John Kelly: Sideways into the Shadows at Real Art Ways

John Kelly: Sideways into the Shadows

John Kelly has been producing creative work in the worlds of dance, performance, and visual art for decades. Sideways into the Shadows combines his work in drawing and performance to give an insightful yet contemporary look into his history and process.

Alongside portraits of artists and friends who died of HIV/AIDS, Sideways into the Shadows includes hand-rendered transcriptions of journal entries originally written during the epidemic. Dating as far back as 1976, the entries weave in and out of humorous, honest, raw, and provocative moments. Says Kelly, “Beginning in 1982, my friends and colleagues were dying…AIDS has framed my story to an unavoidable degree. Their absence remains part of my work.” The drawings serve as elegies to lost compatriots, artists, and creators.

The exhibit also includes video documentation of his previous performances, as well as a video installation in our Video Gallery.

Real Art Ways would like to acknowledge and thank Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project for helping Sideways into the Shadows travel from their NYC gallery space to Hartford.

About John Kelly
John Kelly is a performance and visual artist whose multifaceted career spans more than three decades. His innovative performance works stem from autobiographical, cultural, gender, and identity issues, realized through the theatrical, visual, movement-based, and vocal delineation of character. Subjects have included the AIDS epidemic, the Berlin Wall, the Troubadours, and Expressionistic Film, and character studies based on Egon Schiele, Caravaggio, Antonin Artaud, Joni Mitchell, and Jean Cocteau.

To learn more about Kelly and view more of his work, visit his website.

Featured image: “Ethyl Eichelberger” (detail) 2018. Mixed media on paper. 14″ x 11″

Megan Craig: Shields

Shields explores ideas about vulnerability, protection, blindness or obscured vision, and non-verbal/pictorial signification. The imagery stems from ancient Middle Eastern and African shields and armor (for humans as well as for animals in battle), but the work reflects a broad imagining of what shields might be, what they accomplish, and when and why they are used.

Shields seem to be objects of protection, but they are also markers of vulnerability, weights that complicate agility, screens that compromise vision, and ornate, celebratory displays of identity or belonging. A shield protects and divides, standing between one thing and another.

In geological terms, “shield” signifies a rigid, ancient layer of the Earth’s crust that withstands change without succumbing to pressure, without folding up into a mountain range or buckling down into a crater.

Shields also function as markers of authority, nationality, or inclusion, bearing signs, insignias, or serving as identifying badges. In battle, a shield is typically forged from metal, wood, or another hard material, protecting a vulnerable body behind it.

Utilitarian objects of protection and defense, shields are also ornate aesthetic objects that hover between sculpture and painting. Craig’s Shields invites viewers to consider the relationships between defense and design, insulation and exposure, visibility and invisibility.

The exhibition includes black and white drawings, paintings, and malleable sewn works, as well as a site-specific, participatory installation that invites visitors to create and display their own shields. A 16-page hand-drawn zine accompanies the show.

About Megan Craig
Megan Craig is a visual artist and an Associate Professor of philosophy and art at Stony Brook University. Recent solo shows include Rose Sings at Kunstverein Grafschaft Bentheim in Germany, Lines of Flight at Sundaram Tagore Gallery in New York, and If and How at Scott and Bowne Fine Art in Connecticut. Craig has also produced several large-scale participatory public performance works, including most recently Traveling in Place (2017) with Rachel Bernsen at The Yale Art Gallery, Gather Round (2017 – 2018) in conjunction with Cold Spring School in New Haven, CT, and The Way Things Felt (2016), commissioned by Artspace and supported by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Craig has been awarded painting residencies and grants from several institutions including the Pollack Krasner Foundation, The Weir Farm Trust, The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Vermont Studio Center, and the New York Arts Foundation.

At Stony Brook University, she teaches courses in aesthetics, ethics, French phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and American philosophy. Her research is focused around accounts of memory, sensibility, and ambiguity – with a focus on sensation, synesthesia, and color perception.

Craig is also the graphic designer for Firehouse 12 Records, and a mother of two.

www.megancraig.com

HSO: Intermix – The Twittering Machine

HSO: Intermix is intimate, inviting, and interactive! Get up close with HSO ensembles as they perform contemporary compositions and intriguing, rare, classical pieces. Enjoy cocktails, conversation, mingling, and more. The final Intermix concert of the season, The Twittering Machine, takes place within the galleries at Real Art Ways.

