Category: Connecticut Travel

Scallywags of all ages can step into a world of swashbuckling rogues, dastardly villains, infamous she-pirates and wicked wenches on July 20 and 21 when purchasing a ferry ride ticket to Sheffield Island for the annual Pirates Weekend hosted by the Seaport Association in Norwalk.

Find your sea legs and hop aboard the C.J. Toth Ferry for a cruise to Sheffield Island. Arriving on the Island, guests will be greeted and entertained by a roving gang of rowdy pirates. Kids can hunt for treasure on the beach, play games, sing sea chanteys, watch swordplay, listen to tall tales of thrill and danger, and hear colorful stories of pirates near and far. Who knows what secrets they will reveal!

This is the weekend to experience the freedom of a pirate’s life, and to learn about their lore and history! The pirates that invade Sheffield Island every summer are different. They enjoy taking a break from their adventures on the seven seas and come to Sheffield Island to have a boatload of fun with those lucky scallywags visiting during the Pirates Weekend.

All pirate fun and games are free with the purchase of a ferry ticket. The ferry departs the dock at 11 a.m., 12:30 p.m., and 2 p.m. on both days, Saturday and Sunday. It is best to arrive 30 minutes before the boat departs the dock that is located on 4 North Water Street in Norwalk in the parking lot of the Maritime Aquarium. Parking is available at the Maritime Garage. For tickets click here.

About the Seaport Association
The Norwalk Seaport Association was founded in 1978 by a group of local citizens who had the vision to revitalize South Norwalk and preserve Norwalk’s maritime heritage.

The Norwalk Seaport Association offers a cultural, environmental, and historical journey to the Norwalk Islands. The Sheffield Island Lighthouse and the Light Keeper’s Cottage provide a unique historical and educational venue, which strives to increase awareness, appreciation, and consideration for our environment and how the preservation of historic buildings and nature contribute to our quality of life.

It is our belief that preservation strengthens the perpetual partnership between the past, the present, and the future. The combination of the Lighthouse and the Stewart B. McKinney National Wildlife Refuge offers an unparalleled opportunity to educate children of all ages and adults about the importance of preserving Long Island Sound, our environment and maritime heritage.

West Cornwall’s Souterrain Gallery located on 413 Sharon Goshen Turnpike is featuring the artwork of Shaun MacDavid and the subject is Trees. This exhibit will be up through August 4, 2019. Shaun McCluskey MacDavid grew up in rural West Tennessee, the second of six children whose father was an English professor, and whose mother loved the outdoors and gardening. Shaun graduated with a BFA degree from Middle Tennessee State University and afterward moved to Boston with her husband Andrew. There she studied painting and drawing at the Art Institute of Boston as well as the Museum School. During a year spent in New York City, she studied anatomy and painting at the Art Students League. Then she moved to Buffalo in order to pursue her MFA degree at the State University of New York at Buffalo. There she received a scholarship to teach figure drawing and graduated in 1992. Since then she has lived in Boston, Cape Cod, and currently her home in West Cornwall, Connecticut, where she lives with Andrew and their two children, Charlie, a film student at Mass College of Art and Design, and Lydia, a commercial songwriting student at Middle Tennessee State University. Shaun enjoys walks with her English Setter, Maisie.

Shaun’s paintings have been exhibited at various galleries including Chase Gallery in Boston, Mark Gallery in Cambridge, Portland Art Gallery in Portland, Hermine Merel Smith Fine Art on Martha’s Vineyard, Bennett Street Gallery in Atlanta, Georgia, Stellers Gallery in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, and Souterrain Gallery, West Cornwall. She is currently represented by the Scott Bundy Gallery in Kennebunkport, and Rice/Polak Gallery in Provincetown. Her work can be found in many private and corporate collections across the country.

Artist Statement

Although Shaun has been a figurative painter for years, this most recent work is best described as abstract. However, it draws heavily on the colors, forms, and rhythms found in nature. The work invokes the spirit of a place, telling its particular memory and impression that forms over time. This new work is inspired by the artist Joan Mitchell, who was part of the New York School, but who spent the bulk of her career in France; as well as the artist Grace Hartigan, also of the New York School. However, Shaun’s unique style and sense of color stand out as her own.

