Real Art Ways | Independent Cinema | Contemporary Art | Live Art

“No Guns, All Play” Public Art Project and Celebration

UPDATE: This event is happening weather-permitting.

Real Art Ways presents a new community art project “No Guns, All Play” on Saturday, August 10, at 11:30 am at George Day Park (across from 56 Arbor Street).

The public is invited to this community event; refreshments will be served. (

“No Guns, All Play” is a sidewalk tattoo, commissioned by Real Art Ways and designed and created by artist Steed Taylor. Walkways in the neighborhood park will be painted with brightly colored designs and will include the participation of neighborhood children.

Steed Taylor has created 50 similar works in cities including Beijing, New York City, Washington DC, Chicago and West Palm Beach. (see images below)

Taylor’s street tattoos repurpose public space for art and bring socially engaging art to where people live.

This collaboration with Taylor stems from Real Art Ways’ commitment to its immediate neighborhood, including Park Art, a program for neighborhood youth that Real Art Ways has offered since 1990.

Youth in Park Art will observe and participate in the creation of “No Guns, All Play” beginning Wednesday, August 7, when Taylor arrives to begin the work.

This project is made possible by Love Your Block, a program of the City of Hartford, with additional support from the Greater Hartford Arts Council.

To learn more about Steed Taylor, you can check out his work here.

Common Property:
Sun Washed
Waste of The West
Sophia-Yemisi Adeyemo

Real Art Ways presents a solo exhibition by Real Art Award winner Sophia-Yemisi Adeyemo

Sophia-Yemisi Adeyemo (b. 1999 in Burlingame, CA) is an interdisciplinary artist creating liberatory visions. Both historical liberation struggles and current resistance movements are central to how Adeyemo constructs the scenes in her work. At the intersection of assemblage, painting, and sculpture, Adeyemo pulls from the visual sensibilities of graffiti, protest art, Cuban solidarity posters, hand-drawn shop signs, and non-canonized African-diasporic storytelling sensibilities (so-called “naive” art) as a means of contributing to a lineage of opposition. Adeyemo’s work includes a trash foraging practice, where she collects found and discarded objects from the street. She considers them to be “rejected by-products of a capitalist use-value structure,” and regards them animistically. They exist not only as found objects, but as fragments of experience, which she works with rather than on.

About the Artist

Sophia-Yemisi Adeyemo is currently a Visual Arts MFA candidate at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. Her work has been exhibited at Marianne Boesky Gallery, c1760 Gallery, BRIC Arts Media, Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, Arnot Art Museum, The Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, and the Muskegon Museum of Art, and featured in publications such as Hyperallergic and “Ghetto Gastro Presents Black Power Kitchen”. She has been an Artist-in-Residence at BRIC Arts Media, Lazuli Residency, and the New York Academy of Art. She received her BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design.

Ask Your Artist If It’s Right For You

Thursday, August 1, 6:00 PM. Free admission, no RSVP required.

You’re invited to High Society: A Conversation about Art and Pharma with artist Jeff Ostergren, who will discuss his current exhibition with independent writer and curator Sarah Fritchey at Real Art Ways. Please join us for a conversation exploring the intertwined history of paint and pharmaceuticals – how it began, where we are today, and how pharmaceutical advertising has aimed at keeping some of us down while getting others high.

Guests will be offered a complimentary cocktail inspired by High Society using Wild Moon Botanics Liqueurs from our neighbors at Hartford Flavor Company. Must be 21 or over; while supplies last.

Jeff Ostergren makes paintings, sculptures, videos, drawings, and installations about the intertwined histories of pharmaceuticals and color. His pointillist, color-saturated works, infused with actual pharmaceuticals and chemicals, utilize imagery from art history and advertising to explore the ecstasy and toxicity of our present moment.

Originally trained as an anthropologist, Jeff has been a practicing artist for two decades. Upcoming shows include a solo exhibition at Real Art Ways in Hartford, CT, and a two part project called “A Suitcase” at Picture Theory in New York City and Kunstraum Super in Vienna, Austria.

Recent exhibitions include “Double Take: Familiar Objects in Unexpected Materials” at the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury, CT, “The Past Pushes Forward” at Omola Studios in New Haven, CT, and “Circadian Rhythms,” curated by URSA Gallery in Bridgeport, CT. In 2018, he completed a 2,400 square foot solo site-specific installation “Science For a Better Life,” in which he explored the chemical and visual history of Bayer Pharmaceuticals at Yale University’s West Campus in New Haven, a former Bayer facility.

Ostergren is a recipient of a 2024 Lillian Orlowsky and William Freed Grant from the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. He also received an Artist Grant from the Puffin Foundation earlier this year. In 2023, he was awarded an Artist Fellowship Grant from the Connecticut Office of the Arts, and The Bitsie Clark Fund for Artists Grant, an annual project based-grant in New Haven. He was also chosen a 2021 “Artist-To-Watch” by Ortega y Gasset Projects in Brooklyn, NY.

He also has a curatorial practice, including a well-reviewed exhibition “False Flag: The Space Between Reason and Paranoia” at Franklin Street Works in Stamford, CT in 2018. In addition, from 2018-2019, Ostergren ran Tilia Projects, a community exhibition space, out of his studio in New Haven.

Ostergren received his MFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA in 2006, following upon receiving a BA in a double major of anthropology and gender studies at Rice University in Houston, TX in 1998. He lives and works in New Haven, CT.

Sarah Fritchey is an independent Curator and Writer who works at the intersections of art, justice, civic engagement, memory and belonging. Fritchey has curated exhibitions in museums, galleries and art non-profits around the country, including the African American Museum in Philadelphia, the Hessel Museum of Art in Hudson, NY, Sideshow Gallery in NYC, Fine Arts Gallery at York College in NYC, NYPOP Gallery in NYC, Real Art Ways in Hartford, CT, and Franklin Street Works in Stamford, CT. She has juried regional exhibitions at the New Britain Museum of American Art, and the Art and Culture Center in Hollywood, FL, and has contributed writing to Artforum.com, Hyperallergic, Art New England Magazine, Big, Red & Shiny, Artscope Magazine, and the Hartford Courant.