Program
Shostakovich – Chamber Symphony. Op. 110a, Mvt. 2 & 3
Shostakovich – String Quartet No. 8, Op. 110, Mvt. 2 & 3
McTee – The Twittering Machine

How to Buy Tickets
Online
www.hartfordsymphony.org/tickets

Call
Single Tickets and Flex Cards: 860-987-5900
Subscriptions: 860-244-2999
Monday – Friday, 10 AM- 5PM

In Person or Mail
HSO Box Office at The Bushnell
166 Capitol Ave., Hartford, CT 06106

Questions?
tickets@hartfordsymphony.org

Supported in part by a Hartford Events Grant through the Greater Hartford Arts Council with major support from the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving.

Speak Up

Speak Up is an evening of true stories centered on a common theme, told by storytellers chosen for their skill and expertise. Brought to Real Art Ways by Matthew and Elysha Dicks, the event celebrates the craft of live storytelling in the Greater Hartford area.

This session’s cast features Speak Up veterans Ron Apter, Jeni Bonaldo, and Valerie Edelman Gordon alongside first time storytellers Donald Frank, Kerri Gawreluk, and Chris Kueffner.

All stories are 5-10 minutes long, and may not be suitable for young kids. The stories can be unique, compelling, funny and touching, and show change or growth.

The theme of the evening is Hunger.

Abductions and Reconstructions

Combining unconventional materials in unexpected manners, Abductions and Reconstructions offers fresh takes on abstraction, collage, and sculpture. Curated by David Borawksi, three artists present a diverse range of aesthetic considerations.

Meg Hitchcock uses sacred texts to craft intricate designs and imagery. The labor intensive practice of cutting minute details mimics the rituals and meditations contained in her source materials. Hitchcock often uses letters from one text, such as the Bible, to craft passages in another text, like the Quran. Regarding this process, Hitchcock says “…by deconstructing and recombining the holy books of diverse religions, I undermine their authority and animate the common thread that weaves through all scripture.” Featured image at right: Bling No. 4: Visitation, 2017; Letters cut from the Bible, print by Gustave Dore, paper burned with Tibetan incense; 8 7/8 x 7 1/4 in.

Ryan Sarah Murphy’s bright cardboard reliefs live in between the worlds of sculpture and painting. Her assemblages create what could be aerial views of farmland, architecture plans, or political maps of imaginary nations. She crafts these objects with a sense of seriousness and play befitting the found, casual nature of her materials. Featured image, top of page: at the margins of the land, 2017; Unpainted cardboard, foam core; 6.25 x 9.75 x 2.5 inches.

Liz Sweibel uses both found and purposefully acquired materials in her precarious sculptures and assemblages. Speaking to her process, Sweibel says “I build [my art] using particular yet ordinary materials and gestures. The process is low-tech, immediate, and improvisational, and primarily takes form as spare, abstract sculpture, installation, and drawing.” Featured image below: Untitled (Splinter #11), 2015; Wood, paint; four elements; 2.5″ x 6″ x 4″ (variable).

To view more of Hitchcock’s work, visit her website.

To view more of Murphy’s work, visit her website.

To view more of Sweibel’s work, visit her website.

Stephen Grossman: Wander

Trained as an architect, New Haven-based artist Stephen Grossman uses drawing and painting as a means to navigate dimensional space on paper and panel. Through mixing organic and geometric shapes, his work embodies both structural architecture and figurative bodies. Charcoal, ink, and graphite create subtle differences in warmth throughout his drawings, accented by moments of intensity through gouache.

The works presented in Wander allow the viewer to engage an imaginative sense of space through Grossman’s line weight, texture, and sparse usage of color.

To view more of Grossman’s work, go to his website.

Featured image: I once delivered a package to the 89^th floor of the Empire State Building, gouache on panel, 16” x 20”, 2017.

Peter Edlund Artist Talk

Come join exhibiting artist Peter Edlund as he discusses the work in his current exhibition, Names on the Land. Light refreshments will be served.

About Peter Edlund
Edlund studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York. He has shown nationally and internationally, and has received honors including MacDowell Colony Residencies, a Gottlieb Foundation grant, and a Pollack-Krasner Foundation Grant. He has exhibited at Jack Shainman Gallery, among many others. Edlund is originally from West Hartford, Connecticut. His work has been exhibited at Real Art Ways on multiple occasions, including a solo exhibition in 2000, Majestic America.

Read the Art New England review of Names on the Land.

Read the Hartford Courant article about Names on the Land.