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum will host the New York-based Canadian artist Sara Cwynar’s (b. 1985, Vancouver) first solo museum exhibition on the East Coast, Gilded Age. Cwynar’s practice spans photography, installation, book-making, and film, and surveys the transitory object-life of visual matter in our time of image infatuation. The exhibition will be on view at The Aldrich June 9 to November 10, 2019.

With a background in graphic design and a practice steeped in conceptual art, informed by artists before her such as Sherrie Levine and Sarah Charlesworth, Cwynar’s studio methodology is centered on an exploration of the internalized power dynamics dwelling inside designed images. The works selected for this exhibition specifically interrogate what constitutes a pretty picture. Appropriating imagery that ranges from art history to advertising, Cwynar collapses time and circumstance, appraising the standardization of beauty in subjects (muses and models), objects (flowers and products), and locales (historical ruins) across centuries and platforms—what persists and what is on the wane.

Conceived in close collaboration with the artist, the exhibition will include a selection of Cwynar’s color photographs from 2014 to
2019 (including new work); Kitsch Encyclopedia (2014) her first artist book; Cover Girl (2018), a 16mm film on video with sound (its East Coast debut); and 72 Pictures of Modern Paintings (2016), a site-specific wallpaper (its first appearance in the United States).

Cwynar deftly probes from all angles the methods by which images are constructed, pushed, recycled, and—since the advent of the Internet—never allowed to expire. Hijacking popular photographic clichés, from the portrait to the still life to the product shot, Cwynar poses questions about entrenched stereotypes through an accumulative system of appropriation and layering. Her starting point is a dense archive she is amassing, comprised of outmoded images and objects that are still in circulation, but are primarily of a pre-digital period. Sourced from both real and virtual outlets—from the New York public library to the corner dollar store to the curbside dumpster to eBay—it reveals the mounting presence of a washed-up optimism as trends die, values adjust, and desires vanish. Cwynar’s photographs and films reflect this cultural entropy, by combining archival imagery and out-of-date objects with new footage. In doing so, she exposes the entrapments, trickeries, fantasies, and misogynies operating within these cast-offs, how lifestyle ideals have been bought and sold, prejudices have been retailed, and what all of this might come to represent.

Another ongoing preoccupation is color. Not only its optical and psychological effects and its inherent biases (as we all see color differently), but how it is marketed by commercial industries to homogenize taste. The film Cover Girl mixes footage Cwynar took inside a cosmetics assembly line, with shots of her friend and regular sitter Tracy and beauty products styled in her studio. A script read by Cwynar as well as male and female voice actors conflates her writing with texts lifted from artists and theorists such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Frantz Fanon, Henri Matisse, David Batchelor, Kathy Peiss, and Susan Stewart. The film asks us to consider the ethical and perceptual associations we attribute to color; specifically, how it has been employed by beauty companies like COVERGIRL®, to propagate gendered and prejudiced ideals of prettiness.

Sara Cwynar (b. 1985, Vancouver, BC) currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She holds an MFA from Yale University, New Haven, CT; a Bachelor of Design from York University, Toronto, ON; and studied English Literature at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC. Solo exhibitions include: Image Model Muse, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis (2018/19), traveled to Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee (2019); Tracy, Oakville Galleries, Oakville, ON, Canada (2018); Soft Film, MMKMuseum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany (2017); Everything in the Studio Destroyed, Foam Photography Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2013). Selected group exhibitions include: 33rd Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil; Mademoiselle, Centre Régional d’Art Contemporain d’Occitane, Sète, France; Mast Foundation for Photography Grant on Industry and Work, Mast Foundation, Bologna, Italy (all 2018); Hard to Picture: A Tribute to Ad Reinhardt, Mudam, Luxembourg; Subjektiv, Malmö Konsthall, Sweden; You Are Looking at Something That Never Occurred, Zabludowicz Collection, London, UK (all 2017); L’Image Volée, Fondazione Prada, Milan, Italy (2016); Greater New York, MoMA PS1, Queens, NY (2015/16); Under Construction – New Positions in American Photography, Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY (2015).

