Jeb Bishop-trombone 
Nate McBride-bass 
Kelly Bray-trumpet 
Joe Morris-drums 
Ingrid Laubrock is an experimental saxophonist and composer interested in exploring the borders between musical realms and creating multi-layered, dense, and often evocative sound worlds. A prolific composer, Laubrock was named a “true visionary” by pianist and The Kennedy Center’s artistic director Jason Moran and a “fully committed saxophonist and visionary” by the New Yorker and the New York Times nominated her composition Vogelfrei as ‘one of the best 25 Classical tracks of 2018’. She worked with Anthony Braxton, Muhal Richards Abrams, Dave Douglas, Kenny Wheeler, Jason Moran, Tim Berne, William Parker, Tom Rainey, Mary Halvorson, Kris Davis, Tyshawn Sorey, Craig Taborn, Andy Milne, Luc Ex, Django Bates’ Human Chain, The Continuum Ensemble, Wet Ink and many others. Awards included the BBC Jazz Award for Innovation in 2004, a Fellowship in Jazz Composition by the Arts Foundation in 2006, the 2009 SWR German Radio Jazz Prize, the 2014 German Record Critics Quarterly Award, Downbeat Annual Critics Poll Rising Star Soprano Saxophone (2015), Rising Star-Tenor Saxophone (2018) and Herb Alpert/Ragdale Prize in Composition 2019. Ingrid Laubrock has received composition commissions from The Fromm Music Foundation, BBC Glasgow Symphony Orchestra, Bang on The Can, Grossman Ensemble, The Shifting Foundation, The Robert D. Bielecki Foundation, The Jerwood Foundation, American Composers Orchestra, Tricentric Foundation, SWR New Jazz Meeting, The Jazz Gallery Commissioning Series, NYSCA, Wet Ink, John Zorn’s Stone Commissioning Series, and the EOS Orchestra. She is a recipient of the 2019 Herb Alpert Ragdale Prize in Music Composition and the 2021 Berklee Institute of Gender Justice Women Composers Collection Grant. Ingrid Laubrock is a part-time faculty member at The New School and Columbia University. Other teaching experiences include improvisation workshops at Towson University, CalArts, UC San Diego, UC Irvine, Baruch College, University of Michigan, University of Newcastle, and many others. Laubrock was Improviser in Residence 2012 in the German city of Moers. The post is created to introduce creative music into the city throughout the year. As part of this, she led a regular improvisation ensemble and taught sound workshops in elementary schools.
Hidemi Akaiwa is a Japanese pianist and composer. At 30, she shifted from a successful corporate career to focusing on jazz music. She received a full scholarship to Berklee, where she participates in the college’s Global Jazz Institute, Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice, Planet MicroJam Institute, and Interdisciplinary Arts Institute. These experiences have allowed her to study with world-class musicians, including Danilo Pérez, Kenny Werner, Terri Lyne Carrington, Kris Davis, Billy Childs, David Fiuczynski, and many others. Her passion is to create a new art form infusing the tenets of Japanese Zen with the sounds of jazz and microtonal contemporary classical music. 
Joe Morris is a composer/improviser multi-instrumentalist who plays guitar, double bass, mandolin, banjo, banjouke electric bass and drums. He is also a recording artist, educator, record producer, concert producer/curator and author. His is considered to be one of the most original and important improvising musicians of our time. Down Beat magazine called him “the preeminent free music guitarist of his generation.” Will Montgomery, writing in The Wire magazine called him “one of the most profound improvisers at work in the U.S.” He has performed or recorded with Anthony Braxton, John Zorn, Evan Parker, Matthew Shipp, William Parker, Wadada Leo Smith, David S. Ware, Sunny Murray, Marshall Allen, Dewey Redman, Lawrence “Butch” Morris, Andrew CyrilleJoe Maneri, Barry Guy, Tyshawn Sorey, Ken Vandermark, Mary Halvorson, Han Bennink, Barre Phillips, Tomeka Reid, Paul Rutherford, Agustí Fernández, Nate Wooley, Peter Evans, Gerald Cleaver, Rob Brown, John Butcher, Eugene Chadbourne, DKV Trio, Aaly Trio, Daniel Carter, Rashid Bakr, Wilbur Morris,, Kidd Jordan, Alvin Fielder, Ikue Mori, Zeena Parkins, Tim Berne, Fred Anderson, Ivo Perelman, Andrea Parkins, Hamid Drake, Thurman Barker, Fred Hopkins, Bern Nix, Joe McPhee, Billy Bang, Lowell Davidson, Peter Kowald, Simon Fell, Roy Campbell Jr., Raphé Malik, Whit Dickey, Sabir Mateen, Mark Dresser, Gerry Hemingway, Warren Smith, Karen Borca, Malcolm Goldstein, Paul Lytton, Tim Berne, Suzie Ibarra, Mat Maneri, Sylvia Courvosier, Thurston Moore, Alex Ward, Jamie Saft and many others. He has also performed as a member of William Parker’s Organic Ensemble, Pipeline 2000, Jim Hobbs Ghost Band, Alan Silva’s Celestial Communications Orchestra, Simon Fell Orchestra, Agustí Fernández Celebration Ensemble, and in a large ensemble led by Leroy Jenkins. He currently leads various groups including Abstract Forest, a 20+ piece improvising ensemble, Go Go Mambo, Joe Morris Quartet, Mess Hall, Shock Axis, Plymouth, as well as performing solo, in duos and as a freelance guitarist and double bassist. In 2019 he began his INSTANTIATION music, recording and performing the first four parts of the multi-part work that uses the properties of free music in new ways