Curated by Sam Goldenberg
Americana Vibes highlights musicians who have shaped our cultural and musical identity between the years 1910 – 2000. The exhibition features the work of 54 musicians juxtaposed through video footage, curated playlists and framed album art. Americana Vibes provides an aerial view of the musical history of the 20th Century.
Featured musicians include Leadbelly, Billie Holiday, The Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, Prince, Bruce Springsteen, Sugarhill Gang, and Nirvana.
Image: A collage of 4 album covers. From L to R: The Beach Boys Good Vibrations, Billie Holiday This Years Kisses, Prince When Doves Cry, and Bruce Springsteen Born to Run.
FREE ADMISSION
All are invited to attend an artist conversation and reception with Julian Johnson. Julian will be in conversation with Visual Arts Manager Neil Daigle Orians, about his work and process involved in his exhibition, Skinny Boy Lookin’ Like Deer In Headlights. Julian is one of six 2019 Real Art Awards recipients, which supports emerging artists as they develop their work. His work was chosen from nearly 500 applicants. The reception will begin at 2 PM and the conversation begins at 2:30 PM.
About Julian’s Work:
Exploring his experiences with mental health, Marfan Syndrome, and religion, Julian Johnson’s photographic works offer the viewer an immersive narrative of healing. Ranging in subject matter and process, Johnson’s installation of images create a personal narrative that incorporates elements of still life, portraiture, landscape, and candid street photography that allows for wide interpretation.
About the Artist:
Born and raised in Austin, TX, Julian received his B.A. in Studio Art from Wesleyan University. He now lives and works in NYC. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including the CICA Museum in Gimpo, South Korea and the Zilkha Gallery at Wesleyan University.
Click here to learn more about the artist.
Click here to learn more about the Real Art Awards.
Riverwood Poetry is a FREE series that takes place on the second Tuesday of the month September 2019 – May 2020. Each night begins with an open mic, followed by a poetry reading featuring regionally-or nationally-known poets.
February Poet | Antoinette Brim
A Celebration of Women Come and hear Antoinette Brim share readings that celebrate women and are a reflection of the centennial of women’s right to vote.
Antoinette Brim, author of These Women You Gave Me, Icarus in Love and Psalm of the Sunflower, is a Cave Canem Foundation fellow, a recipient of the Walker Foundation Scholarship to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and a Pushcart Prize nominee. Her poetry, memoir, and critical work has appeared in various journals and magazines, as well as, in anthologies including Villanelles, Stand Our Ground: Poems for Trayvon Martin and Marissa Alexander, Critical Insights: Alice Walker, 44 on 44: Forty-Four African American Writers on the 44th President of the United States, Not A Muse, Just Like A Girl: A Manifesta, and The Whiskey of Our Discontent: an anthology of essays commemorating Ms. Gwendolyn Brooks.
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. Learn more at their website.
Curated by David Borawski, Real Art Ways presents mixed media work by Geoffrey Detrani.
Real Art Ways presents a solo exhibition of works by New Haven-based artist Geoffrey Detrani. Utilizing mixed media on paper, Detrani’s paintings and drawings create abstract semblances of chaotic landscapes. The resulting compositions offer emotive textures of conflict between organic and inorganic bodies.
From his artist statement,
“The imagery that I use explores a hypothetical intersection between the natural world and the built environment. I am interested in a representation of the natural world that is spun from a conflation of imagination and ideology – a symbolic rendering – rather than one that mimics our visual/optical experience of it.”
About the Artist:
Geoffrey Detrani is a visual artist and writer whose work has been exhibited in New York, San Francisco, Los Angles, Boston and South Korea and other locales. His artists’ books are in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His paintings are in the collections of the New Britain Museum of American Art, the Schenectady Museum, the Transportation Security Administration and various private collections. He works in New Haven, CT.
Click here to learn more about the artist.
Image: Cleaving Day, pencil and acrylic on paper, 2019, 48×60″
Riverwood Poetry is a FREE series that takes place on the second Tuesday of the month September 2019 – May 2020. Each night begins with an open mic, followed by a poetry reading featuring regionally-or nationally-known poets.
December Poets | John Jeffrey & Tom Nicotera
Two Poets, Two Paths to Inspiration. Come and hear how Observation and Imagination have equally inspired poetry. Tom Nicotera and John Jeffrey will read their works for Love and Life and Everything Else.
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. Learn more at their website.
Curated by David Borawski, Real Art Ways presents paintings and sculptures by Morgan Bulkeley.
