This is the animating premise of Transformations: dialogues in art and material which opens this Saturday, May 9th at browngrotta arts. The exhibition that asks a deceptively simple question: what happens when artists stop treating materials as additives and start treating them as collaborators? The answer, it turns out, is profound.

Material Is Not Neutral
We tend to think of materials as passive — the stuff through which ideas pass on their way to becoming art. The artists in Transformations challenge that assumption at every turn. In the contemporary art context, materiality isn’t just about physical substance. It encompasses everything a material carries with it: weight, surface, history, cultural memory, expressive charge. A piece of linen isn’t just woven thread. It’s centuries of labor, landscape, and touch.

System and Surprise
Transformations proves that the range of works that a simple material can inspire is nearly endless. Carol Shaw-Sutton, Chiyoko Tanaka, Sara Brennan, Mary Giles, Merja Keskinen, and Jane Sauer all work with Linen. In Shaw-Sutton’s hands the material becomes a molded vessel. Under Chiyoko Tanaka’s ministrations, woven linen fabric is returned to its essential threads, transformed into an artifact. For Sara Brennan, woven linen serves as a canvas. From a distance, her works appear to be abstract paintings. A close up view reveals a textured weaving using dozens of shades. For Jane Sauer and Mary Giles, linen is a sculptural medium.

Material as More
Metal is a canopied category in Transformations. Artists consider it as thread— from gold filaments, to lead extrusions, to bent wire of copper and brass. Kyoko Kumai’s spun steel threads float. Gyöngy Laky turns nails and wire into an artful assemblage. Sue Lawty weaves with bast fibers — raffia, hemp, nettle, linen — and elemental lead, and assembles carefully ordered stones drawn from beaches and riverbeds. She pursues qualities inherently given by the chosen substance, seeking “an understated restraint, balance, tension, rhythm: an essential stillness.”

Same Input, Different Outcome
Toshiko Takaezu and Yasuhisa Kohyama both devoted their lives to clay, but their practices reveal just how vast the distance can be within a single medium. Takaezu’s closed ceramic forms — rounded, glazed, often containing a small stone or rattle sealed inside — are intimate and quietly mysterious, their surfaces richly colored and their shapes suggesting the human body. There is a sense of the maker’s hand coaxing something from the earth. Kohyama, by contrast, surrenders control to the fire itself. He builds by hand and fires with wood, never applying glaze; color and surface are entirely the product of ash movement and the object’s position within the kiln. Where Takaezu brings clay close — shaping it into vessels that hold secrets — Kohyama sends it into an elemental process and receives back something ancient and unpredictable.

What These Works Carry
What unites the artists in Transformations isn’t a shared aesthetic or a shared geography. It’s a shared conviction: that choosing a material is a serious act, that working with it is as meaningful as the finished object, and that what results carries something more than form.

It carries thought. History. Culture. The trace of a hand that knew exactly what it was doing — and trusted the material to meet it halfway.

Join us at Transformations: dialogues in art and material (May 9-17) at browngrotta arts in Wilton, CT. Or order the 164-page catalog from browngrotta.com.

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In addition to the exhibition, our New This Week series has spotlighted the work of six exceptional artists throughout December: Nancy Koenigsberg, Karyl Sisson, Annette Bellamy, Yeonsoon Chang, and Marian Bijlenga. Let’s take a look back at these inspiring artists and their contributions to the world of art.

We started the month of December off by featuring the talented artist Nancy Koenigsberg, renowned for her intricate wire sculptures. Koenigsberg’s work challenges both visually and conceptually, with sculptures that are free-standing, wall-mounted, or part of installations. Her pieces are created using a variety of materials—copper, steel, and aluminum wire—woven and knotted into grids that are shaped and layered.

Koenigsberg’s use of materials that are both shiny and dull, fragile and industrial in strength, creates an interesting interplay between form and texture. This combination of contrasts has made her work notable in the contemporary art world, with an extensive exhibition history in the United States, Europe, and South America. Koenigsberg’s ability to work with both fragile and industrial materials, pushing the boundaries of wire as an artistic medium, has garnered her numerous commissions.

