Month: May 2016

Flanders Nature Center & Land Trust is holding a “Paint the Farm” Artist Challenge, a timed event for artists to create works of art during the popular Flanders Farm Day event on May 21st. This non-juried event is open to all plein air artists working in all media and includes a “Wet Paint” exhibition/sale from 3-4 at the hay wagon main stage. Visitors and art buyers can place bids in the silent auction or “buy it now” to take home newly created artwork. Flanders commission is 30% from Wet Paint Sales. Plein air artists are required to arrive by 11AM and must finish a painting by 2 PM to participate in the judging and wet paint sale.

Both the Farm Day event and the Artist Challenge will be held at the Van Vleck Sanctuary located on Flanders Road in Woodbury. The surrounding areas of the Van Vleck farm offer a wide range of subjects, including historic barns, water views, gardens, antique machinery and farm animals.

Musicians, period correct costumed Colonial and Native American demonstrations, happy families enjoying the fun filled day of farming experiences and many other colorful outdoor views will inspire paintings.

Monetary prizes will be awarded including a Popular Choice award where farm day visitors will vote for their favorite art. There will also be a Natalie Van Vleck Best in Show Award named after the founder of Flanders who was a well-recognized artist. Artist participation is limited to the first 50 entrants, so please register soon. An entry fee of $10 is required at time of registration. Those interested may register online at www.flandersnaturecenter.org or call 203-263-3711, ext. 10, for more information.

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Franklin Street Works, University of Connecticut-Stamford’s Women’s Genderand Sexuality Studies Program, and Sacred Heart University’s Masters of File and Television Program have collaborated to co-curate “All Byte: Feminist Intersections in Video Art,” an exhibition of video works informed by intersectional feminist approaches. The exhibition will be on view at Franklin Street Works through July 10, 2016.

Feminist conversations and scholarship around the inseparability of class, race, country of origin and other factors when contemplating gender are reflected in artworks that, among other things, encourage viewers to listen across difference and explore matrixes of power. Through a call for submissions, the curators also sought out emerging artists in order to explore “fourth wave” feminist approaches to video and film. “All Byte” features works made between 2013 and 2015 by nine artists or collectives: Michelle Marie Charles, INVASORIX, Kegels for Hegel, Sarah Lasley, Nicole Maloof, Virginia Lee Montgomery, Sunita Prasad, Legacy Russell, and Maryam Tafakory. This original exhibition is co-curated by the Program Director of Sacred Heart University’s Film and Television Masters school, Justin Liberman; Director of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Connecticut-Stamford, Ingrid Semaan; and Franklin Street Works’ Creative Director, Terri C Smith.

The term “intersectionality” was coined by feminist legal scholar and critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989. This analytic frame aimed to disrupt the approach of “single axis analysis,” which treated race and gender as mutually exclusive. Instead, intersectional work looks at how social factors and systems of power interlock and shape each other. The “All Byte” co- curators chose videos that exhibit an understanding of intersectionality and a sophisticated or fresh use of the medium. When taken as a whole, these works address gender in concert with many other factors, including: exploring the queer body through a transformative journey; queering of influential, usually white male, theorists through song; placing the alienated female body in surreal parallel to the predominantly white, male tech industry; addressing the contradictions between the lyrics and images in hip-hop videos that often portray women as sexual props; recounting academia’s gendered power structures through parody and art history; exploring inaccurate, race-based assumptions about citizenship and experience; unearthing colonial histories, preserved in the street signs of a small American neighborhood; gender based medical practices; and more. Through the intersectional feminist lens, these artists shed light on systems that reinforce dominance to the exclusion of others and create narratives of inclusion and understanding.

Franklin Street Works is located at 41 Franklin Street in downtown Stamford, Connecticut, near the UCONN campus and less than one hour from New York City via Metro North. Franklin Street Works is approximately one mile (a 15 minute walk) from the Stamford train station. On street parking is available on Franklin Street (metered until 7 pm except on Sunday), and paid parking is available nearby in a lot on Franklin Street and in the Summer Street Garage (100 Summer Street), behind Target. The art space and café are open to the public on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday from noon – 5:00pm and on Saturday and Sunday from 8:00 am – 5:00pm. Franklin Street Works does not charge for admission during regular gallery hours.