From the Artist’s Statement:
“I try to make paintings that are beautiful, frightening and funny all at once, similar to The Theater of the Absurd, which assumes things are so bad that you can only laugh. I see in nature and in the best of humanity an incredible beauty; but I also see in our technology and aggression a will and ability to destroy that beauty, either actively or inadvertently. The refuse of our consumerism, wafting down our streets, caught in the twigs of trees in our deepest forests or swirling in giant gyres in the ocean, is a steady reminder of our growing and smothering effect on our only habitable planet. I paint to try to make people think of the fragility in which we exist.”
About the Artist:
Morgan Bulkeley was born in the Berkshires of Massachusetts in 1944. He was raised on a small farm in the town of Mount Washington, where his parents, both naturalists, raised many wild, orphaned animals. He graduated from Yale University in 1966 with a B.A. in English Literature. After a stint in the Coast Guard, he spent a year in Newark New Jersey, drawing and working with VISTA Programs. Subsequently he spent 14 years in Cambridge Massachusetts painting and sculpting. In 1985 he returned to his childhood home where he lives with his environmentalist wife Eleanor Tillinghast.
Click here to learn more about the artist.
Featured image: Peter, Four Morgans, oil on canvas, 2019
Real Art Ways presents a new installation by 2019 Real Art Awards recipient Julian Johnson.
Artist talk: Sunday, March 8 • 2:00 PM
Exploring his experiences with mental health, Marfan Syndrome, and religion, Julian Johnson’s photographic works offer the viewer an immersive narrative of healing. Ranging in subject matter and process, Johnson’s installation of images create a personal narrative that incorporates elements of still life, portraiture, landscape, and candid street photography that allows for wide interpretation.
About the Artist:
Born and raised in Austin, TX, Julian received his B.A. in Studio Art from Wesleyan University. He now lives and works in NYC. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including the CICA Museum in Gimpo, South Korea and the Zilkha Gallery at Wesleyan University.
Click here to learn more about the artist.
Click here to learn more about the Real Art Awards.
The 2019 Real Art Awards is supported in part by the National Endowment of the Arts.
Image: Infrared Sauna, digital photograph, 2019.
Riverwood Poetry is a FREE series that takes place on the second Tuesday of the month September 2019 – May 2020. Each night begins with an open mic, followed by a poetry reading featuring regionally-or nationally-known poets.
December Poet | Lisa Starr
Lisa Starr is the author of three collections of poetry, including Mad With Yellow, her most recent. She also co-edited the anthology Where Beach Meets Ocean, celebrating the Block Island Poetry Project, the writing series she founded and
directed for 13 years at The Hygeia House, the inn she owned and operated. Starr was Rhode Island’s Poet Laureate from 2007-2013.
After living on Block Island for 30 years, where she ran an inn (The Hygeia House) and raised her children, Starr has recently and happily relocated to Westerly, RI, where she is nearing completion of Pot Luck, a collection of poems about children, and collaborating with her long-time companion, the poet and Rumi translator Coleman Barks, on a memoir about grief, time and friendship. And Mary Oliver. The newly appointed Artistic Director for the Arts Café Mystic, Starr moonlights serving tacos and sangria at a very cool local cantina. She also runs a monthly poetry salon at The Savoy Bookstore and Café in Westerly.
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. Learn more at their website.
Free screening and post-film conversation led by Shanique Reid, Youth and Development Specialist of Planned Parenthood of Southern New England.
Real Art Ways is proud to partner with Visual AIDS for the thirtieth annual Day With(out) Art by presenting STILL BEGINNING, a program of seven newly commissioned videos responding to the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic by Shanti Avirgan, Nguyen Tan Hoang, Carl George, Viva Ruiz, Iman Shervington, Jack Waters/Victor F.M. Torres, and Derrick Woods-Morrow.
Nguyen Tan Hoang, “I Remember Dancing”, 2019. Commissioned for Visual AIDS’ Day With(out) Art 2019. Still courtesy of the artist
The seven short videos range in subject from anti-stigma work in New Orleans to public sex culture in Chicago, highlighting pioneering AIDS activism and staging intergenerational conversations. Recalling Gregg Bordowitz’s reminder that “THE AIDS CRISIS IS STILL BEGINNING,”* the video program resists narratives of resolution or conclusion, considering the continued urgency of HIV/AIDS in the contemporary moment while revisiting resonant cultural histories from the past three decades.