We continued the month by featuring the exceptional artist Karyl Sisson, whose work draws from the materials of everyday life. Based in Los Angeles, Sisson’s work explores the intersection of fiber art and sculpture, using materials both past and present to create intricate, textured forms. Her artistic influences range from the landscape of Los Angeles to microbiology and even fashion manufacturing, bringing a multidisciplinary approach to her practice.

Throughout her three-decade-long career, Sisson has consistently focused on pattern, repetition, and structure as central themes in her work, which she explores dimensionally. Drawing from her background in basketry and needlework, she transforms everyday materials into art that speaks to the complex relationships between domesticity, gender roles, and traditional craft.

Sisson’s recent work, particularly with paper straws, is inspired by cells and organisms, which inform the organic, growing shapes she creates. Her work has been featured in numerous museum collections, and she is part of the Craft in America collection, further cementing her place in the contemporary craft world.

We then highlighted the work of Annette Bellamy, an artist based in Alaska whose work reflects her unique life experiences. Having spent many years commercially fishing in Alaska, Bellamy’s life on the water has deeply influenced her artistic practice. The physicality of both her work as a fisherwoman and her art-making process have fueled each other, creating a dynamic relationship between the two.

Bellamy strives to create art that communicates through a universal visual language. She works with both ceramics and textiles, weaving her life and experiences into pieces that speak to a broader audience. Her work reflects a balance of her life on the water and her craft, merging physicality and art with sensitivity and strength.

We are thrilled to have the opportunity to work with her and showcase her art!

We continued our December features with Yeonsoon Chang, whose masterful use of Teflon mesh, pure gold leaf, and eco-resin creates a dynamic interplay of texture and form that blends the modern with the traditional.

Chang’s work beautifully bridges cultures and techniques, merging contemporary materials with ancient traditions, resulting in pieces that captivate both the eye and the mind. Her precision and delicate craftsmanship make her a standout figure in contemporary art. Chang received the Craft Design Award of the Year from the Korea Craft & Design Foundation in December.

With her innovative approach, Chang has developed an eco-friendly resin that she applies to structures crafted from abaca fibers and Teflon-coated glass-fiber mesh. She uses a special glue to attach gold leaf to the fibers, resulting in pieces that evolve with the light. As the light shifts, the structures change, casting intriguing shadows and reflecting or refracting light, transcending the functional to become art that’s constantly in motion.

Finally, we turned our attention to Marian Bijlenga, whose work continues to challenge traditional notions of textile art. Known for her intricate woven sculptures and use of natural materials, Bijlenga explores the relationship between form, texture, and the space around her work.

Her pieces often play with the idea of repetition and the fluidity of materials, creating a dynamic conversation between the natural world and the human hand. Bijlenga’s work is celebrated internationally, and we are proud to feature her work at browngrotta arts.

Keep following along and stay tuned for more exciting updates all of 2025.

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Wendy Wahl had two 2024 book recommendations to share. “Many years ago, while at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, I discovered Mysteries of the Alphabet by Marc-Alain Ouaknin (Abbeville Press, 1999).

I was as interested then as I am today in the world of alphabets and their origins. This compact book is a compilation of signs, symbols, and pictograms that have been a part of the evolution of letters and their meaning over the past 3,500 years.” In 2021, Wahl made a piece called Equine Calligraphy, composed of hand-gathered and manipulated horsehair stitched to paper with strands of the same hair. She found a category for this kind of work when she came across Asemic: The Art of Writing by Peter Schwenger. The book is a survey of contemporary asemic writing and its place between art and recognizable script. [Cliff Notes version — asemic means writing without language.] The book was ecstatically reviewed: “vital and fateful;” “engaging and groundbreaking.” https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/aia-reviews/asemic-writing-peter-schwenger-cy-twombly-roland-barthes-1202688046/.

“I was excited to realize that browngrotta arts’ artist Marian Bijlenga‘s artwork was used for the book’s cover,” Wahl wrote. browngrotta arts carries a book by Bijlenga, Written Weed, containing collages by the artist made of dried leaves, grasses, and seeds. The images are like handwriting, Chinese characters, the letters of an alphabet.

Gyöngy Laky is another artist who is interested in alphabets and messaging without recognizable forms as in the work Notes to Self. Author David Roth, says “her use of language is decidedly postmodern, seen in how she presents symbols and signs as inherently porous and unstable, subject to all the forces that influence perception and thought.” 