I only found you when I stopped looking
Denisse Griselda Reyes

Real Art Ways presents a solo exhibition by interdisciplinary artist Denisse Griselda Reyes.

I only found you when I stopped looking, Reyes’s first solo show in Connecticut, features short films, familial ephemera, and a new body of paintings that humorously explore themes of self-formation, reparative representation, and archival preservation. I only found you when I stopped looking serves as a thoughtful response to Reyes’s previous show, Did you have a hard time finding me? at A.I.R. Gallery. The titles draw inspiration from Yuri Herrera’s book, Signs Preceding the End of the World.

In a continuing artistic dialogue, the shift from a question to a statement suggests a journey of discovery and unexpected revelations between the two exhibitions. Reyes presents a “maximalist constellation of memory” by juxtaposing family archive materials with paintings and multimedia projections in an installation space reminiscent of, but not identical to, their family’s domestic interiors. Central to the exhibition is a short film that intertwines the border crossings of Reyes’s grandmother Anita during the Salvadoran Civil War and the queer dating life of Reyes’s alter-ego, Griselda. Griselda, a part-narrator, part-drag-persona, and part-survival-strategy, allows Reyes to challenge the expectations placed on queer Latinx artists while acknowledging the complexities of self-formation. The exhibition includes new paintings that recreate family photographs, a vitrine of childhood teeth parodying museal presentation, screens alternating between home videos and simulated archival footage, and blue-green walls evoking Reyes’s family’s past spaces in El Salvador. Through these elements, Reyes transforms preservation into mythmaking, inviting guests to reflect on their own notions of selfhood.

–Connor Spencer

Writer/Researcher/PhD Candidate at Colombia University

About the Artist

Denisse Griselda Reyes (they/them, b. 1993) is an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker, utilizing autobiographical narratives as source material to create contemporary fictions. Through layered temporalities and representations of the self within archives, objects, and performances, they construct a mythology of Salvadoran and personal history. Balanced between tragedy and pleasure, Reyes employs humor and their alter-ego, Griselda, to navigate the grief and absurdity inherent in recreating transhistorical subjects. Their work seeks to negotiate an agreement with the present moment rather than with a distant future, exploring how close one can get to recreating reality before losing touch with it. Their work has been exhibited at White Columns, A.I.R. Gallery, NoBudge Films, Film Diary NYC, The Wallach Art Gallery, Lenfest Center for the Arts, Artforum, Velvetpark Media, MODA Critical Review and internationally. Their films have premiered in Berlin and New York, and they have been nominated for the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant and awarded the “Hot Film in the Making” Roy W. Dean Film Grant. They received an MFA in Visual Arts (New Genres) from Columbia University and a BA in Art History from Wesleyan University. They currently live and work in Brooklyn, NY.

High Society
Jeff Ostergren

High Society: A Conversation about Art and Pharma

A discussion with independent writer and curator Sarah Fritchey and artist Jeff Ostergren on

High Society, an exhibition at Real Art Ways. Thursday, August 1, 6PM

Free Admission

For more information please click HERE

Real Art Ways presents a solo exhibition by New Haven-based painter Jeff Ostergren.

Jeff Ostergren makes art about the intertwined histories of pharmaceuticals and color. His pointillist, color-saturated paintings, sculptures, and videos, infused with actual pharmaceuticals and chemicals, utilize imagery from art history and advertising to explore the ecstasy and toxicity of our present moment. The “pharmakon,” a Greek term that simultaneously means cure, poison, and paint and is the origin of the English words “pharmaceutical” and “toxic,” is a concept that centers the work.

Ostergren works from images taken from pharmaceutical advertising that bear an uncanny reference to art historical works, particularly from the Impressionist period, which was contemporaneous with the rise of synthetic chemistry. These images of idealized leisure form potent means of understanding representations of race, gender, sexuality, disability, and class.

He transforms these advertisements into vibrant pointillist paintings of figures in landscapes and blasts of abstract patterns. Working on synthetic substrates such as polyester canvas stretched over PVC bars, each dot, made with custom tools, is a particular pill’s exact size and shape. Each oval is the color that corresponds to the branding of that pharmaceutical, an actual sample of which is mixed into the paint. Ostergren believes that each molecule of pigment or drug, be it pleasurably mind-altering, physically poisonous, or both, contains the entire history of its invention, production, marketing, and consumption. By infusing those molecules into the painting, he references the complicated histories of these chemicals.

Pharmaceuticals have played a significant role throughout human history, both in terms of their prescribed usage and recreational function. Today, the interplay of politics and economics in the pharmaceutical industry is a pressing societal issue. As a barrage of pharmaceutical options is on offer, we are faced with contradictory moments in which significant advances in human health and possibilities of new levels of pleasure meet violent spirals of addiction and overdose. Ostergren’s exhibition serves as a timely and thought-provoking exploration of these complex dynamics.

High Society brings together a selection of Ostergren’s paintings from the last few years, during which he has pushed his signature “pharmaceutical pointillist” style into new realms of monumental scale and kaleidoscopic optical vibrations.

This exhibition is sponsored in part by The Lillian Orlowsky and William Freed Grant and the Provincetown Art Association and Museum.

About the Artist

Originally trained as an anthropologist, Jeff has been a practicing artist for two decades. Recent exhibitions include “Double Take: Familiar Objects in Unexpected Materials” at the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury, CT, “The Past Pushes Forward” at Omola Studios in New Haven, CT, and “Circadian Rhythms,” curated by URSA Gallery in Bridgeport, CT. In 2018, he completed a 2,400 square foot solo site-specific installation “Science For a Better Life,” in which he explored the chemical and visual history of Bayer Pharmaceuticals at Yale University’s West Campus in New Haven, a former Bayer facility.