Visual AIDS is a New York-based non-profit that utilizes art to fight AIDS by provoking dialogue, supporting HIV+ artists, and preserving a legacy, because AIDS is not over. In 1989, Visual AIDS organized the first Day Without Art, a call to the art world for mourning and action in response to the AIDS crisis. For Day With(out) Art’s thirtieth year, over 100 institutions worldwide will screen STILL BEGINNING, recognizing the important and necessary work of artists, activists, and cultural workers who have responded to AIDS while emphasizing the persistent presence of the epidemic.
*Gregg Bordowitz, The AIDS Crisis is Still Beginning (2019) was recently on view at the Art Institute of Chicago. Hear Bordowitz discuss the work here.
Shanti Avirgan, “Beat Goes On,” 2019. Commissioned for Visual AIDS’ Day With(out) Art 2019. Still courtesy of the artist
FREE ADMISSION
All are invited to attend an artist conversation and reception. Reception will begin at 2:30 PM with light refreshments and mingling before the conversation begins at 3 PM.
Real Art Ways presents Somewhere in the Sequence, a group exhibition curated by David Borawski. Funded in part by a grant from the Artist’s Resource Trust (A.R.T.) Fund, a fund of Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation, Somewhere in the Sequence brings together artists from across New England to explore personal, political and artistic stances, resistance to the status quo, meaning and aesthetics, and strategies for artistic and social communication.
Incorporating sculpture, video, installation, painting, and photography, Somewhere in the Sequence explores a wide breadth of material and conceptual approaches.
Exhibiting artists include Fafnir Adamites, Monique Atherton, Katie Bullock, Alyssa Freitas, Debbie Hesse, Matt Neckers, and Soo Sunny Park.
Image: Plato’s Dichotomy, 2018, Soo Sunny Park
FREE ADMISSION
All are invited to attend an artist conversation and reception with Jeanne Jalandoni, one of six 2019 Real Art Awards recipients. Reception will begin at 2:30 PM with light refreshments and mingling before the conversation begins at 3 PM. Joining her in conversation is Dr Jason Chang, Director of the Asian and Asian American Studies Institute at the University of Connecticut.
Click here to learn more about Sowing Mythology.
From Jalandoni’s Artist Statement
Combining media and materials parallels bicultural identity; a mixture of experiences that were essential to my upbringing and cultural inheritance. I am expected to sustain them, but am subject to disassociate because I am “American” before I am “Filipino.” This tension between “real” and “imagined” elements in my paintings invites viewers to question bicultural tangibility, while allowing me to explore and take authorship of my identity.
About the Artist
Jeanne F. Jalandoni (b. New York, NY) lives and works in Uptown Manhattan. She works primarily with oil paint and textile. Jalandoni received her BFA from New York University with a concentration in painting. In 2018, she was an artist-in-residence at 36 Chase & Barns Residency (North Adams, MA; affiliated with Erica Broussard Gallery, Santa Ana, CA). Her studio is located at Cornerstone Studios in Washington Heights, NY.
Click here to learn more about her work.
Click here to learn more about the Real Art Awards.
The 2019 Real Art Awards is supported in part by the National Endowment of the Arts.
Image: Mourning Dove, 2019, Jeanne Jalandoni
Artist Talk: Saturday, November 23 | 2:30 PM
Real Art Ways presents Somewhere in the Sequence, a group exhibition curated by David Borawski. Funded in part by a grant from Artist’s Resource Trust (A.R.T.) Fund, a fund of Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation, Somewhere in the Sequence brings together artists from across New England to explore personal, political and artistic stances, resistance to the status quo, meaning and aesthetics, and strategies for artistic and social communication.
Incorporating sculpture, video, installation, painting, and photography, Somewhere in the Sequence explores a wide breadth of material and conceptual approaches.
Exhibiting artists include Fafnir Adamites, Monique Atherton, Katie Bullock, Alyssa Freitas, Debbie Hesse, Matt Neckers, and Soo Sunny Park.
Riverwood Poetry is a FREE series that takes place on the second Tuesday of the month September 2019 – May 2020. Each night begins with an open mic, followed by a poetry reading featuring regionally-or nationally-known poets.
November Poet | Patrick Donnelly
Patrick Donnelly is the author of four books of poetry, Little-Known Operas (Four Way Books, 2019), Jesus Said (a chapbook from Orison Books, 2017), Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin (Four Way Books, 2012, a Lambda Literary Award finalist), and The Charge (Ausable Press, 2003, since 2009 part of Copper Canyon Press).