(“The Architecture of Thought,” David M. Roth, in Gyöngy Laky, Screwing with Order: assembled art, actions and creative practice, arnoldsche, 2022).

Heidrun Schimmel creates  “pages” of stitches that appear to be writing, but are not.

Caroline Bartlett has explored text/nontext works, too. 

These books and artworks offer novel ways to explore how art, words and communication combine.

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A more unusual material choice — assembling items made of materials from the sea, will also result in a wildly diverse group of works. We’re showing baskets of seaweed, wall work of fish skin and fish scales, and works that incorporate sea sand and sea stones. 

Collecting by artist can yield a broad mix of results. Choosing a category, like Polish, LQBTQ+ or self-taught artists, can result in considerable variation. Even a single artist, if it is one who experiments relentlessly like Jiro Yonezawa, can ground a surprising collection.

There are four very different works by this artist in Ways of Seeing, and they don’t even include the wide bamboo spheres which he has created more recently. 

Basketmaker Hisako Sekijima, who has worked in everything from cherry bark to kudzu is another example of someone who can be collected in multiples. Lia Cook is another — her practice has moved in several different and exciting ways through out her career.

Then there are them groupings — we are showing art related to water, but even a color, like Picasso’s blue period, can be an energizing organizing principle. We’ve gathered weavings and objects that meet that criteria: 

There are a few days to see our compilations in person. Or you can order the catalog: https://store.browngrotta.com/c-54-ways-of-seeing/

Happy Hunting!

Ways of Seeing: how individuals envision and curate their art collections

Through September 29, 2024
browngrotta arts
276 Ridgefield Road
Wilton, CT 06897
https://browngrotta.com/exhibitions

Gallery Dates/Hours:
Monday, September 23rd through Saturday, September 28th: 10am to 5pm (40 visitors/ hour) Sunday, September 29th: 11am to 6pm [Final Day] (40 visitors/ hour)

Safety protocols: 
Reservations strongly encouraged; No narrow heels please (barn floors)

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The changeable, fluid nature of water has often been an inspiration for artists. Artists use water to convey a variety of meanings. Some are moved by water as a natural force, for others there is a more spiritual connection, and still others are interested in how humans are impacting our oceans and rivers — in each case the results are thought provoking and intriguing. 

Artists in The Art Aquatic exhibition reflect that diversity of approaches. Some have made imaginative uses of water-related materials. There are patchworks of fish skins by Annette Bellamy, who spends part of each year fishing commercially and compositions of fish scales by Marian Bijlenga. Keiji Nio photographs sea scenes, uses the images in ribbons that he plaits and edges with beach sand. Jeannet Leenderste creates baskets of seaweed she forages in Maine and works with the Rockweed Coalition. “Seaweed not only creates a habitat for countless species, it sequesters carbon,” she says, “and protects our shoreline as our sea levels are rising.”

Other works in The Art Aquatic offer more abstract references to life in the deep, including Ulla-Maija Vikman’s “painting,” Biagga (Sea Wind), made of viscose threads in marine colors.  Mariette Rousseau-Vermette’s Blue Water II, made of woven tubes of beachy blue, grey, white, and yellow, evokes a sunny day at the water’s edge. Masakazu Kobayashi’s assemblage of silk-wrapped bows reflects an ocean horizon.

A third series of works offer watery imagery, like Judy Mulford’s Aging by the Sea which incorporates a conch shell and a tiny boat covered in knotless netting, Ed Rossbach’s Fish Trap Basket, with a whimsical fish motif, the mermaid in Norma Minkowitz’s sculpture, My Cup Runneth Over, and Karyl Sisson’s Flight III, a sea-creature-like sculpture of vintage zippers.

More literal still, there are the nautical object interpretations included in the exhibition, like Mercedes Vicente‘s shell of cotton canvas. Jane Balsgaard’s Relief floats alongside Merja Winqvist’s gridded boat – both are made of paper. Text from Moby Dick is etched on Call Me Ishmael, Lawrence LaBianca’s ivory-colored boat sculpture. La Bianca has created a body of work that engages aquatic environments. “The tools we apply to nature—to contain it, shape it, understand it and categorize it also have a profound impact upon it,” he says. LaBianca references the impetus to measure, understand, contain, and manipulate nature that animates his art – that impetus is one that can animate collectors of art as well.