Special thanks to the College of Engineering, Technology, and Architecture at University of Hartford and MakeHartford for assistance in creating laser-cut stencils used to produce several works in the exhibition and public art works in various locations around Hartford.

Colleen Fitzgerald: ndemeh

An autobiographical multimedia solo performance portraying memories of strong, beautiful and black women. Colleen explores her personal diasporic identity by revisiting tidbits passed on to her from her grandmother, mother, sister, and other strong female influences. Her performance is informed by their cultures, stories, foods, dances, clothes, hair, songs and words.

The work is informed by the family recipe she is desperate to learn, the dances she watched her sister do her whole life, or simply the way these women carry themselves. Colleen “carves a space for us to celebrate black women.” She says, “Putting the body on stage is an act of protest. The work serves as an urgent declaration that black women are important, beautiful and magical.”

This work was made possible by artist residencies at Brote Residencia Creativa (ARG), Denmark Arts Center (US), and Casa Muñecas (ARG). Also thanks to the support of OiHoy and Fabiana Castro.

Idea and performance: Colleen Ndemeh Fitzgerald
Assistance: María Esther Mejia
Collaborators: Kukily Colectivo
Music: Jojo Abot, Mehkamu Wayson
Photos: Jasmin Sanchez

Instrument Portrait Series: DRUM – Kaoru Watanabe

Real Art Ways presents three concerts that explore distinct types of drums. Each concert includes a discussion with the performing artists.

Kaoru Watanabe’s Néo featuring Fumi Tanakadate

“Néo is so ethereal that words to describe it skip like a breeze on water. It encompasses time and space from a culture that remains elusive and exotic, yet is audibly accessible in this presentation.” – James Nadal, All About Jazz (Full review here.)

Kaoru Watanabe is a composer and musician, acclaimed for his innovative approach to powerful Japanese drums and the texturally rich melodies of the Japanese flutes. Joined by percussionist Fumi Tanakadate, the duo will play selections from their newly released album Néo.

Read an article about this concert in the Hartford Courant.

About Kaoru Watanabe
Kaoru Watanabe is a Brooklyn based composer and musician, who has a passion for cross-cultural and multi-disciplinary collaborations, working with such artists as National Living Treasure Bando Tamasaburo, Jason Moran, So Percussion, Adam Rudolph, directors Wes Anderson and Martin Scorsese and was a featured guest on Yo-Yo Ma’s Grammy Award-winning album Sing Me Home.

Watanabe was a performer and artistic director of the internationally acclaimed Japanese taiko performing arts ensemble Kodo for close to a decade. Watanabe has performed his compositions at such prestigious venues as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, The Kennedy Center, Kabukiza and in Minamiza, has performed in all 47 prefectures in Japan as well as across the North, Central and South Americas, Europe, Asia and Australia.

About Fumi Tanakadate
Fumi Tanakadate is a taiko artist and pianist based in New York, who has a unique combination of an expertise in European Classical music and a background in traditional folk dance and music from Japan. After studying extensively with Kaoru Watanabe, Fumi now performs frequently with Watanabe, often in a duo setting where she plays taiko and piano and sings, sometimes doing all at once. She has performed at such venues as Joe’s Pub, National Sawdust, Pioneer Works, the Metropolitan Museum of Arts, the Rubin Museum of Art, Super Deluxe in Tokyo and at PASIC, Percussive Arts Society International Convention. Fumi has collaborated with Shane Shanahan of the Silkroad Ensemble, Brooklyn Raga Massive, Chieko Kojima and Yuta Sumiyoshi of KODO, Alicia Hall Moran, Satoshi Takeishi and Kiyohiko Semba.

Fumi also serves as the primary instructor at Kaoru Watanabe Taiko Center, teaching classes and giving educational workshops at local schools and colleges. As a classical pianist, Fumi has performed throughout Japan, tri-state area, Austria, and Spain. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Earth and Environmental Sciences from Wesleyan University and a Master of Music degree in piano performance from Manhattan School of Music.

Major support comes from the Richard P. Garmany Fund.

Instrument Portrait Series: DRUM – Sameer Gupta

Real Art Ways presents three concerts that explore distinct types of drums. Each concert includes a discussion with the performing artists.