Donnelly is director of the Poetry Seminar at The Frost Place, Robert Frost’s old homestead in Franconia, NH, now a center for poetry and the arts. With his spouse Stephen D. Miller, Donnelly translates classical Japanese poetry and drama. Donnelly’s awards include the 2015-2016 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature, a U.S./Japan Creative Artists Program Award, and a 2018 Amy Clampitt Residency Award. Donnelly was 2015 – 2017 poet laureate of Northampton, Massachusetts.
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. Learn more at their website.
Riverwood Poetry is a FREE series that takes place on the second Tuesday of the month September 2019 – May 2020. Each night begins with an open mic, followed by a poetry reading featuring regionally-or nationally-known poets.
October Poet | Michael R. Brown
Michael R. Brown attended the University of Michigan where he earned a Ph.D. in English and Education. He has published five books of poetry: Falling Wallendas, Tia Chucha (1994); The Man Who Makes Amusement Rides, Hanover Press (2003); Susquehanna, Ragged Sky (2003); The Confidence Man, Ragged Sky (2007), and The Martin Bormann Dog Care Book (Resolute Bear Press, 2018.)
Michael joined the slam poetry movement in Chicago and spread the phenomenon throughout New England. He and Patricia Smith established The Cantab (1992) in Cambridge, MA, carried the slam to Sweden, and led a U.S. national championship team in 1993. He and Erkki Lappalainen organized the first Poetry Olympics in Stockholm in 1998. He also created Dr. Brown’s Traveling Poetry Show, a two-hour theater production. From 2008 until 2016, he and his wife Valerie Lawson put out Off the Coast, an international poetry quarterly. They now run a book publishing press.
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. Learn more at their website.
Riverwood Poetry is a FREE series that takes place on the second Tuesday of the month September 2019 – May 2020. Each night begins with an open mic, followed by a poetry reading featuring regionally-or nationally-known poets.
September Poet | Margaret Gibson
Margaret will read poetry from published books that contemplate our relationship with Nature in a time of climate crisis and environmental grief. The poems make a connection between our most intimate personal relationships and the Living World.
Margaret Gibson, current Connecticut Poet Laureate, is the author of 12 books of poems, all from LSU Press, most recently Not Hearing the Wood Thrush, 2018. A poem from that collection, Passage was included in The Best American Poetry, 2017. The title poem from her previous collection, Broken Cup, 2014, won a Pushcart Prize for 2016. Broken Cup was a Finalist for the 2016 Poet’s Prize. Awards include the Lamont Selection for Long Walks in the Afternoon (1982), the Melville Kane Award (co-winner) for Memories of the Future (1986), and the Connecticut Book Award in Poetry for One Body (2008). The Vigil was a Finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry in 1993. She has also written a memoir, The Prodigal Daughter, University of Missouri Press, 2008. Gibson is Professor Emerita, University of Connecticut, and lives in Preston, CT. Click here to learn more about Margaret Gibson.
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. Learn more at their website.
Don’t miss this fantastic night of storytelling to kick off the school year and Speak Up’s fall season!
Speak Up returns to Real Art Ways with Tests: Stories About Trials, Tribulations, and Old Fashioned Quizzes. School will be back in session and all are invited for a night of hilarity and heartbreak.
The cast features Speak Up veteran storytellers Anne Stuart of Boston, Nina Lichtenstein of Maine, and Hartford area locals Matthew Dicks and Barbara Klau. Joining them will be professional storyteller and New Yorker Carla Katz and first timers Ellen Feldman Ornato and Christine Thibodeau.
Hosted – as always, by Elysha Dicks.
FREE ADMISSION
All are invited to attend an artist conversation and reception with Morgan Bulkeley. Morgan will be in conversation with curator David Borawski about his work and process involved in his exhibition, Space Around A Porcupine. The reception will begin at 1:30 PM with light refreshments and mingling before the conversation begins at 2 PM.
From the Artist’s Statement:
“I try to make paintings that are beautiful, frightening and funny all at once, similar to The Theater of the Absurd, which assumes things are so bad that you can only laugh. I see in nature and in the best of humanity an incredible beauty; but I also see in our technology and aggression a will and ability to destroy that beauty, either actively or inadvertently. The refuse of our consumerism, wafting down our streets, caught in the twigs of trees in our deepest forests or swirling in giant gyres in the ocean, is a steady reminder of our growing and smothering effect on our only habitable planet. I paint to try to make people think of the fragility in which we exist.”
About the Artist:
Morgan Bulkeley was born in the Berkshires of Massachusetts in 1944. He was raised on a small farm in the town of Mount Washington, where his parents, both naturalists, raised many wild, orphaned animals. He graduated from Yale University in 1966 with a B.A. in English Literature. After a stint in the Coast Guard, he spent a year in Newark New Jersey, drawing and working with VISTA Programs. Subsequently, he spent 14 years in Cambridge Massachusetts painting and sculpting. In 1985 he returned to his childhood home where he lives with his environmentalist wife Eleanor Tillinghast.