Join us at Ways of Seeing and learn more.

Exhibition Details:
Ways of Seeing
exploring ways individuals envision and curate art collections
browngrotta arts
276 Ridgefield Road
Wilton, CT 06897

Gallery Dates/Hours:
Saturday, September 21st: 11am to 6pm [Opening & Artist Reception]
Sunday, September 22nd: 11am to 6pm (40 visitors/ hour)
Monday, September 23rd through Saturday,September 28th: 10am to 5pm (40 visitors/ hour)
Sunday, September 29th: 11am to 6pm [Final Day] (40 visitors/ hour)
browngrotta.com

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This Fall, browngrotta arts at 276 Ridgefield Road, Wilton, Connecticut, will explore the many ways individuals envision and curate their contemporary art collections. From September 21st to the 29th the gallery’s Fall 2024 “Art in the Barn” exhibition, Ways of Seeing, will sample different types of art selection criteria — by theme, by artist, by size.

Each work in The Art Aquatic, a theme-related collection, exists at the intersection of the artist’s fascination with a variety of nautical themes and the artmaking process. In The Art Aquatic, viewers will find imaginative uses of water-related materials: baskets incorporating shells by Birgit Birkkjaer, kayak and paddle sculptures by Chris Drury wrapped in salmon skin, Marian Bijlenga’s composition of fish scales, and Jeannet Leenderste’s baskets made of seaweed. Other works in The Art Aquatic offer more abstract references to life in the deep, including Ulla-Maija Vikman’s “painting,” Biagga (Sea Wind), made of viscose threads painted in marine colors and Mariette Rousseau-Vermette’s Blue Water II, made of woven tubes of beachy blue, grey, white, and yellow. A third series of works in The Art Aquatic offer watery imagery, like Judy Mulford’s  Aging by the Sea, that features a conch shell and tiny boat, Ed Rossbach’s Fish Trap Basket, with a whimsical fish motif, and the mermaid in Norma Minkowitz’s sculpture, My Cup Runneth Over. 

Impact: 20 Women Artists to Collect, another of the exhibitions within Ways of Seeing, will examine collecting by specific artist. Impact will present sculptures, tapestries, and mixed media works made from 1976 to 2024 by artists of significance and renown, including Kay Sekimachi, Yeonsoon Chang, Simone Pheulpin, and Carolina Yrarrázaval. Each of these artists demonstrates a knowledge of traditional and experimental techniques, while redefining the perception of textiles as fine art.

A third exhibition within Ways of Seeing will be Right-Sized, which considers collecting within specified parameters. Diversity is the hallmark — in materials, techniques, and approaches. In Right-Sized, viewers will find embroidery by Diane Itter, sculpture in sisal, paper, and willow by Mia Olsson, Noriko Takamiya, and Lizzie Farey, ceramics by Claude Vermette, and spheres, boxes, and baskets by Hideho Tanaka, Polly Sutton, Naoko Serino, and others, worthy of collecting in multiples.

“Ways of Seeing will celebrate the passion and individuality that spark and shape collections,” says co-curator Tom Grotta, “while offering collectors at all levels a wide selection of works to appreciate and possibly acquire.”

A full-color catalog will accompany the exhibition.

Details:
Ways of Seeing
exploring ways individuals envision and curate art collections
browngrotta arts
276 Ridgefield Road
Wilton, CT 06897

Gallery Dates/Hours:
Saturday, September 21st: 11am to 6pm [Opening & Artist Reception]
Sunday, September 22nd: 11am to 6pm (40 visitors/ hour)
Monday, September 23rd through Saturday,September 28th: 10am to 5pm (40 visitors/ hour)
Sunday, September 29th: 11am to 6pm [Final Day] (40 visitors/ hour)

Schedule your visit on POSH.

browngrotta.com

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Join us this week, through Sunday May 12, at 6 pm to see our Spring Art in the Barn exhibition, Discourse: art across generations and continents. Traffic has been steady, including a guided tour for 15 people on Tuesday, but we still have slots available for gallery appointments and drop ins.