A Circle Has No Beginning by Sameer Gupta featuring Marc Cary

“The New York-based drummer-tabla player’s own compositions, which fill most of A Circle Has No Beginning, are in the fusion vein, continuing in Weather Report’s trajectory with echoes of ’70s Herbie Hancock and Jean-Luc Ponty. Oriental modes, celestial vibes and muted funk are heard. Not surprisingly, percussion is integral.” – Morton Shlabotnik, Shepherd Express

Sameer Gupta will perform tabla and drumset in selections from his February 2018 release A Circle Has No Beginning that features a fusion of Indian classical music and jazz. Joining Gupta will be Marc Cary (keys), Jay Gandhi (bansuri), Arun Ramamurthy (carnatic violin), Marika Hughes (cello), Pawan Benjamin (sax), and Rahsaan Carter (bass).

About Sameer Gupta
Sameer Gupta is known as one of the few percussionists simultaneously representing the traditions of American jazz on drumset and Indian classical music on tabla. He has performed at Lincoln Center, SFJAZZ, Nehru Centre London, Jazz at Lincoln Center, MoMA NYC and Yerba Buena Gardens San Francisco.

His own interests and love of tabla brought him to the great maestro Pt Anindo Chatterjee, of whom he is now a dedicated disciple, though his first few years were spent under the guidance of Ustad Zakir Hussain. Sameer is also a co-founder and an Artistic Director of the non-profit collective Brooklyn Raga Massive.After graduating with a music performance BA, Gupta worked and taught in the Bay Area for 10 years as a jazz drummer, and later also as a classical Indian tabla player.

Today he lives in Brooklyn, NYC and is actively involved in performing, curating, producing and teaching through various institutions including Brooklyn Raga Massive, Carnegie Hall’s Global Encounters and Ragas Live Festival.

Gupta has held workshops on Indian music and cross over drumming styles, at The Jazzschool in Berkeley, California and Berklee College of Music in Boston.

His influences range from Elvin Jones and Tony Williams to Ustad Allah Rakha and Pandit Anindo Chatterjee, and he’s has had the pleasure to play with many great musicians including Falu Shah, Rez Abbasi, Marc Cary, Wallace Roney, Karsh Kale, Pandit Krishna Bhatt, Ravi Chandra Kulur, Mysore Manjunath, Prasant Radhakrishnan, Pandit Chitresh Das, Jason Samuels Smith, Pandit Ramesh Mishra, Pandit Anindo Chatterjee and numerous other luminaries.

Gupta continues to build his career by combining traditional and modern improvisational styles drawing from his dual Indian and American heritage, and has already established himself as an original musical voice in jazz, world, and fusion music.

From his early percussion studies in Tokyo, Japan in the mid 80s, he has consistently placed himself in many challenging musical environments – from bebop to avant-garde jazz, and European classical percussion to North Indian classical tabla. Gupta continues to compose and perform music from a true multi-cultural perspective that bridges several continents.

More at Sameer Gupta’s website.

Major support comes from the Richard P. Garmany Fund.

Andrew Buck: Quarry

Andrew Buck’s sense of the term “landscape” is inspired by the writings of John Brinkerhoff Jackson. “He went back to the source word, the German landschaften, which referred to that which results when ‘man’ reconfigures and uses the land, in essence creating his own landscape on the natural landscape,” says Buck.

Real Art Ways Executive Director Will K. Wilkins says, “Andrew Buck’s work is abstract, specific, tactile and spirited. There is a lot going on in what seems like straight-forward landscape.”

Buck is interested in the documentary aspects of his work, but he also cites abstract expressionism as an inspiration. Says Buck, “The sheer size of the space of most quarries is awe-inspiring in a strange manner. That is, that these spaces are man-made, not natural. Many of them are otherworldly in both appearance and in actual experience. The overwhelming silence enhances the experience.”

About Andrew Buck
Andrew Buck lives and works in Farmington, Connecticut. His work is included in many public and private collections, include the Yale University Art Gallery and the New Britain Museum of American Art. He has shown both his Rockface and Tobacco series at Real Art Ways. Buck is a recipient of the Connecticut Commission on the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship in both 2016 and 1995 as well as a Berkshire Taconic Foundation Artist Resource Grant in 2010.

To see more of Buck’s work, visit his website.

Quarry Panorama 5 (Stony Creek Granite Quarry); 2014; 85″ x 25″
Click to enlarge.

Quarry Panorama 9 (Trap Rock Quarry, Plainville, CT); 2017; 324″ x 40″
Click to enlarge.

ALTERNATE ENDINGS, RADICAL BEGINNINGS

This hour-long video program will be shown continuously in RAW’s Video Gallery and continued daily through December 31.

Premiering on World AIDS Day 2017, and showing at over 100 museums, galleries and cultural institutions across the world.

