Tag: exhibitions

Kay Sekimachi: New Heights at 99

September 10, 2025 0 Comment
Kay Sekimachi at the loom
Kay Sekimachi on loom in 2014. Photo by Tom Grotta

Kay Sekimachi has always had fans. She is known as a “weaver’s weaver” because of her technical mastery and extraordinary textile innovations. Her work has been recognized and exhibited widely since the 1960s, yet it has been 50 years since she has had a solo exhibition in New York. In 1969, Kay Sekimachi’s “‘sketchy’ and transparent” [ ] free-hanging, gossamer piece of nylon monofilament was included in the seminal Wall Hangings exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. In 1970, there was a solo exhibition of Sekimachi’s monofilaments at the Lee Nordness Gallery in New York.

Fast forward to 2025, and Kay Sekimachi’s work is featured in a solo exhibition Kay Sekimachi: a personal archive at the Andrew Kreps Gallery (394 Broadway, New York, NY, through November 1, 2025, in conjunction with browngrotta arts). Kay’s work is also on exhibit at MoMA in Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction (through September 13, 2025). And, as of September 24th, Sekimachi’s remarkable monofilament weavings are a part of Sixties Surreal, an ambitious, scholarly reappraisal of American art from 1958 to 1972 (through January 19, 2026), at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York. 

 Kay Sekimachi: a personal archive at the Andrew Kreps Gallery
Kay Sekimachi’s work is featured in a solo exhibition Kay Sekimachi: a personal archive at the Andrew Kreps Gallery. Photo by Tom Grotta

It’s official — September 2025 is Kay Sekimachi month — feted in New York and in California where she will turn 99 years old!

Kay Sekimachi: Geometries
Kay Sekimachi: Geometries, May 28 – October 24, 2021; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Photo: Impart Photography

It’s a fitting capstone to Kay’s string of one-person exhibitions in other locales. 2001 saw Intimate Eye: Paper & Fiber Forms of Kay Sekimachi at the Mingei Museum in San Diego. In 2002, it was Kay Sekimachi: Fiberworks at the Craft and Folk Museum in Los Angeles. In 2009, Kay Sekimachi: Fiber Artist opened at the Sonoma Art Museum. In 2016, the year of Kay’s 90th birthday, the Craft and Folk Art Museum presented Kay Sekimachi: Simple Complexity and the de Young Museum in San Francisco presented Kay Sekimachi: Student, Teacher, Artist. 2018 saw the opening of Kay Sekimachi, Master Weaver: Innovations in Forms and Materials at the Fresno Art Museum in California. In 2021, BAMPFA in Berkeley, California opened Kay Sekimachi: Geometries. In 2023 and 2024, a comprehensive survey of her work titled Kay Sekimachi: Weaving Traditions was presented at the SFO Museum. And right now, Kay Sekimachi: Ingenuity and Imagination is on exhibit at the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles.

Kay Sekimachi, Master Weaver: Innovations in Forms and Materials; Fresno Art Museum's
Installation view of Kay Sekimachi, Master Weaver: Innovations in Forms and Materials; Fresno Art Museum’s Council of 100 Distinguished Woman Artist for 2018, Fresno, California, July 14, 2018-January 6, 2019, Courtesy of the Fresno Art Museum

In between, there were significant group and two-person exhibitions. In 1969, her work appeared alongside Anni Albers, Sheila Hicks, Doyle Lane, Lenore Tawney, Peter Voulkos, and others in Objects: USA, which traveled after opening at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C. In 1971, there was Deliberate Entanglements at UCLA. In 1973, the 6th International Biennial of Tapestry in Lausanne, Switzerland. In 1986, FibeR/Evolution, Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin. Then in 1993, the two-person exhibition, Marriage in Form: Bob Stocksdale and Kay Sekimachi  traveled from California to Arkansas, Missouri, Florida, DC, New York, and Rhode Island followed by In the Realm of Nature: Kay Sekimachi & Bob Stocksdale at the Mingei Museum in 2015. Then Woven Histories debuted in Los Angeles in 2023, traveling to Ottawa, Canada, Washington, D.C. and now New York, New York followed by Skilled, Subversive, Sublime: Fiber Art by Women at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in DC in 2024.

Skilled, Subversive, Sublime: Fiber Art by Women at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in DC
Skilled, Subversive, Sublime: Fiber Art by Women at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in DC in 2024. Photo by Tom Grotta

There is more well-deserved recognition to come — a major retrospective on Kay Sekimachi will open in the Summer of 2028 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. 

Watch for it and in the meantime visit Kay Sekimachi: a personal archive in New York if you can. (Here’s a short video to pique your interest.)