For more area information www.visitfairfieldcountyct.com

The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art is hosting a new show from May 1- February 5, 2017 called Site Lines: Four Solo Exhibitions Engaging Place. This series of exhibitions will also feature David Brooks, Peter Liversidge, and Virginia Overton, presenting site-specific commissions, ranging from sculpture to drawing and performance-based works.

The exhibitions will encompass both the monumental and the ephemeral, intersecting, interconnecting, or mirroring the Museum’s interior galleries and two-acre sculpture garden, as well as the surrounding community. The artists will utilize materials found on or indigenous to the grounds and the area, offering a response to “site” that underscores the institution’s material history and its visual condition by transforming scale and circumstance.

The works will seek to “frame” the interiority of the galleries against the natural landscape while also accentuating the Museum’s unique architectural features, such as a pitched roofline, paned windows, and a room-scale camera obscura.
Viewers will be able to respond to works from multiple vantage points as they move around the Museum’s galleries, grounds, and the environs. Gravel Mirror (1968), a work by the influential artist and writer Robert Smithson, incorporated gravel found on the grounds of The Aldrich, and was a significant touchstone for the development of this exhibition series.

The Aldrich is located at 258 Main Street, Ridgefield, CT. For more information, call 203.438.4519 or visit aldrichart.org. For more area information www.litchfieldhills.com
The Museum
Founded by Larry Aldrich in 1964, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum is dedicated to fostering the work of innovative artists whose ideas and interpretations of the world around us serve as a platform to encourage creative thinking. It is the only museum in Connecticut devoted to contemporary art, and throughout its fifty- year history has engaged its community with thought-provoking exhibitions and public programs.
The Museum’s education and public programs are designed to connect visitors of all ages to contemporary art through innovative learning approaches in hands-on workshops, tours, and presentations led by artists, curators, Museum educators, and experts in related fields. Area schools are served by curriculum-aligned on-site and in-school programs, as well as teachers’ professional development training.

Hudson Valley artist James Coe sees things the rest of us overlook in the rural landscape around us, especially when we experience it through the windows of a rapidly moving vehicle. With his talent and skill for evoking narrative qualities, Coe elucidates the transcendent qualities of particular places and moments in time—a barn at the edge of a snowy field at dusk, the green of spring returning to a farm—by presenting the scenes in almost elegiac fashion.

Reflections in a woodland pool of dead trees become an “honor guard” for a pair of mallards regally gliding by, the shimmy of a stream in the last light of day amid a snowy landscape becomes a sculptural element that radiates a quiet sensuality, and the sides of a red barn and adjacent white house assert their DNA as pure geometry when they shine intensely with the last great burst of the hastening sun.

“Those are the scenes that draw me in,” says Coe of the barns, farms, fields, streams and relics of rural heritage that surround him in Hannacroix, N.Y., a rural farming community on the Hudson River about 25 miles south of Albany.

In a new exhibit entitled “Transcendent Landscapes,” running from May 14 through June 18, 2016, at the Gregory James Gallery in New Milford, Conn., the artist will be showing approximately 30 new works that celebrate the Hudson Valley landscape. The public is invited to the Opening Reception on Saturday, May 14, from 5 to 7 p.m. at the gallery.

Importantly for Coe, there are two kinds of landscapes—those with birds and those without birds.

The artist graduated with a degree in biology from Harvard University and intended to become an ornithologist—before going on to attend Parson’s School of Design in New York as a graduate student, where he studied figural and still life art in a traditional atelier setting. After earning a master’s degree, the training in biology and art combined to yield a focus on the art of field guide illustration.

Coe’s résumé includes contributions to the “Easy Bird Guide: West,” and “Birds of New Guinea,” and to Frank Gill’s classic college textbook “Ornithology.” In the illustration arena, he may be best known as the author and illustrator of the acclaimed “Golden Field Guide Eastern Birds,” published in 1994 and reissued in 2001 by St. Martin’s Press.