Viewers will enjoy 150+ works by more than 60 artists from 20 countries. Many people take two trips through the space to ensure they have not missed anything.

While here they learn more about works in the show including Irina Kolesnikova’s Spectator, a filmstrip- like group of woven portraits of her alter ego. She places him in discomfiting situations.  “Sometimes the events happening around him are frightening,” Kolesnikova says, “he wants to go away, to run far away. But curiosity makes him come back again, secretly observing, trying to memorize all impressions.”

James Bassler’s This Old House, is another work that encourages viewers to take a closer work and consider its inspiration and origins. “Over a year ago, a friend gave me a book, Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson,” Bassler writes. “It  caused me to begin yet another weaving of a flag, which includes references to the textile traditions of Africa.  In my early days of learning how to weave, the late 60s and early 70s, I wove many samples, and after weaving, experimented with batik and dyeing.  After all these years, those woven samples — maybe eight or ten of them —  were sewn together to become the surface on which the flag would eventually, after about a year, emerge.”

Same Difference by John McQueen draws appreciative comments (“That’s clever!” “I get it.”) when people learn its backstory. It’s comprised of three items on pedestals made of sticks tied with waxed linen — a wooden sump pump, the skeleton of a bonsai tree, and a representation of the elephant god Ganesh made of tied twigs. The items seem to have been chosen randomly, but they are not. Each draws water from the ground and uses it to slake thirsty crops and people, trees and animals.

Wendy Wahl’s work in Discourse explores inversion — a reversal of position, order, form, or relationship — and requires people to take a closer look. Wahl writes that she reassembles encyclopedia pages because of their symbolism, conceptual reference, and unique paper quality.  “My interactions with these materials,” she writes, “are meditative. These pieces are created by deconstructing the books, rolling and pinching the individual parts, and, like a puzzle, fitting them to the panel. The interconnected spiral elements become the picture plane that explores dimension, direction, texture, color, and reflection.” 

The evocative forms of Rachel Max’s work draw viewers in for inspection and introspection. Over the last few years, Max has been making forms that explore notions of infinity and time. The title for her piece in this exhibition, Caesura, came to her while she was making it. “I was thinking about the composition, working out where the weave should become less dense and where one section would end and another begin. I wanted to create a visual interruption, my equivalent to a break in music or a pause. In poetry, I discovered,  this is called Caesura.”

There are dozens of works to discover at Discourse: art across generations and continents and five days remaining to join us. Hope we’ll see you!

Schedule a visit
Times to visit Discourse: art across generations and continents can be scheduled on POSH. 

Exhibition Details:
Discourse: art across generations and continents
Through May 12, 2024
browngrotta arts
276 Ridgefield Road, Wilton, CT 06897

Gallery Dates/Hours:
Wednesday May 8th through Saturday, May 11th: 10am to 5pm (40 visitors/ hour)
Sunday, May 12th: 11am to 6pm [Final Day] (40 visitors/ hour)
Schedule your visit at POSH.

Safety protocols: 
POSH reservations strongly encouraged • No narrow heels please 

Catalog:
A full-color catalog, browngrotta arts’ 59th, Discourse: art across generations and continents, with an essay by Erika Diamond, Artist | Curator | Associate Director of CVA Galleries | Chautauqua Institution, will be published by the browngrotta arts in May 2024 in conjunction with the exhibition.

Upcoming:
browngrotta arts will present a talkthrough of slides from Discourse on Zoom, Art on the Rocks: art art talkthrough with a twist, on Friday, June 11th at 7 pm EST.

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In Discourse, browngrotta arts will assemble a large and eclectic group of artworks that celebrate artists from different countries, who work with varied materials, and represent distinct artistic approaches. More than 50 artists from 20 countries will be featured.Included will be works from the art form’s origins 60 years ago, current mixed media works and sculpture, and pieces created in the decades between — enabling an intriguing look at intergenerational differences, material breakthroughs, and historical significance in fiber art.

structural explorations
Despite their distinctiveness, the artists in Discourse share a common trait. Each possesses “material intelligence,” what author Glenn Adamson describes as “a deep understanding of the material world around us, an ability to read that material environment, and the know-how required to give it new form.” The works in Discourse reflect this mastery. Artists like John McQueen and Norma Minkowitz of the US and Norie Hatekayama and Naoko Serino of Japan engineer imaginative structures of unexpected materials — plaited paper tape, molded jute, crocheted linen, and pieced twigs and branches. 