One Month Until Vignettes. Who’s New? Gary Trentham

September 7, 2023 0 Comment

At browngrotta arts, we have been collecting available works by basketmaker Gary Trentham for some time. In An Abundance of Objects, part of our Fall 2023 exhibition, Vignettes: one venue, three exhibitions, we will feature several of his vessels and a grouping of his quiver-like hangings. “I cannot imagine myself making an art statement except through the techniques, ideas, and forms of basketry,” Trentham was quoted in The Tactile Vessel (Erie Art Museum, New York, 1989), the publication for the eponymous exhibition curated for the Erie At Museum by Jack Lenor Larsen.

Gary Trentham Hanging Basket Collection
9-11, 1gt Hanging Basket-1-4, Gary Trentham, coiled linen, 59″(h), Photo by Tom Grotta.

Among the artist’s best-known works are hanging, three-dimensional forms in elongated cone shapes. Trentham won a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts while teaching at Auburn University in the late 1970s. He took a summer off from teaching and devoted his time to making baskets that were meant to be suspended in the air. A series of works, inspired by Native American arrow quivers, including Hanging Baskets 1-4, were the result. The long, slender forms also evoke cocoons, as if something might be growing within the mass of tiny waving filaments.

Gary Trentham Hanging Basket
1gt Hanging Basket, Gary Trentham, coiled linen, 54″ x 3.25″. Photo by Tom Grotta.

Trentham worked in natural materials, knotting linen tightly, coiling paper, and brushing jute until it resembles silky fur. “I like simple, neutral-colored materials that let my forms show; they give me a feeling of safeness,” Trentham said. He explored a variety of techniques. Jack Larsen and Mildred Constantine describe the 1980 White Basket in their seminal book, The Art Fabric: Mainstream as, “[a] coiled basket is hidden by hundreds of braids. Their wiry crispness contrasts sharply with the outer fringe of brushed fiber, The braid yarns are attached by looping around a coils before plaiting.”

Gary Trentham Art Linen Basket
5gt Untitled Linen Basket, Gary Trentham, braiding, coiling, oblique linen, 8″ x 13″ x 13″, (flat: 6″ x 22″ x 22″), 1997. Photo by Tom Grotta.

Trentham discovered basketry while studying at the University of Indiana in Bloomington. Joan Sterrenberg, who started the basketry program at Indiana, had studied with Ed Rossbach at the University of California, Berkeley. ” I knew immediately, when I was introduced to baskets by Joan Sterrenberg, that I had found my area,” Trentham said, “and I have never failed to be excited by it.”

Gary Trentham Artwork
4gt Untitled Basket, Gary Trentham, coiled and brushed jute basket, 6″ x 16″ x 17″, 1997

Trentham participated in several important exhibitions, including the International Tapestry Biennial in Lausanne, Switzerland and traveling exhibitions The Art Fabric: Mainstream and Interlacing: the Elemental Fabric.

Several examples of Trentham’s work are included in An Abundance of Objects, part of browngrotta arts’ Fall 2023 “Art in the Barn” exhibition this October 7th through October 15th. Reserve a time on Eventbrite.

Hope to see you there!

Over Under : Under Over in Edinburgh

January 21, 2020 0 Comment
Aliunde Alio, Sue Lawty, natural stone on gesso 24″ x 96″ x 10″, 2016. Photo by Tom Grotta, courtesy browngrotta arts.

The Cordis Trust presents a special exhibition in conjunction with Visual Arts Scotland at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh. Over Under : Under Over explores weave in its widest context through the work of six contemporary artists: Elizabeth Ashdown, Celia Pym, Dail Behennah, Sue Lawty, Sarah Jane Henderson and Sadhvi Jawa.

Cordis states: “Straying from their usual adherence to the traditional principles of woven Gobelin tapestry, this project aims to explore the wider applications of the woven form.” The artists were chosen because their work is constructed in a similar way to tapestry, or because they use techniques that resonate with the principles of weaving, whether that be through the interlacing of materials or of repetitive gesture.”

Sue Lawty’s work In this exhibition is made of found stones. She collects, organizes and orders thousands of tiny rock fragments to create a kind of pixilated cloth. Among Dail Behennah’s works in this exhibition are pieces paper, made with a three-dimensional, three-directional plaiting technique.

Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, Upper Galleries through January 30th 2020.

