Beauty is Resistance: art as antidote 2025 Fall “Art in the Barn” Exhibition at browngrotta arts October 11–19, 2025 | Wilton, Connecticut

browngrotta arts announces its Fall 2025 “Art in the Barn” exhibition, Beauty is Resistance: art as antidote, on view from October 11

to October 19 at the gallery’s Wilton, Connecticut location. More than two dozen artists, spanning generations, mediums, and geographies. will explore the potent role of aesthetic creation—particularly within textile, fiber, and material-based practices — as a form of defiance, cultural preservation, and political voice.

In an age marked by political polarization, environmental crisis, and unchecked commodification, beauty might appear to be a luxury —or a distraction. But the artists featured in Beauty is Resistance embrace beauty not as an escape, but as agency: a means to mourn, to protest, to remember, to heal, and to imagine a different world.

Four Subthemes: Threads, Protest, Ornament, and Ritual

Threads of Memory

The “threads of memory” sub-theme includes works in which fiber becomes an archive of personal, cultural, and collective memory. Norma Minkowitz’s Frozen in Time exemplifies this theme, evoking relics from another era. Her pieces incorporate once-used personal objects — combs, brushes, a diary that won’t open — each rendered in ominous black and transformed into intimate time capsules. These works invite reflection, asking viewers to contemplate lives once lived and stories nearly lost.

Beginning with slides of video stills, Lia Cook creates dramatic, larger-than-life woven portraits of children. Their sheer size could make the subjects less personal, but because of the way they are rendered — pixels translated in to thread — it does not. Cook’s portraits are a source of intimate information and shared history. The result is compelling — contemplative works of great power and presence that create feelings of recognition, nostalgia, possibly grief and longing.

Reading Between the Lines

Some artists in Beauty is Resistance address themes of resistance, politics, and ecology, indirectly, requiring viewers to read between the lines. Aby Mackie, based in Spain, reclaims discarded historical textiles, deconstructing and reassembling them into layered works. “In reworking what was cast aside,” Mackie explains, “my practice becomes a form of quiet resistance — honoring forgotten stories and reasserting the enduring significance of craft in the face of environmental and cultural neglect.”

Historical parallel comes from Ed Rossbach’s 1980s El Salvador assemblages. By incorporating camouflage cloth and natural materials, Rossbach critiqued U.S. covert activity in Central America, revealing the long-standing ties between material, message, and protest.

Radical Ornament

In works that reflect radical ornament, artists reclaim beauty, surface, and structure as valid — and vital — modes of messaging. Architect and artist Randy Walker’s Collider plays with contrasts: transparency and solidity, stability and collapse, visibility and concealment. His intricately threaded works embody a form of storytelling where ornament becomes a tool of transformation, commanding viewers to look more closely.

Gyöngy Laky’s Graceful Exit is a brightly colored basket assembled with winding plastic strands, the extruded waste from the process of making plastic caps. Laky was invited to participate in a recycling project sponsored by Johnson Wax. She was motivated by the corporation’s involvement. “I have a villain notion about what corporations are doing,” she says. “This project was a very positive sign -- I thought, there must be a few enlightened people in their upper echelons.”

Ritual and Reverence

This final sub-theme includes work rooted in indigenous traditions and sacred craft practices, reimagined for contemporary contexts. James Bassler’s Donald and his Habsburg Empire draws a line from historical imperialism to modern elitism. Inspired by the double-headed eagle symbol of the Habsburgs and the flamboyance of modern wealth culture, Bassler weaves satire and political commentary into feathered textiles — made from Canadian duck feathers and spun in Mexico based on historic techniques. His work was created in response to 2016 invitation from the Museo Textil de Oaxaca. “Many of the ancient textiles [in the Museum’s collection] featured the Habsburg emblem to remind the subjugated who was in charge. My use of double-headed ducks connects that legacy with today’s alarming glorification of arrogance, entitlement, and profit.”

In her work, Konstruction, Jin-Sook So offers the cultural and aesthetic essence of bojagi, a traditional Korean folk-art form rooted in wrapping and layering, in a contemporary reinterpretation. In doing so, she demands a reconciliation of tradition and modernity — creating a patchwork of steel mesh, silver-plated to introduce a reflective, precious surface, through controlled oxidation in multiple stages.

Participating Artists (Artist list in formation)

Adela Akers, Polly Barton, Marian Bijlenga, Lia Cook, Neha Puri Dhir, Chris Drury, John Garrett, Mary Giles, Glen Kaufman, Nancy Koenigsberg, Irina Kolesnikova, Gyöngy Laky, Mary Merkel-Hess, Rebecca Medel, Judy Mulford, Misako Nakahira, Laura Foster Nicholson, Eduardo Portillo and María Dávila, Ed Rossbach, Toshio Sekiji, Kay Sekimachi, Karyo Sisson, Jin-sook So, Aleksandra Stoyanov, Blair Tate, Deborah Valoma, Wendy Wahl, Randy Walker, Gisella Warburton, Yong Joo Kim.