When Coe transitioned to focusing solely on fine art, he began painting en plein air landscapes. “When I go out locally to paint, I like to do studies out in the field,” the artist says of a process that now most often involves canvases being completed back in the studio, and sometimes being translated into larger works of the same scene.

In many of Coe’s works, the landscape or its architecture—or a detail such as a cedar tree—comprises the compelling subject matter. “It was started as an on-site painting but I ran out of time and light,” Coe says of a work that distills the gestural qualities of a cedar tree cast against a vivid blue creek.

At some point in his process, Coe will ask himself, “Is this scene appropriate to put a bird into or not?” As that question implies, the paintings with images of birds that are both poetically evocative and scientifically accurate aren’t necessarily a documentary-style recording of a particular bird witnessed at a specific time and place.

Instead, relying on his academic training and long ornithological experience, Coe inserts the appropriate bird into a given landscape if he decides the scene will be ennobled by the presence of a winged visitor. “Landscapes with birds become more intimate,” the artist says, and birds add “a certain life and movement you don’t get in the scene itself.”

His website elaborates: “ … the bird is not simply pasted into the scene for illustrative or narrative purposes; instead, Jim’s goal is to introduce an element of movement, color, or interest to the landscape. He hopes to evoke the poetic quality of bird watching: that magical moment when bird, environment, and atmosphere merge into one memorable image. “

The exhibit will be Coe’s first individual show at the Gregory James Gallery since 2012. “It will be mostly work from the past couple of years,” Coe says. “It’s always a mix of landscapes that I’m doing—farm scenes and my bird paintings.”

Kathy Foley, director of the Woodson Art Museum in Wausau, WI, has described Coe’s recent canvases as being “ethereal, moody, and sensitive all at once.”

Anyone who wants a sneak peek of the show can stop by the gallery to see the four works by Coe already on display, which will be included in the one-man show.

“I try to work at the easel every day,” says the artist, who in late March was working on a painting of hooded mergansers, the small ducks whose male has a bracing shock of white on its seemingly oversized head.

James Coe grew up in the suburbs of New York City, and had an early fascination with the egrets and shorebirds he saw in salt marshes. As a teen, he began to paint when he and a friend set out to compile a guide to the local birds, according to the bio on his website. After Harvard and Parson’s—and essentially a 15-plus-year career as a field guide and scientific illustrator—he embraced fine are full-time.

“He found that many of the skills needed to capture the fleeting light and dynamic conditions of the landscape are analogous to those he had previously developed for sketching an active bird as it foraged or preened,” says his website at jamescoe.com. “Both rely on careful observation, practiced visual memory, speed, and instinct. But the vigor and physical energy that it takes to dash a quick field study in oil paints were new to Jim’s work at that time, and they clearly helped shape his approach to painting.”

Coe is a Signature Member of the prestigious Oil Painters of America, as well as the American Impressionist Society and Society of Animal Artists. As a member of the Board of Directors of the Society of Animal Artists, he serves as the Jury Chair and oversees the selection of the SAA’s annual exhibition. For more than 30 years, he has been a regular exhibitor in the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum’s prestigious “Birds in Art” annual and in 2011 was recognized as the Museum’s 32nd Master Wildlife Artist.

Coe is represented in the permanent collections of the New York State Museum, Massachusetts Audubon Society, the Hiram Blauvelt and Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museums, and the Bennington Center for the Arts. His work has been featured also in Wildlife Art, American Art Collector, and in the online publication Wildlife Art Journal. His paintings have appeared on the covers of Sanctuary, Bird Watcher’s Digest, Birding World, and The Auk, professional journal of the American Ornithologist’s Union.

The exhibit at Gregory James Gallery runs through June 18, 2016. The gallery is located at 93 Park Lane Rd (Rte. 202), in New Milford, Conn.

For more information about the show, please call the Gregory James Gallery at 860-354-3436 and visit www.GregoryJamesGallery.com. For more area information www.litchfieldhills.com Please like us on Facebook !