Caroline Davis and Wendy Eisenberg in Concert

Real Art Ways will host improvisers, composers, songwriters, and friends Wendy Eisenberg and Caroline Davis in concert. This performance is in celebration of the April release of their improv duo album Accept When. Tickets are $15 general admission, $12 for Real Art Ways members, and $5 for full time students. Real Art Ways is located at 56 Arbor Street in Hartford.

About the Album:

Caroline Davis and Wendy Eisenberg wrote Accept When between 2022-23, after a long, beautiful period improvising together intimately in the safety of a friend’s practice space. The deepening of their musical friendship, the affordance of space they give to the possibility of synchronicity, the reminders they write of the preciousness of our existence — all of this they put into these songs to be performed.

A nucleus is supposed to be an especially essential form in eukaryotic cells. Their nuclei are surrounded by a membrane, which in that world permits them to be said to have “true nuclei.” Even their smallest parts, their organelles (incidentally also the name of Caroline’s keyboard heard throughout the record), are held by that membrane. The deepening of our musical friendship, the affordance of space we give to the possibility of synchronicity, the reminders we write of the preciousness of our existence – all of this we put into these songs for you, to help us all accept these miracles and metaphors, in our lifeboats. Click here for the album pre-sale link.

Caroline Davis

Caroline Davis’ musical journey began in Singapore. When her family moved to the United States when she was 6, she encountered R&B and gospel music rife with horns that called her to choose the saxophone. Today, her music covers a wide range of styles. As a leader, she has released seven albums, and her active projects include Portals, My Tree, and Alula. Her work has garnered much praise from NPR, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Wire, and a host of international publications.

Davis has shared the stage with Lee Konitz, Rajna Swaminathan, Michelle Boulé, Angelica Sanchez, John Zorn, Bari Kim, The Femme Jam, Matt Mitchell, Terry Riley, Miles Okazaki, and Billy Kaye. Outside of these performance relationships, she has been involved with the following mentorship communities: IAJE’s Sisters in Jazz, the Kennedy Center’s Betty Carter Jazz Ahead Program, and Mutual Mentorship for Musicians. Grants and residencies supporting a grateful Caroline include: Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Chamber Music America, New York Foundation for the Arts, Jerome Hill, Civitella, BringAbout Residency, The Jazz Gallery, and MacDowell. Some of her compositional practice integrates music with cognitive science, influenced by her Ph.D in Music Cognition.For more information, please visit her website.

Wendy Eisenberg

Wendy Eisenberg is a guitarist who practices in a wide variety of improvisational contexts. Eisenberg has collaborated with a disparate array of musicians from all points along the creative music spectrum, including Bill Orcutt, Allison Miller, Shane Parish, Francisco Mela, Carla Kihlstedt, John Zorn, and Caroline Davis. They have released music on Tzadik, VDSQ, Ba Da Bing! Records, Garden Portal, Feeding Tube, Out of Your Head, and Dear Life Records, and performed everywhere from intimate basements to international festivals including Moers, Le Guess Who? and Big Ears. For more information, please visit their website.

Improvisations Now

An experience of music imagined and created in real time. This series runs from September 2023-May 2024. Check out the full schedule here!

May’s Performance

Tomeka Reid

Described as a “New Jazz Power Source” by the New York Times, cellist and composer, and MacArthur Genius Grantee Tomeka Reid has emerged as one of the most original, versatile, and curious musicians in Chicago’s bustling jazz and improvised music community over the last decade. Her distinctive melodic sensibility, always rooted in a strong sense of groove, has been featured in many distinguished ensembles over the years. Reid released her debut recording as a bandleader, Tomeka Reid Quartet, in 2015 featuring herself (cello), Jason Roebke (bass), fellow MacArthur Genius grantee Mary Halvorson (guitar), and Tomas Fujiwara (drums). The album they released provided a vibrant showcase for the cellist’s improvisational acumen, as well as for her dynamic arrangements and compositional ability. For more information, please visit her website.

Melanie Dyer

“An outstanding modern violist.” – The Strad

Melanie Dyer is a violist who moves across free jazz, jazz, orchestral, and experimental music. She has studied with William Lincer, Lee Yeingst, John Jake Kella and Naomi Fellows. Recently she performed and recorded with William Parker, Henry Grimes, Tomeka Reid, Heroes Are Gang Leaders, New Muse 4tet, Women with an Axe to Grind, and other luminous musicians in the United States, Europe, and South Africa.

She founded WeFreeStrings, a string/rhythm collective rooted in creative improvisation, and plays viola in Gwen Laster’s New Muse 4tet.

To Learn More About Melanie Dyer, please visit her website.

Joe Morris

“The preeminent free music guitarist of his generation.” – Downbeat Magazine

“One of the most profound improvisers at work in the U.S.” – WIRE Magazine

“The guitar revolutionary to pay attention to.” – The Boston Phoenix

Joe Morris born in New Haven Connecticut in 1955. He began playing guitar at the age of 14 first playing rock music, progressing to blues, then to jazz, free jazz and free improvisation. He released his first record Wraparound (riti) in 1983. He has composed over 200 original pieces of music. Joe Morris and Real Art Ways have a longstanding creative relationship. Joe has performed multiple times since the 1980’s and has organized concert series of improvisational music for several years.

To learn more about Joe Morris:

Facebook

Website

Improvisations Now

An experience of music imagined and created in real time. This series runs from September 2023-May 2024. Check out the full schedule here!

April’s Schedule

William Parker: bass, flutes, n’goni, guimbre.

William Parker is a bassist, improviser, composer, writer, and educator from New York City. He has recorded over 150 albums, published six books, and taught and mentored hundreds of young musicians and artists.

