Artspace Celebrates 30 Years With New Exhibition

James Montford drew on the walls of Artspace’s gallery Saturday evening, as the gallery on Orange and Crown celebrated its 30th anniversary. America, he wrote, in upside down letters that he then blotted with his hand. When he had finished his task, Shola Cole swooped in and began to own the space. She picked up a noose off the floor and regarded it like a historical artifact.

“Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,” Cole said, addressing the crowd in front of her, as if half-remembering the famous Emma Lazarus poem that adorns the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. She wrote it on the wall. ​“With conquering limbs astride from land to land,” she said with more certainty. ​“Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand / A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame / Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name / Mother of Exiles.” Then she began to tell her own story.

Cole’s and Montford’s performance was the centerpiece of the opening of ​“Three Decades of Change: Artspace’s 30th Reunion Exhibition,”which celebrates 30 years of exhibitions at Artspace by looking back at some of Artspace’s greatest hits. The past weekend was also full of activities for participating artists from parties and concerts to panel discussions. On Saturday evening, in addition to the performance, that meant a guided tour of the various parts of the retrospective with the artists who had curated the original shows at Artspace from the 1990s to the present.

The exhibit runs through July 8.

As the curators and artists discussed their past work from the perspective of the present, a few themes emerged. One was clear just by looking. ​“All the artists were pretty political,” said artist and curator Suzan Shutan. ​“It’s hard to escape it,” she said, as the artists were just ​“responding to the world.”

So there was Montford’s original piece from 1994, Will he pee in his pants and Classical and Neo Classical Blackheads. At the performance, which Shutan had curated the accompanying label explained, ​“James wore a hood and tied his body in ropes nailed to a wall.” The ropes had been tied into nooses, so that the ​“performance was suggestive of lynching and electrocution.” In the packed space and the summer heat, Montford actually fainted under the hood and began to strangle as the noose around his neck tightened. He really did pee his pants, Shutan said; it was when attendees saw ​“a puddle on the floor” that they knew something was wrong. It took 10 people from the audience to get him out of the nooses. When he regained consciousness, Shutan said, ​“he wanted to get back on” the wall.

An exhibition attendee on Saturday mentioned that the image of Montford in his nooses looked an awful lot like the infamous photos from Abu Ghraib, where U.S. soldiers had tortured and humiliated Iraqi prisoners a decade after Montford’s performance. But that connection tied Montford’s 1994 piece to Mohammad Hafez’s His Majesty’s Throne, which hung in the exhibition as a present-day echo of a 2002 Artspace show entitled ​“Duct Tape.” At the time, artists had been asked to use duct tape in response to government instructions for people to seal up their houses and apartments with duct tape in case of a chemical attack. Curator Sarah Fritchey thought the 2002 exhibition should be represented in the present-day show but couldn’t track down the original curators, and so asked Hafez to step in. Hafez’s contribution was not only his sculpture — like much of his work, about the war and atrocities in Syria — but also a wall painted with blackboard paint on which he invited anyone to write down quotes from politicians who lied. He called these ​“free democracy lessons.”

But a deeper narrative also took shape as the evening progressed, of Artspace as a place that fosters collaboration between artists, whether it’s New Haven artists meeting their neighbors or forging a partnership with artists from abroad.

Brooklyn-based artist and curator Colleen Coleman spoke about the exhibit ​“Ain’t I A Woman,” which she had put together at Artspace in 1995. That exhibit had asked artists to interpret abolitionist Sojourner Truth’s speech to the Seneca Falls Women’s Convention in 1848. ​“If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone,” Truth had said then, ​“these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again.”

As Fritchey did with Hafez, Coleman asked artist Deborah Dancy to fulfill the exhibit’s instructions in 2017. Dancy responded with photographs from 2011 and 2016. Coleman explained that Dancy’s Queen Bea #1 and #2 were images of empowerment as much as oppression. It was important that the figure was missing her face. ​“She’s the queen bee, and no one can miss her because of her blackness.”

“I see Deborah’s work as an opportunity to have a space for black women,” Coleman said.

Artist Joan Fitzsimmons, based in Connecticut, spoke about her long-term collaborations with fellow photographer Jacek Malinowski, based in Warsaw, Poland. She was the subject of Half a Woman #1, #2, and #3, digital videos Malinowski made in 2000 in New Haven and in Poland that starred Fitzsimmons as, well, half a woman. In the films, the camera follows her as she — appearing only from the torso up, thanks to a humorous simple set that cuts her off at the waist — talks about her existence and attempts to do simple things like boil water and bustle about the house. Meanwhile, in Warsaw, Malinowski and his neighbors became the subjects of Fitzsimmons’s photograph series Surveillance.Warsaw.156, made between 2007 and 2012. Fitzsimmons supposed the photos, all taken through the peephole of Malinowski’s apartment door, were influenced by the stories of spying she knew from the Cold War era.

“Jacek never knew I photographed him until the photos were in the exhibit,” Fitzsimmons said.

The spirit of collaborative reinterpretation sprang to life on Saturday with New Haven-raised artist Shola Cole reinterpreting Montford’s Will he pee in his pants. As Cole worked through Lazarus’s poem, she began to invite audience members to help her, handing them the noose ends of the rope to use as a handle and then stretching them tight, as if she was a balloon, and would float away without them. She took the artifacts of Montford’s original performance — the black hood, the nooses, which had been preserved for 20 years — and transformed them.

“These ropes scare me,” Montford said when asked what he thought about seeing them years after performing the piece. ​“They’ve always scared me.” And in the original piece, they were instruments of violence and oppression. But in Cole’s reinterpretation, they became tethers and anchors, tools for exploration and strength.

“The first thing I said was, ​‘I am not being bound by any ropes,’” Cole said. Likewise, the hood became ​“a cape a superhero would wear,” Cole explained after the performance.

What had they learned from working together? someone asked. ​“This has taught me about what legacy I’m coming into,” Cole said. It gave her a sense of history.

Meanwhile, Montford spoke of the freedom that came from shaking up old routines by working with Cole. ​“I can take more risks,” he said. At Artspace, they met in the middle, took old things, and made something new.

Three Decades of Change runs at Artspace, 50 Orange St., through July 8. Click here for hours and more information. Admission is free.