human connection, seeing the hand in things.” The objects in Abundance are all that, intimate, engaging and each individually made.

You’ll find all three catalogs at browngrotta.com. You can purchase the three Vignettes catalogs as a bundle and save $15. 

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Tamiko Kawata: Beyond Edge, Beyond Surface
November 1- 28, 2023
Opening Reception November 1 6-8 p.m.
Pollock Gallery
Meadows School of the Arts
Southern Methodist University
Dallas, Texas 
https://calendar.smu.edu/site/meadows/event/tamiko-kawata-beyond-edge-beyond-surface–opening-reception/

The artist will create an onsite installation on October 29 – 30th

Weaving at Black Mountain College:
Anni Albers,Trude Guermonprez, and Their Students
through January 6, 2023
Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center
Asheville, NC
https://www.blackmountaincollege.org/weaving/

Weaving at Black Mountain College: Anni Albers,Trude Guermonprez, and Their Students will be the first exhibition devoted to textile practices at Black Mountain College (BMC). Celebrating 90 years since the college’s founding, the exhibition will reveal how weaving was a more significant part of BMC’s legendary art and design curriculum than previously assumed.

BMC’s weaving program was started in 1934 by Anni Albers and lasted until the College closed in 1956. About 10% of all Black Mountain College students took at least one class in weaving. Despite Albers’s elevated reputation, the persistent treatment of textile practices as women’s work or handicraft has often led to the discipline being ignored or underrepresented in previous scholarship and exhibitions about the College; this exhibition brings that work into the spotlight at last. The exhibition will also feature work by selected contemporary artists whose work connects to the legacies of the BMC weavers: Kay Sekimachi, Jen Bervin, Porfirio Gutiérrez, Susie Taylor, and Bana Haffar. They’ve produced a catalog for the exhibition, too, that will be available October 31st. 

Folding Silences
through November 9, 2023
D21 Art Projects
Paeo Las Palmas
Providencia, Chile
https://www.d21virtual.cl/2023/09/20/comunicado-plegando-silencios-de-carolina-yrarrazaval/

Through November 9th, the exhibition Plegando Silencios by international artist Carolina Yrarrázaval can be visited at gallery D21. The exhibition consists of a series of 12 tapestries that the artist has worked on in recent years experimenting with materials of plant origin, mainly with coconut fiber, which is intervened to obtain suggestive reliefs, textures, and transparencies that demand a new look at the artist’s work. The creative act of dyeing, folding, and incorporating raw material is transformed into the initial structure of a textile work that s, the gallery says, “seduces and incites the search for new sensations.”

Woven Histories: textiles and modern abstraction
through January 21, 2024
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Los Angeles, CA
https://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/woven-histories-textiles-and-modern-abstraction

Woven Histories sheds light on a robust, if over-looked, strand in art history’s modernist narratives by tracing how, when, and why abstract art intersected with woven textiles (and such pre-loom technologies as basketry, knotting, and netting) over the past century. Included are 150 works by an international and transhistorical roster of artists that includes Ed Rossbach, Katherine Westphal, Anni Albers, Dorothy Gill Barnes, Kay Sekimachi, Lenore Tawney, and Sheila Hicks. The exhibition reveals how shifting relations among abstract art, fashion, design, and craft shaped recurrent aesthetic, cultural, and socio-political forces, as they, in turn, were impacted by modernist art forms. It is accompanied by a book of essays and images, that can be purchased at browngrotta.com.

Takaezu & Tawney: An Artist is a Poet
through March 25, 2024
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
Bentonville, AK
https://crystalbridges.org/calendar/toshiko-takaezu-lenore-tawney/

Takaezu & Tawney: An Artist is a Poet debuts 12 new acquisitions to the Crystal Bridges collection that tell the story of a remarkable friendship between Toshiko Takaezu and Lenore Tawney. Curated by Windgate Curator of Craft Jen Padgett, the exhibition highlights how these two women shaped craft history in the US by expanding and redefining the possibilities of their preferred mediums: Takaezu in ceramics, Tawney in weaving. Takaezu and Tawney had a close relationship for decades, from 1957 until Tawney’s death in 2007. From 1977 to 1981, Tawney lived at Takaezu’s Quakertown, New Jersey, home and the two shared studio space.

Tartan
through January 14, 2024
Victoria & Albert Museum
London, UK
https://www.vam.ac.uk/dundee/whatson/exhibitions/tartan

If you are a fan of tartan (as we are), the V&A’s exhibition is for you. Tartan offers a thrilling view of over 300 mesmerizing objects showcasing tartan’s timeless appeal and rebellious spirit across fashion, architecture, art and design. See tartan worn by Bonnie Prince Charlie, a Scottish soldier’s unwashed kilt from the trenches of WWI, and the Bay City Rollers trousers handmade by a lifelong fan.

And there is always our Artsy Viewing Room that you can visit without leaving home: Glen Kaufman: Retrospective 1980 – 2010.

Enjoy!