ALTERNATE ENDINGS, RADICAL BEGINNINGS is the 28th annual iteration of Visual AIDS’ longstanding Day With(out) Art project. Curated by Erin Christovale and Vivian Crockett for Visual AIDS, the video program prioritizes Black narratives within the ongoing AIDS epidemic, commissioning seven new and innovative short videos from artists Mykki Blanco, Cheryl Dunye & Ellen Spiro, Reina Gossett, Thomas Allen Harris, Kia Labeija, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, and Brontez Purnell.

In spite of the impact of HIV/AIDS within Black communities, these stories and experiences are constantly excluded from larger artistic and historical narratives. In 2016 African Americans represented 44% of all new HIV diagnoses in the United States. Given this context, it is increasingly urgent to feature a myriad of stories that consider and represent the lives of those housed within this statistic. ALTERNATE ENDINGS, RADICAL BEGINNINGS seeks to highlight the voices of those that are marginalized within broader Black communities nationwide, including queer and trans people.

The commissioned projects include intimate meditations of young HIV positive protagonists; a consideration of community-based HIV/AIDS activism in the South; explorations of the legacies and contemporary resonances within AIDS archives; a poetic journey through New York exploring historical traces of queer and trans life, and more. Together, the videos provide a platform centering voices deeply impacted by the ongoing epidemic.

Rearrange Me

An evening of musical contrasts and creative surprises as eight Connecticut artists play songs by each other, rearranged in their own characteristic performance styles.

Each of the eight Rearrange Me artists will be secretly assigned one of the other artists. They will then choose a song and perform it as though it was their own. This means that a folk artist, if assigned a hip-hop artist, will rearrange and perform a song by the hip-hop artist in folk style… and so forth.

Each artist will only know their own Rearrange Me assignment, so the audience and the other performers will hear the pieces for the first time together.

Produced in cooperation with Julie Beman.

Participating Artists:

Kate Callahan | Lys Guillorn & Her Band | Angela Luna | The Sawtelles

Self Suffice | That Virginia | Charmagne Tripp | Zoo Front

Hartt @ RAW

World Premieres of Electroacoustic and Acoustic Music

Hartford composers and Hartt School faculty Lief Ellis and David Macbride will present music involving winds, voices, percussion, and piano interior. Audio spatialization will be featured and audience members will be an integral part of the music making. Come experience music in a new and exciting way!

Program

Leaves and Cicadas – Lief Ellis

Fighting Futility – Lief Ellis

Selections from Sri Yantra – David Macbride:
Yantra 7 (2017) – Charles Huang, Ling-Fei Kang, Janet Rosen – oboes; Bradley Karas, Shane Rathburn, Perry Roth – soprano saxophones.

Yantra 5 (2017) – Angelica Ansbacher, Saerom Kim, Alex Kollias – bass clarinets; Connor Baba, Krissia Molina, Joseph David Spence – baritone saxophones.

Yantra 9 (2017) – Genevieve Clements, Anna Koogler, Andersen White – voices; Devon Cupo, Christopher Natale, Yudong Wang, Benjamin Yuscavage – percussion.

Lief Ellis has a diverse career that encompasses music composition, electronic performance, collaborator and educator. His works have been performed all over the country as well as having premieres in Iceland and Greece. As a collaborator, he has worked with choreographers, dancers, composers, media artists, actors, and musicians in a variety of roles that include videography, interactive programming, and tech support. He has been awarded prizes for his music composition as well as his teaching. For more information please visit LiefEllis.com.

David Macbride has written numerous works, ranging from solo, chamber and orchestral music to music for film, TV, dance and theatre, with particular emphasis on music for percussion and musical landscapes. His works have been performed extensively in the United States and abroad. Solo CDs are available on Innova Recordings and on Albany Records. As a pianist, Macbride was invited to give a recital tour of Peru by the Instituto Cultural Peruano NorteAmericano, and has performed recitals in Spain and in Mexico. Macbride is Professor of Composition and Music Theory at the Hartt School, University of Hartford. See davidmacbride.com.