Click here to learn more about his work.
Real Art Ways presents drawing, installation and performance by Estonian-born, NY based artist and educator Jaanika Peerna.
Opening Reception: Thursday, September 19, 6-8 PM
Performance: Sunday, February 2, 2:30 PM
Peerna’s work encompasses drawing, installation, and performance, often dealing with the theme of transitions in light, air, water and other natural phenomena. Her performances often involve the audience in participatory reflection on the current climate meltdown. Her art practice stems from the corporeal experience of existence and reaches towards enhanced awareness of the fragility, interconnectedness and wonder of life.
“I am a vessel gathering subtle and rapturous processes in nature, using the experiences and impulses to make my work. I record mist turning into water. I let wind move my body so that it leaves traces on paper. I swim through thousands of layers of gray air and mark each one down. Sometimes public performances with musicians and dancers draw me out from the safe silence of my space and expand my drawing practice with sound and movement. I am interested in the never-ending process of becoming with no story, no beginning, no end—just the current moment in flux.”
– Jaanika Peerna
About the Artist
Jaanika Peerna has exhibited her work and performed extensively in the entire New York metropolitan area as well as in Berlin, Paris, Tallinn, Barcelona, Venice, Moscow, Dubai, Sydney, Canberra, Montreal, and Cologne. Her work is in numerous private collections in the U.S. and Europe and is part of the Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Paris. Her performance Glacier Elegy was recently acquired by the Glyn Vivian Museum in the UK. Her work is represented in the U.S. by JHB Gallery and ARC Fine Art and globally by IdeelART. She was awarded the FID Grand Prize in 2016 for her work in drawing, and she has been a teaching artist at the Dia Art Foundation for many years. Peerna currently works as cultural attaché for Estonia in New York.
Click here to learn more about her work.
Real Art Ways presents new work by 2019 Real Art Awards recipient Jeanne Jalandoni.
Exhibition extended to February 14, 2020.
Artist Talk: Saturday, November 9 | 2:30 PM
Rooted in her experience as a second-generation New Yorker, Jeanne Jalandoni creates paintings and installations that investigate the complicated ideas surrounding Fillipino American identity. Jalandoni uses a mixed media approach that evokes the nature of experiencing a bicultural existence. Her paintings mimic imagery from the Boxer Codex, an anonymous 16th century Spanish manuscript that ultimately created stereotypes of pre-colonization people of the Phillipine Archipelago. Image: The Duster, 2018. Acrylic, oil, trim on canvas and stitched fabric, 60″ x 36″.
From Jalandoni’s Artist Statement
Combining media and materials parallels bicultural identity; a mixture of experiences that were essential to my upbringing and cultural inheritance. I am expected to sustain them, but am subject to disassociate because I am “American” before I am “Filipino.” This tension between “real” and “imagined” elements in my paintings invites viewers to question bicultural tangibility, while allowing me to explore and take authorship of my identity.
About the Artist
Jeanne F. Jalandoni (b. New York, NY) lives and works in Uptown Manhattan. She works primarily with oil paint and textile. Jalandoni received her BFA from New York University with a concentration in painting. In 2018, she was an artist-in-residence at 36 Chase & Barns Residency (North Adams, MA; affiliated with Erica Broussard Gallery, Santa Ana, CA). Her studio is located at Cornerstone Studios in Washington Heights, NY.
Click here to learn more about her work.
Click here to learn more about the Real Art Awards.
The 2019 Real Art Awards is supported in part by the National Endowment of the Arts.
Real Art Ways presents Standing Room, a series of large scale paintings by Brooklyn based artist, Kyle Andrew Phillips.
Utilizing the trompe l’oeil technique and inspired by artists such as Peter Doig, Andy Kaufman and Marc Sijan, Kyle Andrew Phillips explores the concept of time spent with art in the gallery setting. He invites the audience to linger with the work which depicts local people in the Hartford community. From his artist statement, he says, “The average time it takes a person to look at a painting is 15 to 30 seconds… How can one experience [the work] longer?”
About the Artist
Kyle lives in Brooklyn and has been exhibiting in group shows in New York and Connecticut. His work is in public and private collections throughout the area, including the New Britain Museum of American Art and the Episcopal Church in Connecticut. Kyle attended of the University of Hartford Art School where he graduated with honors and multiple awards.