He has been called “one of the most inventive bassists/leaders since [Charles] Mingus,” and “the creative heir to Jimmy Garrison and Paul Chambers…directly influenced by ‘60s avant-gardists like Sirone, Henry Grimes and Alan Silva.” The Village Voice called him, “the most consistently brilliant free jazz bassist of all time” and Time Out New York named him one of the “50 Greatest New York Musicians of All Time.”

Parker’s current active bands include the large-band Little Huey Creative Orchestra, the Raining on the Moon Sextet, the In Order to Survive Quartet, Stan’s Hat Flapping in the Wind, the Cosmic Mountain Quintet with Hamid Drake, Kidd Jordan, and Cooper-Moore, as well as a deep and ongoing solo bass study. His recordings have long been documented by the AUM Fidelity record label and on his own Centering Records, among others. He also has a duo project “Hope Cries For Justice” with Patricia Nicholson Parker which combines music, story telling, poetry and dance

He has been a key figure in the New York and European creative music scenes since the 1970s, and has worked all over the world. He has performed with Cecil Taylor, Don Cherry, Peter Brotzmann, Milford Graves, Peter Kowald, and David S. Ware, among many others.

To learn more about William Parker:

Website

Joe Morris: guitar, banjouke, banjo, bass

“The preeminent free music guitarist of his generation.” – Downbeat Magazine

“One of the most profound improvisers at work in the U.S.” – WIRE Magazine

“The guitar revolutionary to pay attention to.” – The Boston Phoenix

To learn more about Joe Morris:

Facebook

Website

No Bodies: Artists in Conversation

A discussion about Real Art Way’s new exhibit No Bodies: Clothing as Disruptor involving visual artists, poets, designers, and curator Alva Greenberg. Within this conversation, participants will discuss the use of written language within the exhibit, assumptions of materiality, cultural identity, and other elements that can make clothing a Disruptor.

No Bodies: Artists in Conversation will be held at Real Art Ways, Hartford, on March 29th, 2024 from 5:30pm to 7:00pm.

Discussion Panelists

Carlos Estévez was born and raised in Cuba and moved to Miami in 2004, where he lives and works. He graduated from the University of Arts (ISA) in Havana and solo exhibitions of his work have been presented at the National Museum of Fine Arts, Havana and in solo and group exhibitions around the US and abroad. His work is included in numerous prestigious collections, such as those of the National Museum of Fine Arts, Havana; Museum of Fine Art, Boston; The Ludwig Forum, Aachen, Germany; The Bronx Museum, New York; Perez Art Museum Miami, Florida. Estéves is a featured artist in No Bodies: Clothing as Disruptor.

Susan Clinard is a contemporary American sculptor. Her life-scale figurative sculptures combine found objects, carved wood elements and ceramic portraiture. Her compositions tell stories, helps us connect and speak to our shared humanity.

Susan’s sculptures were recently acquired by the Fenix Museum in Amsterdam, a major new museum inspired by stories of global migration. She is the winner of the National Hammerschalg carving

award and the Art by the Northeast award for sculpture. She has been the artist in residence at the Eli Whitney Museum for the past twelve years. Susan has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Palette and Chisel Academy of Fine Arts. She has received substantial public commissions, and her sculptures can be found in many private and public collections worldwide. Clinard is a featured artist in No Bodies: Clothing as Disruptor.

Neville Wisdom is the Head Designer and Owner of the Neville Wisdom clothing label based in New Haven, Connecticut. Neville began designing and creating clothing at the age of fifteen, and learned many aspects of the trade from watching a local tailor in his small rural town in Jamaica. Neville has been designing clothing for both men and women for over twenty-five years. In 2008, Neville entered the USA fashion scene opening a tiny boutique in Westville and selling assorted small brand clothing.

Reginald Dwayne Betts Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet, lawyer and the Founder & CEO of Freedom Reads, an initiative to radically transform the access to literature in prisons.

The author of a memoir and three collections of poetry, he has transformed his latest collection of poetry, the American Book Award Winning Felon, into a solo theater show that explores the post incarceration experience and lingering consequences of a criminal record through poetry, stories, and engaging with the timeless and transcendental art of papermaking. Betts’s moist recent work, released 2023, Redaction, a collaboration with artist Titus Kaphar, is based on their 2019 exhibition “The Redaction” at MoMA PS1 about the U.S. cash bail system–the state and federal court system’s conditions by which those arrested, but unable to afford bail, remain incarcerated even though they have been neither tried nor convicted.

In 2019, he won the National Magazine Award in the Essays and Criticism category for his New York Times Magazine essay that chronicles his journey from prison to becoming a licensed attorney. He is also a 2021 MacArthur Fellow, has been awarded a Radcliffe Fellowship from Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Emerson Fellow at New America, and most recently a Civil Society Fellow at Aspen. Mr. Betts holds a J.D. from Yale Law School.

In 2020, after staying in New Haven post-graduation, Betts founded Freedom Reads with a $5.25 million grant from the Mellon Foundation. Freedom Reads, headquartered in Hamden and employing several formerly incarcerated individuals, is the only organization in the country with a mission to provide libraries to prisons, and thereby support the efforts of incarcerated individuals to imagine new possibilities for their lives. To date, Freedom Reads has opened over 253 Freedom Libraries in 35 prisons and juvenile detention facilities across 10 states. These libraries provide a locus where conversation and community can begin inside and outside of prison walls. They are objects of beauty, handcrafted by teams that include people who themselves have served time in prison and populated with a 500-book, carefully curated collection that includes poetry, literature, non-fiction, and more. As Betts often declares, “Freedom begins with a book.” Betts is a featured artist in No Bodies: Clothing as Disruptor.