with various ensembles. He is featured as leader, co-leader and sideman on 150 recordings to date. Many of his recordings as a leader have been named among Writer’s Choice (best of the year) in the Village Voice, Chicago Tribune, Wire, Coda, and Jazziz, and on Free Jazz.org and All About Jazz.com.. He has recorded for the labels AUM Fidelity, SoulNote, Thirsty Ear, Ayler, Knitting Factory, Okka Disc, OmniTone, Avant, Incus, Hat Hut, ECM, Leo, Homestead, NoMore, About Time, Clean Feed, Skycap, Rogue Art, Rare Noise, ESPdisk, Bug Incision, Relative Pitch, and Cuneiform. In 2014 he founded Glacial Erratic records. In 2019 he was nominated for a St Botolph Distinguished Artist Award. He received the 2017 Killam Visiting Scholar Award from the University of Calgary Alberta Canada. He was the recipient of a Meet the Composer grant in 2004. He was nominated for a 2001 Calarts Alpert Award. He was nominated as New York Jazz Awards Guitarist of the Year in 1998 and 2002. In 2012 he published the book Perpetual Frontier: The Properties of Free Music (Riti, 2012). His article Encryption was included in Arcane vol 7 (Tzadik 2014). His article Perpetual Frontier appears on www.pointofdeparture.org (Pod39) May 2012. He has written numerous liner note articles on his music and for other artists for recordings on the labels Sony, Hat Hut, Aum Fidelity, RogueArt and others. His monthly column Intentional Evolution begins publication in the German magazine Jazz Podium in January 2020. He has presented workshops and master classes in a wide variety of settings throughout North America and Europe, including at Harvard University, Princeton University, Dartmouth College, University of the Arts, Berklee College of Music, University of Calgary, University of Guelph, University of Alberta, and Mannes School of Music. He has taught improvisation and/or guitar on the faculty at Tufts University Experimental College, Southern Connecticut State University and the Longy School of Music at Bard College. He is a lesson faculty member at New School Jazz and Contemporary Music. He has been on the faculty in the Jazz and Contemporary Improvisation Department at New England Conservatory of Music since 2000. He began his work as an organizer and performance producer/curator in 1976 in Boston and continued there and in New York until 2001 when he left Boston for New Haven CT. Upon moving to Connecticut in 2001 he created the Just Play series in New Haven (2003/2004), curated the premier season at Firehouse 12 (2005), was artistic director for Hartford Jazz Society Jazz in the Park series (2008), co-founded and curated the Improvisations series at Real Art Ways in Hartford (2011–2016), and founded and co-curated the Multiplex series at State House in New Haven (2019). He was in residence at The Stone NYC for two weeks in January 2013, and for one week in June 2014, August 2016, June 2017 and May 2018. In September 2015 through June 2016, he produced the series Arcade which presented him in performance with new emerging musicians with ten performances presented in New Haven, Hartford, Cambridge, Mass., and Brooklyn, N.Y. His one-day festival Spectacle was presented at Real Art Ways in Hartford CT annually from 2013-2018. It featured emerging musicians performing in ad-hoc groupings with well-known professionals. 
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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, 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
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: 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, 6 PM.
Exhibition Documentation (PDF)
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.
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. 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. VIEW ADDITIONAL SELECT PAST EXHIBITIONS
“An outstanding modern violist.” – The StradMelanie 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.
“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 PhoenixJoe 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
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
“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 PhoenixJoe 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
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. 
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. Exhibition Documentation (PDF)
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 gullibility, 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 an affirmation of their 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.
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.
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. 
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No Bodies: Clothing as Disruptor, Curated by Alva Greenberg Meaningful Adjacencies by RJ LaRussa 
Photo: Nicole Stevens 
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.” “Newsome expands the sound of a single soprano into a one-man band.” – All About JazzSam 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.
“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 PhoenixJoe 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
SIGHTGREEN: 2021, Digital macro video, Induced VHS Generation Loss, Audio collage. 