Artist Talk: Somewhere in the Sequence at Real Art Ways

Every third Thursday of the Month, creative, interesting and open-minded people gather to experience all kinds of art and connect with one another.

The final Creative Cocktail Hour of the year will feature a Makers Market, showcasing local artists and vendors. Get your last minute holiday shopping done! Buy local and have a great time.

Vendors include:

3236 Tin Ave
Avé Rivera Studio
BAHocker Designs
Basic Bars Soap
Black Orchid Skincare
Carianne Mack Garside Studio
Cinder + Salt
Cottage Potter
Empowered By Love Enterprises
Grassillini Creations
Hartford Prints!
Homeprep Products
Island of Misfit Crafters
Kate Stephen Jewelry
Laurie Lynne’s Jewelry
Lisa Mareé Designs
Night Fall
Quilting After Dark
Sox in the City
Stock the Bar Candles
Tomiko Pottery
Verdilune

Check our social media for more Vendor updates.

Music by Aimee Chambers

Creative Cocktail Hour has happened every single month on the third Thursday since 2002!

Real Art Ways welcomes the return of New York Times bestselling author and long-time friend, Steve Almond (Candyfreak, Against Football) for an evening of film, reading and discussion, exploring the ways that novels impact our lives.

The evening will begin with a screening of The Act of Becoming, a documentary about the 1965 novel Stoner by American writer John Williams. After the film, Steve will read briefly from his new book, William Stoner and the Battle for the Inner Life, and lead a group discussion on how our favorite novels can help us come to know ourselves.

About Steve Almond
Steve Almond is the author of eleven books of fiction and non-fiction, including the New York Times bestsellers Candyfreak and Against Football. His essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, and his fiction has been anthologized in the Best American Short Stories, Best American Mysteries, Best American Erotica, and Pushcart Prize. He lives with his wife (a Hartford native!) and three children outside of Boston. Click here to learn more about Steve.

About Stoner by John Williams
William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude.

John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world. The New Yorker describes it as, “The greatest American novel you’ve never heard of.”

Connecticut writers are taking over all five galleries here at Real Art Ways! Each space will offer programming and prose. All are invited for a day of panels, readings, food trucks, and a spectacular book fair.

Readers’ Marketplace
Beyond spotlighting some of the region’s premier artists through talks and readings, the CT Lit Fest also welcomes and highlights the achievements and work of publishers, presses, and literary organizations.

Typewriter Gallery
Typewriters will be set up on podiums for visitors to type and print out stories, poems, missives – and maybe even secrets. Plus, there will be mini-prose and poetry workshops.

Panel Gallery
Curated panels will offer a forum for leading thinkers, writers, and educators to discuss writing and the arts in our culture.

Tiny Reading Gallery
Podium + mic = all-day readings in an intimate setting

Theater Talks
Features writers reading their work followed by moderated conversations and Q & A.

RAW Cafe
The café will host presentations by writers and musicians throughout the day in a coffeehouse-style setting.

Visit the official CT Literary Festival page for a list of authors, presenters and additional information.

Bill Griffith will give an engaging talk and sign copies of his latest book, Nobody’s Fool

Bill Griffith has been an active cartoonist since 1967. Since then, he’s made hundreds of humorous comics that have appeared in publications ranging from the National Lampoon to The New York Times. While he has created an assortment of different comics with characters and sketches, none are more well known then his comic strip of Zippy.

His Zippy comic features a pinheaded character by the name of “Zippy.” While his clown suit and head shape are recognizable, it’s the random blurbs and devotion to miscellaneous objects that satire consumerism that make him so memorable. Zippy gives any reader a topic of conversation with his philosophical conversations with God, a fast talking schemer, a lounge singer, a hapless working man, and other characters giving tons of opportunities for non-sequiturs.

Comic art began in the early 1920’s as a way of talking to an audience about politics, educational information, different realities, and even commentaries on real life situations all for the purpose of making someone laugh. The golden age of comics back in the mid 1900s was a time period full of change. During this time, the American people saw many different cartoonists present a whole array of political points of view and personal ideas. However, regardless of the politics, the goal was always the same: to make people laugh.

The comics were able to produce a type of imagery that television or film was not able to offer because it was drawn and could go beyond realism. Because of this, cartoonists could play around with different themes and offer another lens for comic characters to show the American people. This was only possible because of artists like Bill Griffith, who not only offered a unique, humorous, political perspective during not-so-funny times, but also allowed an audience to collectively engage and discuss different ideas and artforms that an artist presents; much like the goal of Real Art Ways.

The Tree Spa for Urban Forest Healing begins its installation with an all-you-can-eat Pancake Breakfast including locally-produced maple syrup and real butter.

BYOB to participate in the “Bring Your Own Batter” competition. The winner will receive locally-produced maple syrup.

Hartford-made maple syrup will be on sale, as well as refreshments and our regular concessions.

The Tree Spa, a functional steam room for group relaxation, will be open.

Tickets for this event are $10 per person.

Half-hour sessions in the Tree Spa are an additional $10 per person.

Learn more about the Tree Spa for Urban Forest Healing here.

Roger Clark Miller (Mission of Burma, Alloy Orchestra) will host an evening of drawing and word games that were developed during the heyday of surrealism.

Games include the Exquisite Corpse drawing game (advanced drawing skills not required!), the Dream Game (a board game where you end up creating a dream!), and many varieties of surrealist word games.

The consummate master of ceremonies, Miller will not only explain and lead the games to kick off the event, but he’ll also DJ – providing a surrealistic soundtrack to the evening. (Paper and drawing/writing tools will be supplied).

Says Miller, “A great virtue of these games is that they are not at all competitive. A person who is an experienced artist may interact with a more naive drawer to produce a brilliant composition. It’s all about the collective work.”

Everyone plays while taking in a surrealistic soundtrack curated by Miller, and sipping cocktails made especially for the evening.

Miller adds, “With Surrealism in charge, anything is possible. It’s a great ice-breaker to boot, hence a Surrealist Valentine’s Day in Hartford.”

Image above: André Masson, Max Ernst, and Max Morise, Exquisite Corpse, 1927.