The Glass House located in New Canaan Connecticut is celebrating its tenth year of offering tours of this magnificent property that was once the home of Philip Johnson and is now a National Trust Historic Site. The pastoral 49-acre landscape comprises fourteen structures, including the Glass House (1949), and features a permanent collection of 20th-century painting and sculpture, along with temporary exhibitions. Tours of the site are available in May through November and advance reservations are recommended.

On May 1 through November 30 the Glass House will present Yayoi Kusama: Narcissus Garden. On view will be a new iteration of Yayoi Kusama’s Narcissus Garden (1966/2016). Comprising 1,400 mirrored globes, each approximately 11 inches in diameter, the Narcissus Garden will be installed within the pastoral 49-acre landscape of the Glass House campus.

Another exhibition that runs from May 1 – August 15 by Robert Rauschenberg: Spreads and Related Works is a group of paintings and works on paper chosen to compliment the painting Recital (Spread), 1980 which Philip Johnson purchased that same year and is now included in the permanent collection of the Glass House. This exhibition is organized by David White, Senior Curator of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

Two performances are planned for May. The first one takes place on May 13 and 14 and is a new project by Gerard & Kelly, that brings into dialogue two homes lived in by the architects who built them – the landmark Schindler House in West Hollywood, California, and Philip Johnson’s Glass House. The project explores themes of queer intimacy and domestic space within legacies of modernist architecture.

On May 22, there will be the first performance by Ivy Baldwin, a new piece commissioned by the Glass House, that brings a powerful yet often hidden emotion to life within the Glass House and its dramatic grounds. Keen (Part 1) embodies the emotional and physical experience of loss, memory and holding love, and filters it through the lens of serene Modernism and chaotic wilderness.

The 2016 Glass House tour season will begin on May 1 and ends on November 30. Tickets for the 2016 tour season are on sale now. Tickets are required for admission. Advance reservations are highly recommended as tours often sell out. Please check ticket availability prior to your visit. For tickets by phone, please call 866.811.4111.

For more information www.visitfairfieldcountyct.com

On May 7 from 3 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. Edward F. Gerber, Past President of the Westport Historical Society, will host a walking tour of the Kings Highway North Historic District. The tour will be an opportunity for history buffs to learn about one of the town’s oldest settled areas, some homes of which date to the mid-1700s.

Gerber said he will talk about the style of the houses and the fact that, although they were built from the early 1700s to the mid-1900s, “you can’t tell the later houses from the older ones. The architects did a good job of blending old and new.”

Kings Highway North was established as a local historic district in 1972 and named to the National Register of Historic Places in 1998. It encompasses 106 “contributing buildings” – structures that add to the district’s historical qualities – and four historic sites. Most of the contributing buildings are homes in the Colonial style.

The historic sites include a small triangular green at the intersection of Old Hill Road and Kings Highway North that was used as a military drill ground, the adjoining Christ and Holy Trinity and Church of the Assumption cemeteries across Kings Highway from Old Hill Road, and an earlier graveyard, laid out in 1740, at the northwest corner of Kings Highway North and Wilton Road. Originally, Kings Highway North was part of a postal road laid out between New York and Boston in 1762. Unlike the Post Road, which was built later, it followed a circuitous route through town, crossing the Saugatuck River over an old wood bridge just upstream from the present one.

Gerber will be accompanied on the tour by Edward Hynes, a specialist on the history of Westport during the American Revolution. Hynes will discuss the planned ambush by Continental troops under Benedict Arnold to fire cannons from the high ground on Old Hill down on British soldiers returning from a raid on Danbury to prevent them from crossing the river on the bridge below. But the British outsmarted the Colonials and crossed upriver near the site of present Ford Road. All tour goers are invited to a complimentary beer tasting at Rothbard Ale and Larder 90 Post Road East following the tour.

Meet across from the cemeteries at the foot of Old Hill Road; park along Kings Highway North. May 7, 3 pm. $10 suggested donation. No charge for children 12 and under. Reservations are recommended: (203) 222-1424, http://westporthistory.org. For more area information www.visitfairfieldcountyct.com