Month: January 2015

Art Walks is a new event that is happening on the first Friday of every month in Torrington located in the Litchfield Hills. Many businesses start the “hop” as early as 1pm, with festivies lasting into the early evening, later as the days become longer. Experience your creative side, visiting with local artists and arts minded businesses. Venues will be offering debuts of guest artisans, art talks, music, refreshments, introductions of their newest works, raffles, and SALES!

During the Art Walk — Wine and Chocolate on February 6 four businesses have teamed up to offer something special. Dawn Hill Designs is offering free samples of wine plus chocolates from local chocolate makers. A Free box of Russel Stover chocolates for your Valentine with a qualifying purchase from Feb. 1-14. *While supplies last. All items with a heart within the studio are 25% off Feb. 1-7.

Kelly’s Crystals Boutique is featuring Valentine’s Day themed gifts. Free chocolates with any purchase and Swarovski Crystal Heart Earrings with any $25 purchase.

Karen Rossi Studios is offering a Free box of chocolates with qualified purchases. All items with a heart within the studio are 25% off their regular price. Karen Rossi Studios is also featuring the work of textile artist Doreen Breen and $10 off mixed-media scarves during Arts Walk. Doreen Breen’s wine reception will be from 4-7pm. For more information on Rossi and her creations visit www.karenrossi.com.

Stepping Stones Studio will display work by sculptor Dennis Bialek with a 25% discount on his small bird sculptures during Arts Walk (regularly priced at $50). Also on February 6th will be the opening reception for the work of mixed-media painter Amber Miada. The reception for Amber will be held from 4-7pm.

The next “Art Walk” is planned for March 6. For more information visit http://www.artswalk.info. For area event information and more www.litchfieldhills.com

Xiomáro (SEE-oh-MAH-ro), an artist at Weir Farm National Historic Site in Wilton/Ridgefield, presents The Other Side – Charles, Caesar, Harry, Sam, Pompey, Lon and Isaac from January 11 to March 29, 2015 at Oyster Bay Historical Society in New York.

The collection of twenty-nine photographs presents General William Floyd (1734-1821), who fled to Middletown after the British occupation of his plantation on Long Island. During his period of exile, his wife Hannah died and remains buried at Middletown’s Mortimer Cemetery. Floyd, a slave owner, served in the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia where he set his signature to the Declaration of Independence in July 1776. His plantation is now a National Park unit of Fire Island National Seashore, which commissioned Xiomáro after seeing his photographic work for Weir Farm. Xiomáro was an Artist-in-Residence at Weir Farm in 2010 and, since 2011, continues his relationship with the park as a Visiting Artist.

At the heart of the collection are photographs of undated wooden crosses bearing generic slave names, set apart on the other side of a fence from the elaborate individualized stones of the Floyd family cemetery. The photographs serve as spiritual memorials to the laborers—both enslaved persons and paid house servants of color—who worked on the estate. These plain wooden crosses, put in place sometime in the 1870s, represent in part the Floyd family’s evolution from slave ownership to active military service in the Union army during the American Civil War.

Xiomáro is a nationally exhibited artist whose work has been covered by The New York Times, News 12 and The Huffington Post. On January 5, The Other Side will be featured in the prestigious Aspect Ratio, a London-based photography magazine. His other National Park Service commissions include President Theodore Roosevelt’s Sagamore Hill mansion, which was exhibited at Harvard University. At present, Xiomáro is photographing the home of poet and abolitionist Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in Massachusetts and will be living in a Florida swamp for a month documenting the fragile ecosystem that feeds into the Everglades.

The Other Side is on view January 11 to March 29, 2015 at the Oyster Bay Historical Society, 20 Summit Street, Oyster Bay, NY 11771, (516) 922-5032, oysterbayhistorical.org. A free opening reception and lectures by Xiomáro are scheduled. A free limited edition photo e-book can be downloaded at www.xiomaro.com.

On February 5 at 7 p.m. the Carriage Barn Arts Center located in Waverly Park in New Cannan is hosting a lecture entitled “André Kertész: An Artist’s Life.” The talk will be given by Robert Gurbo, the Curator of the André and Elizabeth Kertész Foundation in New York, and the Juror of the 35th Annual Photography Show at the Carriage Barn Arts Center. There is a pre lecture reception at 6:30 pm.

André Kertész (1894-1985) is an undisputed master of photography. Widely seen as the father of photojournalism and street photography, he created much of the visual vocabulary of the medium that is still in use today. From his pioneering work in Hungary (1912 -1925), through his influential work during Paris’s artistic heyday (1925- 1936), right up to his final days in New York (1936 -1985), his photographs display an ability to infuse personal narrative and design into a documentary style that was uniquely his own. In a body of work that spans much of the 20th century, Kertész created deceptively simple images of everyday life that also reflected his own state of mind and questioned his very existence and relationship to the world around him

Long-time curator Robert Gurbo worked with Kertész over the last 7 years his life and has spent the last 37 years combing through his archive. He has contributed numerous essays to catalogues and magazines; is the author of three books on Andre Kertész and co-author of Andre Kertész, the catalog that accompanied the 2005 National Gallery retrospective. In a talk that offers an intimate and personal look, Gurbo interweaves the artist’s work, self-portraits into the timeline of Kertész’s complicated life story. His talk offers his unique and personal perspective of the life and work of a man he claims to have been obsessed with since he was 16 years old.

Gurbo juried The 35th Annual Photography Show: History and Process, which includes the work of 75 contemporary photographers as well as a display of vintage cameras and early photographs, such as daguerreotypes and tintypes.

A $10 fee for members; $15 for non-members includes a reception at 6:30pm, followed by the lecture/discussion at 7pm. To register for the lecture please go to http://www.carriagebarn.org/lecture-robert-gurbo/ or contact 203.972.1895.