The Curatorial Frame

The exhibition takes materiality as its central subject. For the artists in Transformations, materials are not neutral carriers of form but active participants in the creative process, each with its own history, physical constraints, and expressive potential. The title signals a double proposition: the transformation of raw matter into art, and the transformation that art enacts on our understanding of the material world itself.

Co-curators Rhonda Brown and Tom Grotta position the exhibition around what curator and historian Glenn Adamson calls “material intelligence,” which he describes as a deep understanding of the material world, an ability to read its properties and possibilities, and the knowledge required to give it new form. The works in Transformations are installed in combinations designed to invite comparison, inviting viewers to reconsider what happens when different artists begin from the same substance and arrive at entirely different places.

Materials and Artists

The range of materials across the exhibition is deliberately broad: clay, silk, linen, cotton, steel, bark, seaweed, bamboo, and horsehair all appear, alongside more unexpected choices. The diversity is not incidental. It reflects a curatorial argument that material intelligence is not a single skill but a family of knowledges, each with its own demands and possibilities.

In silk, Kiyomi Iwata works with spun silk for freestanding sculptures and with kibiso, the waste silk from the first unravelling of the cocoon, for luminous wall works. Polly Barton builds woven images from bound and dyed silk threads. In cotton, Simone Pheulpin and Mercedes Vicente produce forms that appear grown rather than made, evoking coral, shells, and geological structures. Kay Sekimachi employs split-ply and card-weaving techniques to fashion cotton cord loops that hold shells and stones gathered from the shore. In clay, Toshiko Takaezu’s serene column stands in contrast to Yasuhisa Kohyama’s vessels that carry the feel of something hewn from mountainsides, while Karen Karnes’s functional pots resist the sense of the purely handmade. John McQueen, Polly Sutton, Dorothy Gill Barnes, and Hisako Sekijima work with bark. Marian Bijlenga, Adela Akers, Marianne Kemp, and Birgit Birkkjaer incorporate horsehair. Jeannet Leendertse works with seaweed.

The full artist list includes Dail Behennah, Nancy Moore Bess, Marian Bijlenga, Linda Bills, Birgit Birkkjaer, Sara Brennan, Wlodzimierz Cygan, Chris Drury, Mary Giles, Norie Hatakeyama, Kiyomi Iwata, Karen Karnes, Merja Keskinen, Lewis Knauss, Yasuhisa Kohyama, Irina Kolesnikova, Kogetso Kosuge, Kyoko Kumai, Jeannet Leendertse, Dona Look, Aby Mackie, Rebecca Medel, John McQueen, Norma Minkowitz, Sung Rim Park, Simone Pheulpin, Eduardo Portillo and María Dávila, Ed Rossbach, Hisako Sekijima, Kay Sekimachi, Karyl Sisson, Polly Sutton, Carol Shaw-Sutton, Toshiko Takaezu, Gary Trentham, Mercedes Vicente, Jiro Yonezawa, and Carolina Yrrarazaval.

About browngrotta arts

browngrotta arts has published 61 art catalogues and books and placed works in private and corporate collections across the United States and internationally, including the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Arts and Design, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The gallery maintains an active working relationship with architects and interior designers, offering consultation for commissioned artworks and site-specific installations for commercial and residential spaces. The exhibition will be accompanied by a full-colour catalogue.

✦ ArchUp Editorial Insight

Transformations occupies a particular position in the landscape of material-focused exhibitions. Unlike shows that treat craft as a historical category or materiality as a theoretical premise, browngrotta arts builds its argument from direct encounter with the objects themselves, trusting that the installation of works in deliberate combination will generate the comparisons and distinctions that written curatorial frameworks only describe. The concentration of textile, fibre, and ceramic work from an internationally diverse list of artists, many of them operating outside the mainstream circuits of contemporary art, is where the exhibition’s real substance lies. The question it raises, whether material intelligence constitutes a distinct form of artistic knowledge rather than a subset of craft or conceptual practice, is one that gains traction precisely through the density and variety of what is on the floor rather than on the wall text.

Conclusion

Transformations: Dialogues in Art and Material runs 9 to 17 May 2026 at browngrotta arts, 276 Ridgefield Road, Wilton, Connecticut. The opening and artists’ reception is Saturday 9 May, 11am to 6pm. For media inquiries and high-resolution images contact Rhonda@browngrotta.com. A selection of works is available for sales inquiries at browngrotta.com.