fiber art … an evolution
Discourse also offers viewers a chance to make intergenerational and cross-continental comparisons. Included will be starkly graphic weavings by Warren Seelig (US) made in the 70s and 80s, and ones by Gudrun Pagter (DK), and Blair Tate (US) made 40+ years later. We have often observed a different sensibility among artists from Eastern Europe and those in Western Europe, Asia, and the US. Artists in Eastern Europe have a history, which began after World War II, of using items at hand to create works – sisal, rope, hemp, goat hair. A fierce energy is seen in these works; they are rugged and raw. By contrast, for artists who worked elsewhere in more traditional tapestry materials like wool, silk, linen – quietly refined works were often the result. Discourse will spotlight such regional contrasts. 

material matters
Viewers to Discourse will also see a wide range of to material and technique approaches. Several artists make vastly different uses of paper — scrolling of encyclopedia pages by Wendy Wahl (US), knotted paper objects by Shoko Fukuda (JP), and sculptural works of rice paper by Pat Campbell (US). Three other artists, Adela Akers (US), Marianne Kemp (NL), and Marian Bijlenga (NL), use horsehair in vastly different ways. 

the medium is the message
Some of the artists in Discourse, including Laura Foster Nicholson (US) Gyöngy Laky (US), and Irina Kolesnikova (RU/DE), use the medium of fiber art to make explicit statements about the modern world — about personal anxiety, communication, and humans’ impact on the environment. “I like to tease the brain – to promote or even provoke or cajole, a visual dialogue with the viewer,” says Gyöngy Laky (US). Her work, Anticipation, which spells out the word “Who?“ in applewood branches, presents a question. “Given the challenges, concerns, conflicts and other dangers we face today,” Laky says, “this question, underlies the search for a way forward to a better day.” Anneke Klein (NL) is interested in communication: In Dialogue — Her work is made up of two layers that hang, one in front of the other. When you change your position in front of Dialogue, the interaction between the two layers changes, as it does between two speakers.

experiments in technique
Contemporary fiber art is by definition experimental. It arose when a group of artists used tapestry techniques to create abstract sculptures that hung off the wall. A work of parallel optical lines from studies Lia Cook (US) did for her master’s thesis in the 1970s will be included along with works reflecting Neha Puri Dhir’s (IN) currrent experiments dying silk and baskets by Esmé Hofman (NL) of black willow and elm that also incorporate color.

fiber art has emotional appeal
Fiber art — art textiles, tapestries, and three-dimensional sculpture — engages us on a deeply personal level. Our first memories are of cloth, fuzzy blankets, soft towels and they remain strong ones. Scientists have shown that different parts of the brain light up when we look at a woven image and a photographic image of the same item. Aby Mackie (SP) sources and recycles used fabrics from flea markets, fabrics laden with memory. She is captivated by these silent witnesses to a life lived; a worn bed sheet, a stained tablecloth, a moth-eaten gown. Such artifacts bear the marks and physicality of human nature, possessing a poetic power. She gilds this repurposed material in works like We Can All Be Saved, leaving viewers to consider what creates value.

We invite you to draw comparisons and gain new perspectives of your own. See you in May!

Exhibition Details:
Discourse: art across generations and continents
May 4 – May 12, 2024
browngrotta arts
276 Ridgefield Road, Wilton, CT 06897

Gallery Dates/Hours:
Saturday, May 4th: 11am to 6pm [Opening & Artist Reception]
Sunday, May 5th: 11am to 6pm (40 visitors/ hour)
Monday, May 6th through Saturday, May 11th: 10am to 5pm (40 visitors/ hour)
Sunday, May 12th: 11am to 6pm [Final Day] (40 visitors/ hour)
Schedule your visit at POSH

Safety protocols: 
POSH reservations strongly encouraged • No narrow heels please 

Catalog:
A full-color catalog, browngrotta arts’ 59th, Discourse: art across generations and continents, will be published by the gallery in conjunction with the exhibition.