No Bodies: Clothing as Disruptor Curator, Moderator

Alva Greenberg is a curator based in Connecticut. She started her career as the co-owner and editor of The Gazette, a weekly newspaper in Old Lyme, CT. From 1997-2009, she ran ALVA Gallery, a contemporary art gallery in New London, CT dedicated to promoting mid-career artists working in all disciplines. In 2006, Alva Greenberg was a recipient of the Eugene O’Neill Center’s “25 of Connecticut’s most Uncommon Women” award and in 2018 she received the State of Connecticut Governor’s Patron of the Arts award. Ms. Greenberg currently serves on several boards including the French American Museum Exchange (FRAME), Romare Bearden Foundation and the Connecticut Arts Foundation. Past boards include the Florence Griswold Museum and Arttable. Alva Greenberg is the curator of No Bodies: Clothing as Disruptor.

Greenness
Alex Dolores Salerno

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Real Art Ways presents a solo exhibition by 2023 Real Art Award recipient Alex Dolores Salerno.

In Naoki Higashida’s bestselling book “The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism” Higashida answers the question, “Would you give us an example of something people with autism really enjoy?” by explaining “we do take pleasure in one thing that you probably won’t be able to guess, namely, making friends with nature.” He elaborates that “the greenness of nature is the lives of plants and trees. Green is life”. In addition to being the lives of plants and trees, greenness is also another word for gullibleness, naivety, lack of experience, and other concepts that are often used against autistic people who are perceived and pathologized as childlike and incapable. Greenness, however, grounds itself in autistic and neurodivergent sensibilities through its focus on sensory regulation and sensory exploration.

Spanning installation, soft sculpture, video, and photography, Alex Dolores Salerno’s first solo exhibition, Greenness, draws from the artist’s own autistic experience of nature, and the sense of “access intimacy” (as coined by Mia Mingus) that they feel through the work of disabled ancestor Mel Baggs (sie/hir pronouns). Salerno dedicates the exhibition to Baggs and incorporates hir language and wisdom in multiple works. In addition to hir extensive autism and disability advocacy, Baggs also wrote about hir connection to and engagement with the earth as affirmation of hir existence and place in this world. While being in relationship with nature can be particularly supportive for many autistic people, the artist argues that it is an access need for everyone, just as ramps, ASL interpretation, audio description and other accessibility practices are necessary for us all to live together in community.

Salerno further explores greenness through their use of the color “OSHA safety green” throughout the gallery. Utilizing this federal standard color that indicates the location of safety equipment or information, the concept of safe working conditions is expanded to include environments and bodymind experiences that might otherwise be overlooked or disregarded. Rejecting socially constructed and restrictive ways of engaging in art contexts, our workplaces and our environments, Greenness invites touch, stimming, rest, and slowness. By intertwining these actions and ways of being with the concept of workplace safety, the exhibition makes apparent how capitalism and its destructive demand for continuous productivity, production, and increasingly fast paced consumerism estranges us from both the earth and our needs.

Please join us for a virtual conversation between Alex Dolores Salerno and poet ofi davis, moderated by artist Francisco echo Eraso hosted by NYU’s Center for Disability Studies. This virtual event will take place on Friday, April 25th from 6:00pm to 7:15pm. CLICK HERE TO REGISTER.

About the Artist

Alex Dolores Salerno (b. 1994, homeland of the Nacotchtank, Anacostan and Piscataway people colonially known as Washington D.C.) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Lenapehoking, colonially known as Brooklyn, NY. Informed by queercrip experience, community, and culture, they work to critique standards of productivity, 24/7 society, notions of normative embodiment, and the commodification of rest. Salerno received their MFA from Parsons School of Design and their BS from Skidmore College. They have exhibited at the Museum für Moderne Kunst (Frankfurt), Espacio de Arte Contemporáneo de Castellón (Castellón), ARGOS centre for audiovisual arts (Brussels), Art Windsor-Essex (Windsor), The 8th Floor, the Ford Foundation Gallery (NYC), among others. They have been awarded a Wynn Newhouse Award (2022) and an Art Matters Foundation Artist2Artist Fellowship (2023). Recent publications include Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art and Art in America. Salerno has been an artist in residence at Art Beyond Sight’s Art & Disability Residency (2019-2020), the Artist Studios Program at the Museum of Arts and Design (2021), the Visual Artist AIRspace Residency at Abrons Arts Center (2022-2023), and they are currently in residence at BRIClab: Contemporary Art Residency Program at BRIC (2023-2024). Visit Salerno’s website HERE for more information.

About the Real Art Awards

The Real Art Awards is an annual opportunity for emerging artists living in New England, New Jersey, or New York. The open call, offered with no entry fees to artists, attracts hundreds of applicants each year, of which 6 artists are chosen. Selected artists receive a solo exhibition, with a commissioned essay, professional documentation, and a cash prize of $2,500. The 2023 Real Art Awards was juried by artist/educator Aki Sasamoto, artist/writer/curator Devin Kenny, and Real Art Ways Executive Director Will K. Wilkins. The 2023 Real Art Awards is supported in part by awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Edward C. & Ann T. Roberts Foundation.

CCH

Real Art Ways’ monthly social hour. Featuring a DJ, performances, art exhibitions, and more. Come as you are.

Everybody is welcoming, conversations abound, people connect.

Come with friends, come by yourself, hangout. Creative Cocktail Hour is a great way to meet new people!

8-10pm DJ: Kasey Cortez

Kasey Cortez is a multidisciplinary artist currently working to merge her many realms of creative expression. She has delved into worlds of music, theatre, photography, design, fashion, & installation art. Her work across mediums is inspired by a deep fascination with collective trends/culture, the minutiae of human choice & the mundane passing of time. She’s also a yoga teacher of nearly 10 years, & DJing has become her new favorite form of expression!

Art Exhibitions:

6-8pm Exhibition Opening: Greenness by Alex Dolores Salerno

No Bodies: Clothing as Disruptor, Curated by Alva Greenberg

Meaningful Adjacencies by RJ LaRussa

Food Truck:

Samba’s Cuisine: Brazilian and Spanish food truck!

Hands-on art making activities led by Real Art Ways staff

CCH

DJ, performances, art exhibitions, DJ. Come as you are.

