Exhibition Shows How Ann Lehman Struck A Spark

The two friends in Ann Lehman’s sculpture — we only know they’re friends because the title tells us so — appear as though they’re deep in the middle of a long conversation, one that started long before we arrived and will continue after we’ve gone. One is perhaps trying to convince the other of something. He’s pressing his point. The other isn’t convinced, but he’s hearing the argument out. It’s happening on a bench that could be in any public park. In short, it’s a definition of community: people coming together in an open space, exchanging ideas, listening and speaking, challenging one another knowing that the friendship is stronger than any argument, that the bonds between people matter the most.

Lehman — who died in 2022 at the age of 94 — knew more than most about both art and community, a point made irrefutably by ​“The Alchemy of Art,” the latest show in the Hilles Gallery at Creative Arts Workshop on Audubon Street, running now through Jan. 27. The show serves as a retrospective on both Lehman the artist and CAW’s own history, showing how the woman and arts leader and the Audubon Street institution were inextricably linked. In the process, the show offers a wise perspective on New Haven’s current visual arts scene as it figures out how to work best for artists in the near future and beyond.

“She built a school, a community, and an arts district,” an accompanying note explains. ​“And she built monuments from metal, chairs from horseshoes, and assorted delicacies from wire. Ann welded everything together.”

At the beginning of the 1960s, the exhibit’s notes explain, there was no art schooling for the New Haven community. ​“Ann and her rabble-rousing band of mostly young wives believed that making art accessible would transform New Haven’s landscape and release the enormous creative potential that they recognized was there.” The group established Creative Arts Workshop in 1961, ​“producing a climate in which communities historically excluded from organized art instruction could find a creative home.” 

CAW started in the basement of the John Slade Ely House, when the group of artists, nominating Lehman as president because she was the youngest, whitewashed the basement walls and started teaching classes. It was a scrappy organization, but the community was built from the beginning. A quote from Lehman: ​“By word of mouth, we had 150 people enrolled that summer. We had children’s classes, pottery, painting and drawing, photography, block printing, jewelry, and more,” and ​“with very few exceptions, CAW was organized and run by women.” They worked out of the Ely House for five years, ​“where the resident curator hated our presence and constantly berated me for the dirty footmarks we made.” They moved into the basement of the old Mishkan Israel building on Audubon and Orange in 1965 (before it was the Educational Center for Arts) and Lehman stepped down as president, but never left the group.

“There were people we didn’t get together with before CAW,” Lehman is quoted as saying. ​“Art brought us together.” And CAW continued to grow. Lehman again: ​“Classes grew along with our reputation. Because there was nothing else available for children, about one-third of student enrollment was young people and still is. At our maximum, there were 3,000 students.”

In 1972, as a note explains, ​“CAW, having worked with the city’s developer, the Arts Council of Greater New Haven, built our home at 80 Audubon Street,” where it remains today. It grew from a volunteer organization into a professional art school. In a note included in the exhibition, Judith K. Liebmann writes that ​“like her father, who taught her how to weld, she disdained the fragile and made things that were sturdy and meant to last.”

Lehman taught at CAW into her 90s. As an artist, she worked with metal, fabric, resin, tile, and clay. As a teacher, she nurtured generations of students. A quote from sculptor Ted Salmon, a former student of Lehman’s, reads: ​“Ann was like a conductor, she guided everyone around her and directed them. We were all so willing to help Ann. You couldn’t say no to her — it was just her nature.”

The show presents Lehman first and foremost as an artist for good reason, as the range and depth of her craft are on ample display. Some of her metal pieces lean into the essential nature of the material; they are full of shiny surfaces and hard angles. But others work almost entirely at cross purposes with it, to the point that — as the title of the show implies — the metal seems transformed into another substance altogether. ​“I like to make hard things seem soft because it is unlikely,” Lehman is quoted as saying. ​“I’ve manipulated them. I’ve asked or told them to do this.” In her hands, the metal complied.

Lehman’s alchemy was also one of style. She didn’t work in the same aesthetic over and over again, even when she worked with similar materials. Several of her pieces use metal’s ability for highly textured surfaces to create sculptures that feel utterly lived in at the same time that they convey a burst of speed and energy.

But among the intense variety of pieces in the show — of metal, clay, fabric, and tile — it’s fitting that one of the works closest to the window is a mirror, positioned in such a way that it reflects outward, away from CAW and toward the city, the community from which the school arose. This year the arts scene has questioned, tested, transformed, and lost some of its longest-running institutions. Yet for the most venerable, there remains a sense that they have been around forever, and always will be. 

“The Alchemy of Art” reminds us that, fundamentally, this isn’t true. Many institutions that seem old aren’t that old. They were created not long ago and can be lost in far less time than that. They can be destroyed. They can also be created again, or new things created in their place. Sixty years ago, artists organized among themselves to found an art school, in response to similar concerns that face New Haven’s artists now, about who gets access to the arts and who doesn’t, about equity and justice, about how the arts can tap into the community and help it flourish. The legacy of that organizing was Creative Arts Workshop. What might exist sixty years in the future, thanks to a spark struck now?

“The Alchemy of Art” runs at Creative Arts Workshop, 80 Audubon St., through Jan. 27. Visit CAW’s website for hours and more information.