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Glen Kaufman’s art experience and influences were extensive — studying, then teaching, at Cranbrook Academy of Art, a Fulbright Scholarship in Denmark, a year as a designer in Dorothy Liebes’ New York studio, and study visits to the UK.  He landed at the University of Georgia where he headed the fiber program for 20+ years, spending one-half of each year in Japan for much of that time. The work in Glen Kaufman: Elegant Eloquence, dates from the 1960s through the 2020s. It includes double weaves, macramé works, and a freestanding cylindrical form from the 60s, collages, and works of indigo, shibori, and gold leaf on paper. Several of the works Kaufman created using a Japanese technique to apply gold and silver leaf atop intricately woven damask fabric, often in a grid, to reflect disappearing Japanese architecture will be displayed. Janet Koplos and Bruce Metcalf in Makers: A History of American Studio Craft (2010) describe Kaufman’swoven and printed work from Japan as “a concept and creation entirely his own.” Both through imagery and construction, these works combine East and West. 

The works in Dorothy Gill Barnes: a Way With Wood, illustrate the full range of the artist’s engaging and innovative approach to natural materials. A Way With Wood contains several dozen works from the Barnes’ personal collection including early experiments in weaving bark and other materials. There are also “dendroglyphs” made from bark that Barnes had marked on living trees and later harvested after scars had formed, and later works in which wood and glass were combined in intriguing ways. 

An Abundance of Objects, filling another two rooms, presents an eclectic collection of items of varied materials and techniques. Citing the authors of How to Live with Objects, Monica Khemsurov and Jill Singer, the exhibition encourages viewers to think about their connection to the objects that surround them — how they were discovered and made and the associations they arouse, meanings they radiate and feelings they trigger. Included are silk squares by Kiyomi Iwata, a mechanical, segmented “tree” that collapses and then stands with the turn of a crank by Lawrence LaBianca, woven “quivers” by Gary Trentham, and a sculpture made from a textile cast in bronze by Eduardo Portillo and Mariá Davilá.  

Here is the complete list of artists whose work we expect to include: Dail Behennah (UK), Hisako Sekijima (JP), Tim Johnson (UK), Polly Sutton (US), Stéphanie Jacques (BE), Judy Mulford (US), Gizella Warburton (UK), Mary Merkel-Hess (US), Simone Pheulpin (FR), Lawrence LaBianca (US), Lizzie Farey (UK), Joe Feddersen (US), Toshiko Takeazu (US), Gary Trentham (US), Nancy Koenigsberg (US); Markku Kosonen (FI), Tamiko Kawata (US), Christine Joy (US), Kosuge Kogetsu (JP), Kajiwara Aya (JP), Kyomi Iwata (US), Katherine Westphal (US), Dona Look (US), John McQueen (US), Jiro Yonezawa (JP), Gyöngy Laky (US), Noriko Takimaya (JP), Gertrud Hals (NO), Jeannet Leenderste (US), Naomi Kobayashi (JP), Karyl Sisson (US), Willa Rogers (NZ), Neil and Fran Prince (US), Jin-Sook So (KO), Lewis Knauss (US), Dawn Walden (US), and Keiji Nio (JP).

Catalogs will be published for each of the three exhibitions and can be ordered from browngrotta arts in October. The Opening & Artist Reception for Vignettes: one venue; three exhibitions will take place on October 7th from 11 -6. Reservations for the exhibition can be made on Eventbrite.

See you then!

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In some cases, like Dorothy Gill Barnes’ work, a logical progression from earlier to current work is apparent. Cherry Ys is a study that Barnes had created when more traditional weaving was a larger part of her process. Some 30 years later she created Willow with Log — weaving again, but this time with a material she has mastered — tree bark. 

Dominic Di Mare is widely known for captivating sculptures of simple materials like carved hawthorn branches with delicate feathers, beads, paper, eggs, and horsehair. In Di Mare’s hands, these were transformed into intensely poetic and spiritual works which he made in the 79s. For Acclaim!, however, we were able to show Di Mare’s intriguing assemblages and a series of elegant weavings, The Mourners, that he had made in the 1960s.

The transition from early to later work was even more dramatic in the works included in Acclaim! by Warren Seelig. Five Panel #2 is a complex corduroy weaving from the 1970s. You’d be forgiven if you didn’t recognize, Small Double Ended, of metal and fiber, as a work by Seelig made nearly 25 years later.

There are few artists who have mastered as many bodies of work as Lia Cook. Acclaim! included Landform and Legs, pop-art-like weavings that Cook made in the 70s, shortly after completing a Master’s degree in 1973. Also exhibited was Presence/Absence: In the Folds, created two decades later. By that time, Cook was creating works on a Jacquard loom based upon photographs. In between, she had worked with painted strips of cloth to create fabric mosaics of sorts and since, she has been integrated EEG reports into her weavings.

You can see all the works in Acclaim! in our online exhibition on Artsy. You can hear more about the works by joining us for Art on the Rocks, an art talkthrough with spirits! on Zoom on June 9, 2023.

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