Everybody is welcoming, conversations abound, people connect.

Come with friends, come by yourself, hangout. Creative Cocktail Hour is a great way to meet new people!

DJ:

Our house DJ Mr. Realistic!

Dance Composition Roulette with the Hartford Dance Collective.

Create & compose a dance with The Hartford Dance Collective. In this interactive experience, audience members have an opportunity to write down words or phrases on pieces of paper that will be dropped into a bucket. The facilitator of the group will pick out four phrases from the bucket for the performers to create with. Watch as the dance unfolds before your eyes as you help create the style, emotion, quality, setting, music of each dance piece.

Photo: Nicole Stevens

Art Exhibitions

Soft Opening: No Bodies: Clothing as Disruptor

Get a sneak peak into Real Art Ways’ next exhibition No Bodies: Clothing as Disruptor. Curated by Alva Greenberg.

Join us for the Opening Reception on Saturday, February 17 from 5-8pm. More information here.

Unknown, Unknowns by Steven DiGiovanni

Meaningful Adjacencies by RJ LaRussa

Food Truck

Nibbles n’ Noms: a Connecticut based taco truck!

Hands-on art making activities led by Real Art Ways staff

Riverwood Poetry Series

Join us for this in-person reading! An open mic will precede the featured reader—one poem, one page.

Since we are always trying to perfect our open mic, this month we will draw 10 names from all those who sign up by 7 PM.

The series is also updating their contact list!

If you would like to receive email notifications of upcoming events, please leave your name and preferred email address at the book sales table.

The authors’ books will be available to buy for book signing & conversation, and beer, wine, soft drinks, and snacks will be available for purchase. Bring a friend! Free of charge. Ample parking available at Real Art Ways.

March’s Readers:

Daniel Donaghy

Daniel Donaghy is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Somerset, which was named co-winner of the 2019 Paterson Poetry Prize. His previous poetry collections are Start With Trouble (University of Arkansas, 2009), winner of the University of Arkansas Poetry Prize and the Paterson Award for Literary Excellence and a Finalist for the Connecticut Book Award and the Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award, and Steetfighting (BkMk Press, 2005), a Paterson Poetry Prize Finalist.

He earned a BA in English from Kutztown University, an MA in English/Creative Writing from Hollins College (now University), an MDA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Cornell University, and a PhD in English from the University of Rochester. Donaghy was awarded the 2022 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize and a 2019 Artist Fellowship by the Connecticut Office of the Arts. He is a professor of English at Eastern Connecticut State University, where he edits Here: a poetry journal with his students, and serves as Poet Laureate of Windham, CT. He grew up in the Kensington section of Philedelpha, PA, which has inspired many of his poems.

Frederick-Douglass Knowles II

Frederick-Douglass Knowles II is a professor of English at Connecticut State Community College (Three Rivers Campus). He is a Hartford Poet Laureate Emeritus. Knowles has been the recipient of the Nutmeg Poetry Award and the Connecticut Office of the Arts Fellow in Artistic Excellence for Poetry/Creative Non-Fiction. He is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the author of BlackRoseCity.

About Riverwood Poetry Series

The Riverwood Poetry Series, Inc. is a non-profit arts organization committed to the promotion and appreciation of poetry in Connecticut. RPS, Inc. is invested in providing entertaining and thought-provoking programming, while responding to the needs of our neighbors through community outreach and collaboration. From their Facebook page: “The Riverwood Poetry Series has innovated many programs since our inception, all of them free to the public. We provide entertaining and thought-provoking poetry in a relaxed atmosphere.”

Improvisations Now

An experience of music imagined and created in real time. This series runs from September 2023-May 2024. Check out the full schedule here!

March’s Performance:

Sam Newsome – Soprano Saxophone

“Newsome expands the sound of a single soprano into a one-man band.” – All About Jazz

Sam Newsome is a saxophonist, music professor, and accomplished writer. Newsome’s avant-garde approach, particularly in the realm of prepared saxophone, has positioned him as a sought-after player in New York’s improvised music scene. His innovative voice has resonated in collaborations with notable artists such as Elliot Sharpe, William Parker, Fay Victor, Daniel Carter, Joe Morris, and Dave Liebman. For more information, please visit his website.

Nick Neuburg – Percussion

Nick Neuburg is is a drummer/percussionist, pianist and composer originally from the greater Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. Nick attended the New England Conservatory of Music, where he studied with the legendary drummers Rakalam Bob Moses and Billy Hart and studied composition and improvisation with pianist Anthony Coleman and Guitarist Joe Morris. Upon graduating in the spring of 2014, Nick remained in the greater Boston area until the summer of 2018, during which time he both remained active in the creative music scene as a performer and became busy working and teaching. Now living in NYC, Nick has performed as a part of the bands Aykroyd, Letter Castle, Particulars, Ryan Power, Los Greys, Every Kim Parcell, Listening Woman and Creative Healing, among others.

Taylor Ho Bynum – Cornet, Brass

Taylor Ho Bynum is a musician, teacher, and writer, with a background including work in composition, performance, interdisciplinary collaboration, production, organizing, and advocacy. Bynum plays with friends in collective ensembles like his duo with Tomas Fujiwara, Illegal Crowns (with Fujiwara, Benoit Delbecq, and Mary Halvorson), and Geometry (with Kyoko Kitamura, Tomeka Reid, and Joe Morris), and as a sideperson in Tomas Fujiwara’s Triple Double and Shizuko, Jim Hobbs & the Fully Celebrated Orchestra, and Bill Lowe’s Signifyin’ Natives.

