Jacquelyn Gleisner
Ann P. Lehman, from The Million-Petaled Flower of Being Here.
Music produced through Kegel exercises. A tapestry of the fossil record. A reckoning with violence.
These projects and more are among the commissions for this year’s City-Wide Open Studios, which has the theme of “Older But Younger.” The commissions focus on how art passes from generation to generation, and what ideas can result when the artists working on a project together are decades apart in age.
City-Wide Open Studios — now in its 22nd year — runs from Oct. 4 to Nov. 3 across New Haven and a little outside of it, featuring the work of over 400 artists. On Oct. 4 there will be an opening reception at Artspace at 6 p.m. Oct. 12 and 13 will be Private Studio Weekend, in Westville and all around town. On Oct. 19 and 20 the studios in Erector Square throw open their doors. And on Nov. 2 and 3 CWOS returns to Yale’s West Campus in Orange for Alternative Space Weekend. (For more information, visit the CWOS website.)
It’s in that final weekend that the public will be able to check out all of Artspace’s 12 commissioned pieces. In accordance with the theme, to qualify for a commission, the participants in the project had to have at least a 25-year age difference among them. One of them satisfied that requirement in perhaps a surprising way.
Kiermaier.
In Creativity Is the Key, the participating artists are 10 women ranging in age from 60 to 92, all students of art teacher Constance Kiermaier. As Donna Collins, one of the artists, explained, “we meet monthly, talk about art, and work together.” Recently Kiermaier decided to move to Maine and gave them each an antique key with a note attached as a parting gift. The notes contained oblique, poetic advice. To one of the students who was a professional dancer, Kiemaier wrote: “follow Stravinsky, not Mozart, as you go deeper into the waiting depths.” For their Artspace project, the 10 artists are paying it forward. Those who come upon the exhibit will be invited to take an antique key and fashion a piece of advice for someone else — handing wisdom down to another generation, and perhaps yet another.
Memory Edit, from Megan Craig, Ralph Franklin, Nick Lloyd, and Kyle Goldbach, is also participatory. It tells the stories of four seniors living in the greater New Haven area — two of them at the Whitney Center in Hamden — who have had long artistic careers. Their reflections will be the basis for creating 17-foot banners that participants will be invited to stitch together into a tapestry of memory. People will be on hand to help even “if someone comes in with no sewing experience at all.” The full piece will be unfurled at the very end of the final day of City-Wide Open Studios. Memory Edit asks questions about the ability to fully capture artistic outputs that span a lifetime. “How do we commemorate life experiences while they’re alive,” Craig said, “and after they have passed?”
“I believe the body is an instrument for memory — the body creates memory as well,” said dancer Angharad Davies, whose piece, The Body Is an Archive, focuses on social dances and the way that memories attach to them. Her video installation (see image above) features several New Haven-area people of all ages who talk about dances from the Watusi to the Floss to the Cha Cha Slide, and dance them as well. For older dancers, Davies found, the dances “return them to more youthful days.” Younger dancers, meanwhile, “experience what their elders’ time was like.” Dancing in all cases helps dancers define themselves: “this is who I am, right now, in this moment,” Davies said. There was freedom in that — as there will be in the live performances that accompany the installation.
The War Experience Project draws from artist Rick Lawson’s own experience as an Army veteran of the war in Iraq. Returning home, he found that people have had a lot of questions for him about what he had done in the Middle East. “These questions are well-meaning,” he said, “but are often lacking in understanding and even respect.”
“Did you ever kill anyone? Did you ever see anyone die? These are kind of mind-boggling questions to ask a stranger,” he added. In an art class he was taking, Lawson was asked to make an art project about his experience and realized that he could use his uniform as a canvas. “I was able to use the art as a conduit to share my experience,” he said.
Since then he has worked with many other veterans of several different conflicts — encompassing generations of U.S. warfighting — to help them communicate about their experiences as well. “Many people have not shared anything about their experiences, yet many families have war trauma in their histories,” Lawson said. His project, he has found, helps start “a conversation that is begun on the terms of the veteran.” He’ll be holding a painting workshop for veterans on Oct. 6 at Artspace.
Erin Lee Antonak’s Land Acknowledgment.
In Generations of Rhythm, tap dancer Alexis Robbins and her students, ranging in ages from 24 to 65, will perform a routine that explores the history of tap, its relation to jazz, and the ways it continues to evolve in the present as a mode of self-expression. Althea Rao’s Vagina Chorus will use an app that somehow translates the movement of Kegel exercises into musical tones. In The Million-Petaled Flower of Being Here, Jacqueline Gleisner will present a writing project drawn from discussions with 10 older New Haven-area artists, included Ann P. Lehman (pictured above), who still includes welding in her art practice at the age of 92. In Land Acknowledgment, artist Erin Lee Antonak will draw from the Native American creation story of Turtle Island to pay homage to the fact that New Haven is built on sacred Quinnipiack land. Kate Henderson and a group of other artists will explore the concept of the Fountain of Youth in Searching for the Fountain of Youth: A Feminine Perspective. A collaboration between Unidad Latinos en Acción and artist Pedro Lopez will delve into the generational stories behind the giant puppets involved in the Day of the Dead parade in Día De Los Muertos.
Artist Leila Daw said there were 44 years between her age and that of collaborator Alexis Musinski. Together, they created tapestries of the fossil record that will be set up to be an immersive experience on Alternative Spaces weekend. They had a sobering message to deliver. “The fossil record may be all that is left if the current environmental degradation continues,” Daw said. The two artists spent time at the Peabody going through fossils for models and inspiration. There they learned about an even more sobering possibility: “Even the fossil record may be degraded if the acidification of the oceans and air continue. There may be nothing left.” In that sense, the title of their piece, Ages of Life, took on a darkly ironic meaning. “Think about extinction!” Daw said in closing.
Howard el-Yasin and Dymin Ellis created a similarly unsettling piece in Strange Fruit; 40 years apart in age, they connected through shared experiences of being black and queer. The art explored “how we can work together and how we’re different,” el-Yasin said. In the room in West Campus they were given to exhibit in, “I was struck by the marks in the walls, that used to have shelving,” he said. From those marks he fashioned the idea of plush, felted doorknobs. But in fact, the room will be covered in black pieces — including a dildo called Black Thunder. El-Yasin will perform a dance piece he worked out with Annie Sailer; dance, he said, is “something I wasn’t allowed to do” as a child, “but I’m embracing it as an older adult.”
Then there will be the blackened banana peels hanging from the ceiling, which el-Yasin painstakingly collected and preserved by baking them. “I like to work with materials that feel odd and don’t necessarily tell you what to think or feel,” el-Yasin said. “I’m trying to get at a way of seeing things in a different way.” But there was a very serious side to the piece as well, as el-Yasin and Ellis wanted to call attention to the far too numerous cases of transgender people of color who have been victims of violent death.
“I’m trying to memorialize the names of people who would otherwise not be known to us — people who are killed because they are different,” he said.
City-Wide Open Studios runs Oct. 4 to Nov. 3 across New Haven. Visit Artspace’s CWOS website for more details.