Art in situ – Helena Hernmarck at the Aldrich Museum through January 13, 2019

November 21, 2018 0 Comment

Helena Hernmarck describes the yarn she sources from Sweden at the opening of Helena Hernmarck: Weaving in Progress. Photo by Tom Grotta, courtesy browngrotta arts

A unique view into Helena Hernmarck’s artistic practice is on exhibit at the Aldrich Museum up the road from us in Ridgefield, Connecticut for four more weeks. In addition to showing 20 tapestries created over 40 years by Hernmarck, the Museum has replicated a wall of her studio with a large photograph, installed one of the artist’s smaller looms and invited her and her assistant, Mae Coburn, to complete a weaving onsite. We were at the well-attended opening of the exhibition and particularly appreciated the portion of the exhibit that illustrates her process – from inspiration to drawing to yarn selection to final work. As the Museum describes it: “An inventory of the wool used in the process will be on view, along with a display of materials from the artist’s archive, including photographs, watercolors, drawings, prototype samples, and other ephemera that illustrate and inform Hernmarck’s process and the evolution of her career.”

Process documents–inspiration, drawings, color swatches — preparation for a Hernmarck tapestry. Photo by Tom Grotta, courtesy browngrotta arts

In creating a work, Hernmarck plots the amount of weaving she needs to complete each day on graph paper. She told CT Post in October that when first learning to weave, she knew she wanted to create large-scale works. “I decided that if I could weave one square meter a week, I could live on it. And it’s almost true. I made it coarser [using multiple strands] so I could go faster,” she told the newspaper. That bundling has set Hernmarck’s work apart. “Depending on how she twists the strands and what colors and thicknesses she chooses, she is said to be able to give her tapestries unprecedented depth and complexity. One critical essay described them as almost pointillist,” wrote Joel Lang, “Ridgefield weaver Helena Hernmarck and her loom preside over Aldrich exhibit,” CT Post, October 18, 2018.

Exhibition view from Helena Hernmarck: Weaving in Progress, at the Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, CT. Photo by Tom Grotta, courtesy browngrotta arts.

Working at the Museum three to four days in a row has required a slight change in approach, Hernmarck says. “It is fun that so many are coming,” including textile enthusiasts and art classes, but hard to get the weaving done as planned while answering all the questions.

Don’t miss the opportunity to see Hernmarck’s art creation in action. The Aldrich is at 258 Main Street, Ridgefield, CT 06877, Tel 203.438.4519; general@aldrichart.org.

The in-residence days are:
November: 23, 24, 28, 29, 30
December: 6, 7, 8, 12, 13, 14, 20, 21, 22, 27, 28, 29
January: 2, 3, 4, 10, 11, 12

Art Out and About: US

June 7, 2018 0 Comment

The opportunities to see great art are endless this summer! Heading to the West Coast for work? Take a detour and visit  the newly opened Nordic Museum to check out Northern Exposure: Contemporary Nordic Arts Revealed in Seattle, Washington. Visiting friends or family in the Northeast? Make plans to spend the day in New Haven and see Text and Textile at The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library on Yale’s campus. Whether you are in the North, South, East or West there are a wide variety of strong exhibitions on display across the US this summer, here are a few of our favorites:

Grethe Wittrock's Nordic Birds at the Nordic Museum

Grethe Wittrock’s Nordic Birds at the Nordic Museum in Seattle, Washington. Photo by Grethe Wittrock

Northern Exposure: Contemporary Nordic Arts Revealed at the Nordic Museum, Seattle, Washington

The newly opened Nordic Museum hopes to share and inspire people of all ages and backgrounds through Nordic art. The museum is the largest in the US to honor the legacy of immigrants from the five Nordic countries: Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. Northern Exposure studies “how the Nordic character continues to redefine itself within an evolving global context” by challenging “perceptions of form, gender, identity, nature, technology and the body,” explains the Museum. The exhibition features work by internationally acclaimed artists, including Grethe Wittrock, Olafur Eliasson, Bjarne Melgaard, Jesper Just, Kim Simonsson and Cajsa Von Zeipel. Made of Danish sailcloth, Wittrock’s Nordic Birds immediately attracts the eye upon entering the exhibition. Northern Exposure: Contemporary Nordic Arts Revealed will be on display through September 16, 2018. For more information click HERE.