Cwynar’s works are in the permanent collections of Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; MMKMuseum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Dallas Museum of Art; Milwaukee Art Museum; Fondazione Prada, Milan; Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco; Zabludowicz Collection, London; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City; Foam Photography Museum, Amsterdam.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a full-color catalogue, the artist’s first, which will include an interview between the artist and the exhibition’s curator, Amy Smith-Stewart.

Organized by Amy Smith-Stewart, curator, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

To celebrate the new book, Weir Farm National Historic Site (Arcadia Publishing), a select number of the photographs showcasing the park are on view now until July 31, 2019, at the Mark Twain Library in Redding.

The photographs were created by the book’s author, Xiomaro, who is the Visiting Artist at Weir Farm and an alumnus of its Artist-in-Residence program. The book tells the story of Julian Alden Weir (1852–1919), a leading innovator of American Impressionist painting, and chronicles his farm’s rescue from residential development to its establishment as a park. The farm’s landscape inspired countless masterpieces created by Weir, his famous painter-friends, two subsequent generations of artist-owners, and contemporary artists who continue to create at the park. The book’s historical narrative unfolds with well over 100 photographs, most of which were created by Xiomaro under commissions from the National Park Service.

The foreword was written by Senator Joe Lieberman who introduced legislation in 1990 to establish Weir Farm, located in Wilton and Ridgefield, as Connecticut’s first national park. Weir Farm is also the only one in the nation dedicated to painting. In 2020, the park will be depicted as part of the US Mint’s America the Beautiful series. The Mint’s website says the series “captures the breathtaking beauty of America’s natural landscapes that have inspired countless poets, adventurers, and artists. Today, these hallowed sites are… enshrined” through the quarters designed by the Mint.

The large photographic prints, measuring 17″ x 25,” offer immersive and detailed views of Weir’s studio, his brushes, his home, and the landscape. The photographs have been widely circulated throughout Connecticut at venues such as the Capitol building in Hartford, the Bridgeport office of Congressman Jim Himes, and the Stamford Mayor’s office.

Xiomaro (pronounced “SEE-oh-MAH-ro”) is an internationally recognized artist and speaker whose photography has been covered by The New York Times, CBS Eyewitness News, and News 12. His work has been exhibited at Harvard University, museums, galleries, and public spaces.

The book was released internationally by Arcadia Publishing as part of its Images of Modern America series, which the company website describes as uncovering “amazing aspects of American history that are all too often overlooked by standard texts” and “filled with expertly penned content and stunning full-color images.” Arcadia, based in Charleston, South Carolina, is the leading publisher of local and regional books in the United States with a library of more than 14,000 titles.

The Mark Twain Library was founded in 1908 by the most popular American author of the time, Samuel Clemens – best known as Mark Twain – who lived in Redding.

The Mark Twain Library is located at 439 Redding Road, Redding, CT 06896 and the exhibition runs until July 31, 2019. For more information and a free Weir Farm print, visit http://www.xiomaro.com.

Over 100 juried artisans showing one-of-a-kind ceramics, wearable art and a huge array of other fine arts and crafts will be featured at the 7th Annual Norwalk Art Festival on Saturday and Sunday, June 29 and 30, from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm, rain or shine. Admission to the Norwalk Art Festival is free.

The Norwalk Art Festival is a premier cultural two-day fine art and craft festival located in a beautiful park setting nestled between two Museums and a nationally recognized Art Center. This wonderful community festival occurs annually, on the last weekend in June.

Artists will exhibit original works of art in a wide variety of media – painting, photography, ceramics, jewelry, fiber, mixed media, sculpture, printmaking and drawing will be some of what presented.

Children’s Art Activities, live music, a food court, Museum tours at a reduced price, and poetry readings will be scheduled throughout the weekend as well making this a true family event.

Again, the event is free and parking is nearby at marked West Avenue locations.