Bynum has worked for two decades with Anthony Braxton. This partnership is recognized as one of the most generative partnerships of that legendary composer’s career, with projects ranging from duos to orchestras and everything in between. During Bynum’s stewardship of the Tri-Centric Foundation (which he served as executive director from 2010-2018), he produced many major Braxton projects, including two massive Trillium operas, two immersive Sonic Genome performances, and multiple festivals, box sets and albums. Bynum also worked closely with such departed masters as Bill Dixon and Cecil Taylor, with other collaborative credits including The Aardvark Jazz Orchestra, Nels Cline, Emily Coates, Bill Cole, Kris Davis, Ensemble Musikfabrik, Stephen Haynes, John Hebert, Fred Ho, Jason Kao Hwang, Titus Kaphar, Ingrid Laubrock, Living by Lanterns, Nicole Mitchell, Joe Morris, Kwaku Kwaakye Obeng, Mali Obomsawin, William Parker, Matana Roberts, Eliott Sharp, Wadada Leo Smith, Tyshawn Sorey, Yo La Tengo, and Zemog El Gallo Bueno. For more information, please visit his website here.

Joe Morris – Bass

“The preeminent free music guitarist of his generation.” – Downbeat Magazine

“One of the most profound improvisers at work in the U.S.” – WIRE Magazine

“The guitar revolutionary to pay attention to.” – The Boston Phoenix

To learn more about Joe Morris:

Facebook

Website

Riverwood Poetry Series

Join us for this in-person reading of 6 Poets Laureate! An open mic will precede the featured reader—one poem, one page.

Since we are always trying to perfect our open mic, this month we will draw 10 names from all those who sign up by 7 PM.

The series is also updating their contact list!

If you would like to receive email notifications of upcoming events, please leave your name and preferred email address at the book sales table.

The authors’ books will be available to buy for book signing & conversation, and beer, wine, soft drinks, and snacks will be available for purchase. Bring a friend! Free of charge. Ample parking available at Real Art Ways.

This month’s readers include:

Andrea Barton, Tony Fusco, Ben Grossberg, Anthony Paticchio, Virginia Shreve, and Faith Vicinanza.

Click here to view the reader’s bios!

About Riverwood Poetry Series

Meaningful Adjacencies
RJ LaRussa

Real Art Ways presents a solo exhibition by NYC based video artist RJ LaRussa.

Through video, sculpture, and digital collage “Meaningful Adjacencies” examines the psychological trauma of the CIA’s torture techniques, and the destruction of the evidence by government personnel.

“Meaningful Adjacencies” draws focus to the portion of post 9/11 abuses perpetrated by the United States. This exhibit focuses on the CIA Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation (RDI) program as it exists within both extremes: it is simultaneously the most brutal, repressive, institutionally sanctioned program to come after 9/11, as well as the most obfuscated, laundered, and pardoned practice at the highest levels.

The “information” obtained under torture in CIA Black Sites around the world continues today to serve as justification for the United States’ war on terror, just as the RDI program itself may still exist in one form or another, despite being officially ended. “Meaningful Adjacencies” memorializes those who were detained and brutalized. In doing so, we are forced to reexamine our relationship to global violence, and narratives of US innocence that are used to gain cultural consent for the continuation of these wars.

SIGHTGREEN: 2021, Digital macro video, Induced VHS Generation Loss, Audio collage.

About the Artist

RJ LaRussa is a Director of Photography and working locally in New York City. Their work has been screened at SXSW, Chicago Critics Fest, Frightfest, L’Étrange Festival, and the Denver Film Festival among others, and has been covered by the Zeiss Lenspire blog, Aislin Magazine, and the Greater Hartford Arts Council. Their most recent short film work THE MUNDANES, by Magic Society Pictures, premiered at SXSW 2023. RJ is a graduate of the 2023 Respectability Entertainment Lab.

LaRussa specializes in story-focused projects across both feature and short narrative, music video, and documentary work. He strives to bring naturalism and experimental techniques together to create visuals that serve the story of each individual project.

RJ’s sensitive approach to their subjects is informed by their experiences as a neurodivergent artist. The relationship between people and the world around them is integral to their work as a storyteller. For more information, click here.

Tomeka Reid Quartet // Tomas Fujiwara’s 7 Poets Trio

On Sunday, February 25 at 3pm, Real Art Ways presents a performance from Tomeka Reid Quartet and Tomas Fujiwara’s 7 Poets Trio. Tickets are $15 general admission, $12 for RAW members, $5 for students.

Tomeka Reid Quartet

Tomeka Reid is one of the most original, versatile, and curious musicians to emerge from Chicago’s bustling jazz and improvised music community over the last decade. As a cellist, composer, and bandleader, Reid melds the Western classical tradition with modes rooted in the African diaspora and avant-garde to produce a rich and textured palette of sounds. She participates in several musical groups as a member or bandleader and composes and arranges works for small and large ensembles with varied instrument combinations.

Reid released her debut recording as a bandleader, Tomeka Reid Quartet, in 2015 with the Tomeka Reid Quartet, featuring herself (cello), Jason Roebke (bass), Mary Halvorson (guitar), and Tomas Fujiwara (drums). The album provided a vibrant showcase for the cellist’s improvisational acumen, as well as for her dynamic arrangements and compositional ability. The quartet’s second album, Old New (2019) has been described as “fresh and transformative…striking out in bold, lyrical directions, with plenty of Reid’s singularly elegant yet energetic and sharp-edged bow work.” A new record is anticipated in spring 2024.

Tomas Fujiwara’s 7 Poets Trio

Tomas Fujiwara assembled his 7 Poets Trio with Patricia Brennan and Tomeka Reid for the first time during his residency at The Stone in April 2018, after having previously played with Patricia in Michael Formanek’s Ensemble Kolossus, and with Tomeka in her Quartet. As has been the case with his past ensembles (Tomas Fujiwara & The Hook Up, The Tomas Fujiwara Trio, Triple Double, and the Tomas Fujiwara Percussion Quartet), Fujiwara brought together two musicians who had never played together before, creating a brand new combination of musical personalities. The rapport was instantaneous and their debut was described by All About Jazz as “a meshing of chamber jazz, modern classical composition and improvisation, although most of Fujiwara’s music sounded well organized in advance. All three players rose to an individual expression, working as a composite unit to deliver solo embellishments. Roles were malleable, as the listener decided whether everyone was soloing, or no-one. All three members were devoted to establishing a sensitive group consciousness, and they succeeded eminently.” Their eponymous debut came out in 2019 on Rogue Art, with a follow up album, Pith, released in September 2023 on Out of Your Head Records.