Traces: Wonder by Lia Cook at the Racine Art Museum, Gift of Karen Johnson Boyd. Photo by Jon Bolton

Traces: Wonder by Lia Cook at the Racine Art Museum, Gift of Karen Johnson Boyd. Photo by Jon Bolton

Honoring Karen Johnson Boyd: Collecting In-Depth at Home and at RAM, Racine Art Museum, Wisconsin

The Racine Art Museum’s new exhibit Honoring Karen Johnson Boyd: Collecting In-Depth at Home and at RAM showcases art advocate and collector Karen Johnson Boyd’s collection of ceramic, clay and fiber art. The exhibition, which is broken up into a series of four individually titled exhibitions, with varying opening and closing dates, highlight Boyd’s interests, accomplishments and lifelong commitment to art. Throughout her life, Boyd was drawn to a diverse array of artistic styles and subjects. Boyd, who collected fiber in an encyclopedic fashion, supported artists of varying ages with varying regional, national and international reputations. Boyd’s Frank Lloyd Wright-designed home provided her with many display options for her fiber collection. Though baskets encompassed the majority of Boyd’s fiber collection, she regularly altered her environment, adding and subtracting works as she added to her collection. The exhibitions feature work from Dorothy Gill Barnes, Lia Cook, Kiyomi Iwata, Ferne Jacobs, John McQueen, Ed Rossbach, Hideho Tanaka, Mary Merkel-Hess, Norma Minkowitz, Lenore Tawney and Katherine Westphal. Honoring Karen Johnson Boyd: Collecting In-Depth at Home and at RAM will be on display at the Racine Art Museum through December 30th, with exhibited pieces changing over in mid-September. For more information on Honoring Karen Johnson Boyd: Collecting In-Depth at Home and at RAM visit the Racine Art Museum’s website HERE.

Text and Textile at The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library

Text and Textile at The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, New Haven, Connecticut

In New Haven, Connecticut, The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library recently opened Text and Textile. The exhibition, which will be on display through August 12th, explores the relationship and intersection between text and textile in literature and politics.Text and Textile draws on Yale University’s phenomenal collection of literature tied to textiles, from Renaissance embroidered bindings to text from Anni Albers’ On Weaving. Additionally, the exhibition features: Gertrude Stein’s waistcoat; manuscript patterns and loom cards from French Jacquard mills; the first folio edition of William Shakespeare’s plays; the “Souper” paper dress by Andy Warhol; American samplers; Christa Wolf’s “Quilt Memories”; Zelda Fitzgerald’s paper dolls for her daughter; Edith Wharton’s manuscript drafts of “The House of Mirth”; an Incan quipu; poetry by Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson, Susan Howe and Walt Whitman; and “The Kelmscott Chaucer” by William Morris. For more information on Text and Textile click HERE.

Kaki Shibu by Nancy Moore Bess. Lent by Browngrotta Arts

Kaki Shibu by Nancy Moore Bess. Lent by Browngrotta Arts

Rooted, Revived, Reinvented: Basketry In America at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft. Houston, Texas

The traveling exhibition Rooted, Revived, Reinvented: Basketry In America is now on display at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft in Houston, Texas. The exhibition, which is set to travel around the United States through the end of 2019, chronicles the history of American basketry from its origins in Native American, immigrant and slave communities to its presence within the contemporary fine art world. Curated by Josephine Stealy and Kristin Schwain, the exhibition is divided into five sections: Cultural Origins, New Basketry, Living Traditions, Basket as Vessel and Beyond the Basket which aim to show you the evolution of basketry in America. Today, some contemporary artists seek to maintain and revive traditions practiced for centuries. However, other work to combine age-old techniques with nontraditional materials to generate cultural commentary. Rooted, Revived, Reinvented: Basketry In America features work by browngrotta arts’ artists Polly Adams Sutton, Mary Giles, Nancy Moore Bess, Christine Joy, Nancy Koenigsberg, Dorothy Gill Barnes, Ferne Jacobs, Gyöngy Laky, Kari Lønning, John McQueen, Norma Minkowitz, Leon Niehues, Ed Rossbach, Karyl Sisson and Kay Sekimachi.

Kay Sekimachi in Handheld at the Aldrich Museum

Kay Sekimachi in Handheld at the Aldrich Museum. Photo by Tom Grotta

Handheld at the Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut

The Aldrich Museum’s new exhibition Handheld explores how contemporary artists’ and designers’ perceive the meaning of touch. Touch is one of the most intimate and sometimes unappreciated senses. Today, the feeling our hands are most familiar with are our that of our handheld devices and electronics. Touch is no longer solely used to hold objects such as pencils and tools, in fact, touch is increasingly taking the form of a swipe, where the sensation is ignored in favor to the flat visual landscapes of our own selection. “Handheld takes a multifarious approach—the hand as means of creation, a formal frame of reference” explains the Aldrich Museum. It serves the viewer as “a source of both delight and tension as they experience sensual objects in familiar domestic forms, scaled for touch, that can be looked upon but not felt.” The group exhibition, which features work by Kay Sekimachi will be on display until January 13, 2019. For more information on Handheld click HERE.