Peter Edlund: Names on the Land

ARTIST TALK: Saturday, January 27 | 4 PM

Peter Edlund explores the contradictions in utopian American landscape imagery. Taking aesthetic and visual cues from the work of artists ranging from the Hudson River School to Ansel Adams, Edlund’s paintings employ allegorical imagery to investigate contemporary issues. His landscapes reference the mythic images of Manifest Destiny while shedding light on the “actual social and political reality of racism and genocide in our country.”^{^[1]}

In 2005, Edlund began researching Algonkian languages to understand the meanings of Native American place names in the Northeast, adding the Oneida language indigenous to central New York State in 2013. His research has informed his paintings since. Says Edlund, I am attempting to “address the collective amnesia of American society by using the ‘landscape’ as my means of expression.”^{^[2]} Edlund’s work raises compelling questions. Why is there generally a lack of cultural understanding of the meanings and significance of native words that are the names of rivers, mountains, lakes and towns?

Through appropriating the aesthetics of historic landscape painting, Edlund’s work takes aim directly at colonialism and the forces that created the rifts in understanding and knowledge that we live with today. Edlund uses traditional allegory as a tool to investigate contemporary issues, while simultaneously connecting us with the history we come from.

Picking the most contentious battle states from the 2016 Presidential Election, Edlund investigates contemporary social issues each state faces that are deeply rooted in historical events and practices. He utilizes idyllic landscape painting to create imagery that evokes breathtaking sunsets while embedding deep allegorical meaning. For example,

The Battle of Wisconsin shows a swan and her hatchlings being threatened by a fox, raccoons and an eagle. The imagery “evokes the conflicts of Wisconsin’s history from the displacement and relocation of indigenous peoples to the current conservative agenda of social cutbacks, racial inequalities and voter suppression.”^{^[3]} Edlund crafts his imagery in the Battle States paintings by taking place names from respective states and translating their original Native American meanings into English — Waukesha meaning fox, Waubesa meaning swan, Kanabec meaning snake, and so forth.

Read the article in the Hartford Courant.

Here’s a review of the exhibition in Art New England.

About Peter Edlund
Edlund studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York. He has shown nationally and internationally, and has received honors incluing MacDowell Colony Residencies, a Gottlieb Foundation grant, and a Pollack-Krasner Foundation Grant. He has exhibited at Jack Shainman Gallery, among many others. Edlund is originally from West Hartford, Connecticut. His work has been exhibited at Real Art Ways on mulitiple occastions, including a solo exhibition in 2000, Majestic America.

^{^[1]} Artist Statement, Peter Edlund, http://www.peteredlundart.com/artist.html

^{^[2]} Artist Statement, Peter Edlund, http://www.peteredlundart.com/artist.html

^{^[3]} The Battle for Wisconsin artist statement card, Peter Edlund, 2017

Featured image: Weatogue (Hut-Land), 36″x46″, oil on canvas, 2007

Thanks to the College of Engineering, Technology, and Architecture at University of Hartford for assistance in creating laser-cut stencils used to produce several works in the exhibition and public art works in various locations around Hartford.

Ann Z. Leventhal: Among the Survivors

Tuesday, October 10 | 2:30 PM

The author will discuss, sell, and sign copies of Among the Survivors, her new novel.
She will talk about her 56 years in Greater Hartford plus the joys and torments of a writer’s life.

About Ann Z. Leventhal
Ann Z. Leventhal is the author of Life-lines, a novel about a wife who runs away with her husband’s mistress. Her short stories, articles, poems, and reviews have appeared in Vignettes, The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Christopher Street, The New York Times Book Review, and Publishers Weekly.

See Ann’s website.

About Among the Survivors, A Novel
Though twenty-one-year-old Karla Most manages to bag Saxton Perry, a virtual prince thirty years her senior, she has no idea how to live happily ever after, with or without him. Karla cannot get past her anger at having been deceived by her single, now-dead mother, Mutti, who―supposedly a “Holocaust victim,” complete with tattooed numbers―was in fact a German Christian who got into the United States by falsifying her background. So what does that make her daughter? Before she can answer that question, Karla must track down the actual story of her own existence.

Pinned to the Wall: Panel Discussion

Join us for an informative and lively panel discussion, delving into a variety of subjects suggested by the exhibition, Stewart Crone: Pinned to the Wall.

Panelists

Peter Waite: Curator / Moderator
Marty Baron: Art collector
Stewart Crone: Artist
Peter Good: Designer / Artist
Chris Passehl: Designer
Kelly Walters: Assistant Professor of Graphic Design, UConn

Discussion Topics Include

Fine Art vs. Applied Art
Tradition vs. Innovation: can traditional techniques be used in innovative ways?
Where are lines drawn between commercial print and design and fine art?
Who is the client for fine art?
How does print democratize art? Does print devalue art?