Saturday Soup with Simon Benjamin

Please join us on Saturday, January 13th at 3pm for Saturday Soup; a discussion with Simon Benjamin and writer Gervais Marsh about Benjamin’s current exhibition sub–marine: Jeweler of Memory.

Real Art Ways presents an artist talk with Jamaican artist Simon Benjamin on Saturday, January 13 at 3PM. The exhibition is on view through Sunday, January 14 2024. Gallery hours are everyday from 2-9pm. Admission is free. Real Art Ways is located at 56 Arbor Street, Hartford.

Join Simon Benjamin and writer, curator, and scholar Gervais Marsh for Saturday Soup, an informal conversation on the occasion of Benjamin’s solo exhibition at Real Art Ways—and the culminating event of his 2022 Real Art Award Exhibition. In the spirit of his Jamaican roots, cups of soup will be served. Catered by Fire & Spice in Hartford.

For more information on Simon and his exhibition at Real Art Ways, click here.

About Gervais Marsh

Gervais Marsh is a writer, curator and scholar whose work is deeply invested in Black life, concepts of relationality and care. They received a PhD in Performance Studies from Northwestern University and are currently a Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow with the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.

Their writing has been published in several books and exhibition catalogs including Denzil Hurley (monograph), Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Forgotten Lands Vol. 5, KMAC Museum Triennial (2022), as well as online art publications such as Hyperallergic, C Magazine, Brooklyn Rail, ARTS.BLACK, Musée Magazine, and PREE: Caribbean Writing, among others.

CCH

Live music, art exhibitions, DJ. Come as you are.

Everybody is welcoming, conversations abound, people connect.

Come with friends, come by yourself, hangout. Creative Cocktail Hour is a great way to meet new people!

Music/DJ:

DJ Kasey Cortez

Tarot and Palm Readings from Adam Latin!

Limited Space available from 7-9pm.

Adam Latin is a tarot and palm reader who has been working professionally since 2001. He has read for tens of thousands of people since he started reading. He offers support in areas around personal empowerment, relationships, career, family communication, love, and trauma. He wants a deeper sense of victory and passion for his clients.

Art Exhibitions

Exhibition opening from RJ LaRussa.

Langit Lupa (Heaven and Earth) by Bhen Alan

Unknown, Unknowns by Steven DiGiovanni

Tubular Times curated by Terri C. Smith

Food Truck

Muncher’s International, authentic Jamaican cuisine.

Hands-on art activities led by Real Art Ways Staff

No Bodies:
Clothing as Disruptor
Curated by Alva Greenberg

Real Art Ways presents a collection of work from 26 artists curated by Alva Greenberg

Clothing conveys impressions of social background, economic status and ethnicity. Like physical features, it is one of the most common means used to project ourselves and understand others. This inclination to categorize others is also a way of controlling our responses to them. How often do we subconsciously imbue clothing with a significance which is misleading?

The altered and uninhabited clothing in No Bodies disrupts these autonomic responses by playing with perceptions of materiality, cultural identity, relationships, political beliefs and portraiture itself. Being free of physicality, the works in No Bodies force us to confront assumptions, as well as the ever-growing societal compartmentalization of people and behavior and the #socialmedia which increasingly rules our thinking.

What does it mean when we deconstruct a garment by unraveling it or burning it or turning it into another material? What does clothing symbolize when there never was or will be a body inside?

Featured artwork by

Reginald Dwayne Betts, John Boone, Marsha Borden, Rachel Breen, Chris Burden, Patrick Carroll, Susan Clinard, Hannah Conradt, E.V. Day, Lesley Dill, Anindita Dutta, Nina Dwin, Carlos Estévez, Kathryn Frund, Jonathan Herrera Soto, Jesse Krimes, Whitfield Lovell, Adriana Marmorek, Carol Paik, Sidney Russell, Karen Shaw, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Micki Watanabe Spiller, Cindy Tower, Cleo Wilkinson, and Cybèle Young.

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About the Curator

Alva Greenberg is a curator and artist based in Connecticut. She started her career as the co-owner and editor of The Gazette, a weekly newspaper in Old Lyme, CT. From 1997-2009, she ran ALVA Gallery, a contemporary art gallery in New London, CT dedicated to promoting mid-career artists working in all disciplines. In 2006, Alva Greenberg was a recipient of the Eugene O’Neill Center’s “25 of Connecticut’s most Uncommon Women” award and in 2018 she received the State of Connecticut Governor’s Patron of the Arts award. Ms. Greenberg currently serves on several boards including the French American Museum Exchange (FRAME), Romare Bearden Foundation and the Connecticut Arts Foundation. Past boards include the Florence Griswold Museum and Arttable.

Jonathan Herrera Soto, Te Encontrare Donde Crecen Rios Bajos, 2020

On March 29th, we hosted No Bodies: Artists in Conversation; a discussion with contributing artists and designers about the work and concepts explored in this exhibit. CLICK HERE to watch.

CLICK HERE to listen in on a lively conversation with artists Carlos Estevez, Lesley Dill, Micki Watanabe Spiller and curator Alva Greenberg about this expansive group exhibit focusing on the ideas around garments and embodiment.

CLICK HERE to watch Anindita Dutta’s performance of प्रदक्षिणा | Pradakshina | Circumambulation. T his performance is in relation to our No Bodies: Clothing as Disruptor exhibit and took place during April’s Creative Cocktail Hour.

WFSB Channel 3 News Coverage clip 1

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With funding from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts