“Open Studios” Steps Into West Haven

Inside Susan Clinard’s Gilbert Street studio on Sunday afternoon, the West Haven space was full of New Haven faces. 

People chatted in the corners among the sculptures. One viewer shared a long moment with a figure in a boat. People exchanged waves and hugs. It was all part of New Haven Open Studios’s second weekend, which encompassed Amplify the Arts in East Rock, but reached to the Gilbert Street studios in West Haven as well, where artists threw open their doors — as they will again next weekend, Oct. 19 and 20, in Erector Square and MarlinWorks, and in Westville, NXTHVN, and elsewhere the weekend after that, Oct. 26 and 27.

“The artists have done an amazing job of pulling themselves together,” Clinard said at her Gilbert Street home. ​“It still requires a lot of work,” from setting up studios to getting the word out. ​“But the joy,” and ​“the feeling of community,” are ​“very much still there.” To her it all seems ​“very beautiful and natural.”

Down the hall from Clinard’s studio, a group of artists from the West Haven-based Shoreline Artist Collective (SLAC) — Louise Cadoux, Bill Enck, Jenna Gonzalez, Edith Reynolds, Victor Smith, and Pietro Spagnulo — set up a show that represented the fruition of work in artists organizing themselves.

Edith Reynolds (pictured) does paintings of shells and coastal scenes, and won a Connecticut Sea Grant for a show that ​“tells the story about mollusks and their importance for sustenance and economic development.” Reynolds’s father was an oysterman on the Connecticut coast and she grew up around the trade. ​“And I loved history,” she said. She noted that Indigenous people on the shoreline had eaten oysters for thousands of years. For colonists, the oysters were also a source of wealth; selling the mollusks allowed them to build cities.

“I love the idea,” too, she said, that ​“mollusks are the first 3‑D printers. They make their own homes.” The oysters also have an environmental effect: an oyster, she said, can filter 50 gallons of water a day. ​“So they’re kind of my heroes,” she said. Acknowledging that many people enjoy eating them, she herself doesn’t. ​“I like them too much,” she said. 

Sculptor Bill Enck (pictured) worked until 2017 as a construction manager and didn’t have as much studio time to work on his craft (he is now retired from construction and is a full-time sculptor). ​“So I would collect things that I like,” he said, and rather than starting pieces entirely from scratch, found a faster process of making art that incorporated found objects. One piece is fashioned from a core drilling from a terra cotta ceiling from a building in New York. Another piece is fashioned from a drink holder. ​“Basically it’s a spring,” he said; the piece is held together by tension. Other pieces use mounts for ceiling fans and cast-iron bathtubs, or copper pipes, or packing materials. He combines the found object with pieces he fashioned.

“The pieces just came together,” Enck said. ​“It was shocking,” he said with a laugh, and also ​“kind of fun.” 

Victor Smith’s paintings ​“depict my ups and downs in life,” he said. He started painting as a teenager in Jamaica, using bright colors. ​“Not many people took note.” But ​“as life started to get rough, I learned to express my negative emotion by painting people who looked like they were in great distress,” he said. When he was 18, he had a ​“great love affair” and ​“I was hoping to marry this lady.” It didn’t work out, and ​“I entered a dark phase.” He expressed his hurt in painting, ​“and when I did, I started to get reviewed in the Jamaican press.” His first collection of ​“distressing paintings,” he said, led to the first of two national art awards when he was 21. His paintings toured Europe as part of an exhibition of Jamaican art. 

“Immediately I became a celebrity,” he said. ​“It was turning your lemons into lemonade. If my heart had not been broken, if I had not been in so great distress, if I had not decided to express my hurts through my paintings, I probably would never have been discovered.”

Not all of Smith’s paintings illustrate tumult. One piece in the show depicts a Rastafarian man playing drums in a choppy sea. Rastafarians are ​“a popular subject” for Jamaican artists, but all is not at ease in the painting: the sea is yellow instead of blue, the sky is red, and ​“there’s a lot of motion.” Another painting, of a sunset, was done ​“just for the beauty of it.” Other pieces dipped into surrealism, such as one about a science professor, watching an amoeba on a hill, cells going through cell division. Roots from his neck extended into the soil. The move from tumult to balance to surrealism was all part of Smith’s development as a painter.

Working Together

The SLAC artists’ participation in New Haven Open Studios grew out of their own organizational efforts in West Haven, which was ​“kickstarted” in 2021 with grant money from the federal American Rescue Plan, funneled through the city of West Haven. More recent grant money and support from ArtsWestCT and the Arts Council of Greater New Haven enabled the artists to rent space for a show last month, and continue that show to coincide with New Haven Open Studios, which the artists were already familiar with. 

Enck had participated in the event in 2019, opening his home studio. He said he got just a handful of visitors. By contrast, Reynolds estimated that the SLAC show had a couple dozen visitors each day this weekend. ​“It’s the first year,” Reynolds said. The number of visitors felt particularly nice as ​“people don’t put ​‘West Haven’ and ​‘art’ in the same sentence very often.” In terms of bringing visitors to Gilbert Street, ​“it helps that there are some other established artists in the building,” Enck said.

The SLAC show a month ago and Open Studios were ​“an opportunity for networking,” Reynolds said, and ​“now that we all know each other, we’re hoping to take it the next step.”

One of the artists with a working studio in the building is Susan Clinard, who moved this year from the Eli Whitney barn on Whitney Avenue to Gilbert Street. She noticed that there’s ​“greater intention on the person coming to visit,” she said, because ​“it is farther away, and takes more effort.” But ​“people are getting to see me the way I worked more in Chicago,” before she moved to New Haven. Her studios then were also in light industrial buildings. ​“I hope people are taking in the whole experience,” Clinard said, of the building, which is a working space, housing artists and woodworkers. During the week, she said, ​“I love hearing the saws, everyone doing their thing.”

For Smith, collaboration has been part of being an artist from the beginning. He used his popularity in Jamaica to form an artists’ association that mounted a well-covered exhibition. ​“It was only fitting to help,” he said, ​“so I brought them along with me.” 

His national art award also allowed him to come to the United States on a visa for cultural exchange, and he married a woman in New Haven who had also emigrated from Jamaica, in 1973. ​“When I came to New Haven, there was not a lot of activity among minorities” regarding visual art, Smith said. In response, in 1983, he started the Kaleidos Art Group for Black and Brown artists. ​“It got so big we had artists from all over the state coming to New Haven.” The group ended up with two storefronts in Chapel Square Mall. ​“So for months we had two stores to exhibit our work,” and make sales, Smith said. Among them were ​“people who otherwise would not have shown their work, put their work out there.” 

Kaleidos was his way to ​“duplicate the process” he had done in Jamaica of lifting up artists around him. ​“It was very successful in both areas.” So for Smith, SLAC and Open Studios are a new collaboration that is part of the same long story.

Clinard has ideas for expanding the event next year, inviting artists to show work in the hallways of the building. ​“It would be cool to make this a place where people could do pop-up shows,” she said. In the Glibert Street building, artists and everyone else are working ​“on very different things.” But ​“we’re all here working.” 

Visit Erector Square’s website for a full listing of New Haven Open Studios events for the rest of the month.