About the Panelists

Peter Waite is the curator of the show. Peter is an accomplished painter whose work has been shown nationally and is included in the collections of the Benton Museum, The Wadsworth Antheneum, NASA, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, to name a few. http://www.peterwaite.com/

Marty Baron is a financial planner and art collector living in West Hartford. He and his wife Nancy participated in Artspace New Haven’s “House Salon” tour in September of 2016, where their collection was on display and guests were given a tour by painter Deborah Dancy.

Stewart Crone is the artist of the show, Pinned to the Wall. He has a wealth of knowledge and insight into the topics surrounding his work.

Peter Good is a designer and artist, and co-founder of Cummings-Good. His work is included in the collections of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, NY; the Library of Congress, Washington, DC; The Museum fur Kunst und Gerwerbe, Hamburg; Neue Sammlung MuseumMunich; and the Museum of Modern Art, Toyama, Japan. https://www.cummings-good.com/

Chris Passehl founded his design firm in 1996. His clients include the YMCA of Greater Hartford, The Lewitt Collection, and Real Art Ways, among many others. Chris has taught at the University of New Haven, Eastern Connecticut State University, and UConn as well as advised student interns from Yale, RISD, and others. http://www.passehldesign.com/

Kelly Walters is an Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at the University of Connecticut. She is a multimedia designer and curator. Her artistic practice investigates the intersection of black cultural identity, representation, and language in mainstream media. She is also founder of Bright Polka Dot (an independent design studio) focusing on print, digital, pattern and textile design. Kelly has worked as a designer for SFMOMA, the RISD Museum, and Blue State Digital.

Hong Hong: All the Light in a Vivid Dream

Real Art Ways presents Hong Hong’s (b. 1989, Hefei, China) first solo exhibition in Hartford, Connecticut, All the Light in a Vivid Dream. The exhibition features a series of large-scale, hand-poured paperworks recently completed during Hong’s artist residency at the Morgan Art of Papermaking Conservatory & Educational Foundation in Cleveland, Ohio. The works in this exhibition are a part of Hong’s multidisciplinary investigation of the temporal parameters of human perception, and its effects on social, cultural, and environmental systems.

Hong has traveled to various sites across the United States to make paper since 2014. During these outdoor explorations, labor has given form and structure to largely intangible events, such as weather and haptic movements. Through the engagement of repetitive processes, Hong sought to punctuate, and to provide cadence to, her experience of existence as one continuous, disorientating interval. Material became an imprint of its own metamorphosis, and a chronology of time passed. In this context, each work is a photographic still of unfolding, momentary progressions, both of the body and of the landscape the body is situated within.

The imagery in All the Light in a Vivid Dream evokes vast stretches of sea and sky, as well as the horizon line where they meet. In the artist’s words, “The horizon is an interesting place. Where does the horizon exist? Does land ever touch sky? Maybe it only does in our dreams. One can argue that the horizon is simultaneously present and absent: it is a constant, and yet, with every passing moment, it changes. I am interested in the natural expanses that we yearn for, as well as the human desire to migrate to them, map them, and with our best efforts, record them. Through land, through the sea, through sky, and through the stars, we seek and find our own coordinates.”

Ultimately, the works on view in All the Light in a Vivid Dream attempt to harness the momentary, such as the passing of a single hour, to allude to the eternal, like the dissolve of dusk into night.

Read the article in the Hartford Courant.

About the Artist
Born in Hefei, China, Hong Hong is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans papermaking, sculpture, installation, and performance. Hong earned her MFA in 2014 from the University of Georgia and her BFA in 2011 from the State University of New York at Potsdam. Her work has been exhibited across the United States in shows at the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Madison Museum of Fine Art, New Mexico History Museum, and Georgia Museum of Art.

Hong is the recipient of grants and commissions from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Center for the Arts at Wesleyan University, the Edward C. & Ann T. Roberts Foundation, The Greater Hartford Arts Council, and Artspace New Haven. In 2017, she will complete artist residencies at PLAYA, Morgan Conservatory, and I-Park.

Hong currently lives in Connecticut, where you can find her making paper in empty parking lots and working on a yearlong, site-specific project called Everlasting Ephemera.

Image: All the Light in a Vivid Dream, hand-poured kozo, 2017

Stewart Crone: Pinned to the Wall

Pinned to the Wall: Panel Discussion
Thursday, September 14 | 6:30-8 PM
More information here.

Curated by Peter Waite

Stewart Crone has been collecting paper – and experimenting with text and images – inspired by commercial printing, since he began working in the trade in 1971. The effort has been motivated by a desire to escape the daily challenge of catching errors and instead to celebrate the occasions of error, chance, disorder and misbehavior of ink and paper.

