A rare chance to see inside browngrotta
BROWNGROTTA ALLOWS A RARE GLIMPSE AT ITS INTERNATIONAL FIBER ARTS COLLECTIONS
To enter the domain of browngrotta arts in Wilton a week before its fall “Art in the Barn” open house is to have the sensation of discovering living things at rest.
In the front hall opposite the main entrance, a creature called “Surface Form” has draped itself atop a white pedestal. Woven from willow, it has hollows like a basket. But the hollows are deceptive. “Surface Form” is so tightly woven it’s an almost solid mass, a self container.
A printed guide provides an unusual measurement. It says the meter- long sculpture weighs four pounds. That’s a lot of willow. The creator is Laura Bacon, an English artist, best known for sculptures too big to fit in a gallery. Rhonda Brown, who with her husband Tom Grotta founded their business in 1987, says Bacon makes sculptures so large they wrap around buildings and climb out windows.
Less conspicuous, even though it is 18- feet long, is a metal mesh sculpture titled “Bridge” by the Finnish artist Agneta Hobin. Strung above Bacon’s “Surface Form,” it could be an indoor footbridge, but its filament is so fine it would disappear viewed side on. So, it is displayed slightly tilted and gains extra visibility from mica embedded in the mesh. Reflective, the mica scales turn “Bridge” into a silver skinned serpent.
Brown and Grotta operate in an unconventional way. A converted 1895 barn doubles as their home and showcase. Walk- ins are welcome only during biannual open houses. Their prestigious artist roster is about evenly split between national and international. “Here’s Japan. Here’s India,” says Tom Grotta, gesturing as he walks from the front hall to the dining room.
Catalogs that Grotta is proud to photograph himself are important to connecting artists and buyers. This year’s edition, “Volume 50: Chronicling Fiber Arts for Three Decades,” functions as a retrospective.
Fiber arts, or textile arts, is a category hard to pin down. The fiber may be plant- based or metal, borrowed or augmented. One humble piece among three dozen in the room designated the old kitchen is a tote bag made from recycled Trader Joe’s shopping bags. Asking price $ 8,000, it is by the celebrated weaver James Bassler.
Back in the front hall, there’s a collection of fabric panels by the Polish artist Wlodzimierz Cygan woven from wool, linen, sisal — and fiber optic wire — that light up. “Believe it or not, it was inspired by a Chinese painting of a basket with a man underneath,” says Brown.
Maybe the reason so many of the pieces in the open house appear to be at rest is that are made from natural materials or refer to nature, and are three dimensional, displayed in a home environment.
What Grotta says was positioned to be the literal centerpiece for the show is suspended in the middle of the dining room. A
12- foot tall shower of twine, its creator is Annette Bellamy, an Alaskan commercial fisherwoman whose ocean based art is shown in museums. The 132 lines in the sculpture are like those she uses to fish for halibut. But their hooks are ceramic and oversized. The shadows they cast on a white platform beneath, their seabed, is an extension of the sculpture.
Much less conspicuous, but one of the highest priced works on display is the $ 75,000 “Waterfall” by the California artist and basketmaker Ferne Jacobs. A narrow, inverted triangle woven from twine and linen, it’s plain brown in color and tucked away in a corner of the living room. What makes it especially intriguing,
Grotta explains, is that Jacobs didn’t plan it out ahead of time. “This is like jazz,” he says. “It comes into shape as she does it.”
Meanwhile, filling almost an entire wall at the far end of the living room is “Su Series,” a woven work by another California artist, Lia Cook. Much more premeditated, it is comprised of 32 square panels of a child’s face overlaid with zig- zagging lines.
In fact, the lines may be derived from brain scans of people looking at woven or identical photographic images. The face is Cook’s own as a child, yet the lines create different expressions on each one. Brown says Cook collaborated with neuroscientists on the project. She weaves on a handloom converted to accept digitized data. With its repetitive panels, “Su Series” viewed from a distance could be mistaken for a museum video installation waiting to be turned on.
Equally large and the only other piece so reliant on human imagery is a four panel tapestry by the
Ukrainian- born weaver Aleksandra Stoyanov. Each panel is almost 10- feet tall and bears the image of a person drawn in pencil on cloth. Each one stands alone on the same empty street, gazing outward. Three of the four wear bulky overcoats, boots and scarves. They could be anywhere, but wherever they’re from it’s winter and, as Rhonda observes, they’ve seen suffering.
Every piece of fiber art has a story to tell about its construction, but some are more hidden than others. In the living room, there’s a trio of “Yuragi” by the Japanese artist Naomi Kobayashi who sometimes uses shredded paper texts into her weavings.
In one case, says Rhonda, a mystery writer, who was a Kobayashi collector, asked if her texts could be unraveled and read. Told yes, the writer used the idea in a plot. A character shreds a secret message and conceals in a weaving.
Just two Connecticut artists are in the browngrotta show, but each has a piece with a story. Kari Lonning of Ridgefield has a shallow basket woven from akebia vine. She discovered the plant, an invasive species, when she tripped over it near her home. “It was so strong, she went down. The vine didn’t move,” says Tom.
Norma Minkowitz of Westport, a prominent figure in the fiber arts movement that began in the 1970s, has several of her familiar bird sculptures and mixed media “fiber drawing” that’s biographical. Besides her accomplishments as an artist, Minkowitz is a serious long distant runner. One of the media in the drawing — it looks like an abstract home sampler — is socks she wore out running.
The browngrotta “Art in the Barn” open house runs until Sept. 20. Because of Covid- 19 restrictions admission is listed to 15 people per hour. Reservations can be made on line.