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Join browngrotta arts for a private Tour and Reception in Saturday, October 15th from 4 pm to 7 pm to benefit World Affairs Forum. The event will be our Fall 2022 Art for a Cause.

The Details
At 4PM, Tom Grotta will host a Private Tour of the exhibition Allies For Art: Work from NATO-related Countries. From 5 to 7PM, there will be brief Remarks by speakers from WAF and browngrotta arts will host a Reception, with exhibition-themed canapés and a curated cocktail where guests can socialize, view and learn more about the exhibition’s works of art.

The Speakers

Two experts on art and culture will speak briefly about making and protecting art in conflict zones. Cindy Maguire, PhD is a researcher and professor, and co-author of the book “Arts and Culture in Global Development Practice,” also with Ann Holt, PhD. Rob McCallum, PhD is both a practicing artist who has exhibited his work at numerous international solo and group shows, as well as a global educator with a PhD in Art Education. 

Register Here to attend.

The Cause/World Affairs Forum
In addition to 100% of the proceeds from public ticket sales, 10% of the proceeds from all sales of art, books, or catalogs at this Art for a Cause event will be donated to World Affairs Forum, an independent, nonpartisan organization dedicated to engaging the public and leading voices to better understand the world. Since 1946, World Affairs Forum in Stamford, CT has been providing top-level and thought-provoking presentations, debates, and discussions of foreign policy and global affairs featuring world leaders, economists, diplomats, scholars, business luminaries, corporate change-makers, authors, journalists, and Nobel laureates. Its mission is to create conversations in our community about global affairs, foreign policy, and America’s role in the world.

The Exhibition:
Allies for Art: Work from NATO-related countries (October 8 – 16) features over 130 pieces from nearly 50 artists, and will highlight work from 21 countries in Eastern and Western Europe made from the 1960s to the present. The diverse fiber works and sculpture in the exhibition were created by artists who fled repressive regimes, who have worked under and around government restrictions and who have been influenced by current conditions. 

Signing Up
Public registration for the general reception, from 5pm to 7pm, is $25. Public registration for the 4pm private tour + general reception from 5pm to 7pm is $50.
Click to register: Art for a Cause.

Note:
We will be closing registration when the gallery venue reaches capacity, so please register as soon as possible to secure your tickets.

Address:
276 Ridgefield Road Wilton, CT 06897

Safety protocols:
Eventbrite reservations strongly encouraged • We will follow current state and federal guidelines surrounding COVID-19 • As of October 1, 2022, masks are not required • No narrow heels please (barn floors.)

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This year we’ve gathered our art selections into a clickable lookbook format. Whether you are gifting yourself, a friend or family member, a work of art makes a truly unique choice. Our curated collection includes art for every location, including crowdpleasing centerpieces (Rocking the Table) and coveted items to set on a bookshelf (Boosting a Bookshelf) or counter top (Counter Balancing). 

We’ve included art suggestions to fill special spots — including those often hard-to-fill narrow walls (On the Straight and Narrow). Our choices include a pleated fabric work by Caroline Bartlett of the UK and a hanging of hand-painted threads by Ulla-Maija Vikman, known as “Finland’s colorist.” Or have you got your eye on an empty space? The one that makes you think — “I wish I could find just the right piece of art for that spot.” We’ve got a batch of ideas for you there — from embellished photographs by Gyöngy Laky(US) to an intricate embroidery by Scott Rothstein(US) to a newsprint and lacquer collage by Toshio Sekiji of Japan.

There are works at every price point, from the brightly colored abstract tapestry, Flow, by Jo Barker, a Cordis Prize winner from the UK to a basket sculpture of cottonwood by Christine Joy(US) to a new book about the innovative weaver Włodzimierz Cygan of Poland.

Take a look here: http://www.browngrotta.com/digitalfolios/HolidayFlipBook/Hoilday FlipBook 2021.html

The small print:

Order for the holidays by December 13th and we’ll ship by December 14th for domestic delivery by the holidays (though due to COVID and other delays, we can’t guaranteed the shippers’ schedule). If you’d like us to gift wrap your purchase, email us at art@browngrotta.com, as soon as you have placed your order. To ensure we know you want gift wrapping, don’t wait to contact us — we generally ship as soon as the orders are received. Quantities are limited.

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