Not all error is interesting of course – we still curse the inkjet machine when the cartridges go empty, and the machine makers for how expensive their little plastic containers have become. Larger paper – bigger error – seems to have a nice way of conferring a higher purpose to these mistakes and disorder. Crone’s own experiments have been directly influenced by this celebration of error – arguments shaped by a desire to keep chance, uncertainty and displacement included in the resulting works.

The flat, razor thin film of ink that lies on the surface of a piece of paper contains a mystery of order and structure that holds out promise of perfect organization, or relative chaos. Thus the expression ‘not worth the paper it’s printed on’ encapsulates the challenge for a printed sheet without error, and the contrary decisions offered in this exhibition stand as examples of paper that remain filled with the awareness of imperfection.

Read the article in the Hartford Courant.

About the Artist
Stewart Crone has over 40 years of printing experience: electronic pre-press, commercial lithography, fine arts editions and reproductions, flatbed press operations, map production, flexography, silkscreen. After participating in the Envirovision show for the NY State Fair in 1972, and in The First All Xerox Show and Language and Photography at La Mamelle in San Francisco in 1975 and 1976 respectively, he turned to the more prosaic tasks of simply making a living and pursuing other interests in film and politics. He has continued to work on paper both formally and informally. Pinned to the Wall is the first ever show of his interest in both collecting and making works on paper.

Crone holds an M.A. in Education and an M.A. in Geography, both from the University of Connecticut and a B.A. in Political Economy of Industrial Society from the University of California, Berkeley.

RAW JAZZ: Tyshawn Sorey Septet

Real Art Ways presents RAW JAZZ – A series of four free concerts in June, July and September.

Major support for RAW JAZZ comes from the Evelyn W. Preston Memorial Trust Fund, Bank of America, N.A., Trustee.

“He is the antithesis of the showy, extroverted drummer, as for Sorey the stress is always on the beauty of the collective music made by his groups rather than the chops of the individual players.” – Troy Dostert, The Free Jazz Collective

Tyshawn Sorey is a composer, performer, educator, and scholar working across an extensive range of musical idioms. A 2015 Doris Duke Impact Award recipient, Sorey performs percussion, trombone and piano nationally and internationally with his own ensembles, and artists including Muhal Richard Abrams, Steve Coleman, John Zorn, Roscoe Mitchell, Misha Mengelberg, Vijay Iyer, Wadada Leo Smith, Anthony Braxton, Steve Lehman, Tim Berne, and Myra Melford.

The International Contemporary Ensemble, Spektral Quartet, and TAK Ensemble have performed his compositions, which integrate African diasporic, Western classical, and avant-garde musical forms. In 2012, he was selected as an Other Minds Composer.

As a leader, Sorey has released five critically acclaimed recordings – most recently The Inner Spectrum of Variables (Pi, 2016), which features both classical/contemporary composition and conducted improvisation.

He has taught lectures and courses on composition and improvisation at the Banff Centre, International Realtime Music Symposium (Norway), Hochschule für Musik Köln, Musikhochschule Nürnberg, Rhythmic Conservatory (Denmark), Birmingham Conservatory of Music, Conservatorium van Amsterdam, Cité de la Musique (Paris), and Vallekilde Højskole (Denmark).

Sorey’s works have premiered at the Issue Project Room, Walt Disney Hall, the Bimhuis, Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center, the Village Vanguard, the Jazz Gallery, and Roulette.

He received a B.M. in Jazz and Performance Studies from William Paterson University and an M.A. in Music Composition from Wesleyan University. Tyshawn will begin his tenure at Wesleyan University as a John Spencer Camp Professor of Music in Fall 2017.

The septet, called Koan II, will play compositions by Sorey that are inspired by concepts derived from Zen Buddhist practices and nearly imperceptible sound worlds. The ensemble will explore low-range instruments with their characteristic slow sonic waves.

Joining Sorey are Ben Gerstein, trombone; Stephen Haynes, trumpet; Todd Neufeld, guitar; and three basses: Mark Helias, Joe Morris and Carl Testa.

“…he tends to move through his music with a flowing sense of ritual and constant alertness. It involves a lot of silence. It also involves a lot of attack, but in very short and concentrated doses, sometimes as short as one great, purposeful smack on a drum head or a quick crescendo of mallets on cymbals that floods the club’s entire atmosphere.” – Ben Ratliff, New York Times