... and this fragile earth, our island home.

Bridgeport - Our Fragile Home,a touring exhibition of art created by the Manchester Center, VT husband / wife artist team of Pat Musick and Jerry Carr will be on view at the Housatonic Museum of Art, Bridgeport, CT beginning Thursday, September 5 and will continue through October 20, 2013. A reception for the artists, free and open to the public, will be held on September 5th from 5:00 – 7:00 pm.

This exhibit, which exhorts us to take care of, nurture and respect our fragile planet, contains a message that has universal appeal. Based on inspiration from the words space travelers use to describe their first glimpse of the earth from outer space, it is a testament to a shared world-view and understanding of how vulnerable we all are. Amazingly, the sight of our earth from space inspires the same words no matter the differences in nationality, language, social, religious or political values of the viewer.

One is reminded too of T.S. Eliot's 1939 essay "In Defense of Christianity"

We are being made aware that the organization of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly.  I need only mention, as an instance now very much before the public eye, the results of soil erosion—the exploitation of the earth, on a vast scale. . . ,  for commercial profit: immediate benefits leading to dearth and desert. . . .

… For a long enough time we have believed in nothing but the values arising in a mechanized, commercialized, urbanized way of life: it would be as well for us to face the permanent conditions upon which God allows us to live on this planet.

Having originated at the Southern Vermont Art Center in May-July, 2013 it will follow Housatonic to the Brattleboro Museum of Art, Vermont in December-February 2014 and will end at the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Art Gallery, College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA, June 2014.

Musick is the primary artist.  Carr, a retired NASA Astronaut, serves as chief engineer and fabricator of the work. The mixed media materials Musick uses are a reflection of the opposites she finds in the natural and man-made environment. Steel, bronze, and paper counterpoint alabaster, stone and wood.

 Musick trained at Dartmouth College with Paul Sample and at Cornell University with Allan d'Arcangelo.  She holds an MA and a PhD degree from Cornell.  Her work is in the permanent collection of more than 50 museums and public spaces nationwide. She is the author of three books and she and Carr collaborated on one book on the subject of The Trail of Tears. Carr holds a Masters degree from Princeton University and Bachelor's degrees from The University of Southern California and is the subject of a book entitled Around the World in 84 Days recalling his Astronaut experiences..

For further information contact Robbin Zella at the Housatonic Museum of Art at or (203) 332-5052.

In the Burt Chernow Galleries

Chuck Close and His Turnaround Arts Kids

The Housatonic Museum of Art presents Chuck Close and his Turnaround Arts Kids that will be on view in the Burt Chernow Galleries, 900 Lafayette Blvd., Bridgeport, CT., from November 7 through December 15, 2013 with a reception on November 7th from 7:30 – 8:30 pm. The Burt Chernow Galleries are free and open seven days a week. Visit the website, www.HousatonicMuseum.org for gallery hours.

The exhibit will feature five (5) large-scale archival watercolor pigment prints provided by the artist in association with Magnolia Editions, Oakland, courtesy Pace Gallery. Chuck Close’s monumental portraits explore the intersection of photography and painting, providing an arresting experience. To create his photo-based work, Close places a grid on the photo and on the canvas, and working systematically, in incrimental units, he builds his images by applying small strokes of paint in multiple colors. When viewed from afar, each cell is perceived as an average hue creating a unified image, albeit in near abstraction when viewed from a close distance. The prints emphasize the cell structure underlying the image which blurs into soft focus, affording an altered spin on the traditional genre of portraiture.

Manhattan-based visual artist Chuck Close recently mentored 600+ students from kindergarten through the eighth grades at Bridgeport's Roosevelt School, one of eight schools in the nation to participate in President Barack Obama’s Turnaround Arts initiative which aims to improve low-performing schools by increasing student "engagement" through the arts. The public-private partnership was developed in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Education and the White House Domestic Policy Council. Close was one of the eight high-profile creative talents who volunteered for the program, working closely with the selected school students, faculty and surrounding communities.

Turnaround Arts tests the hypothesis that high-quality and integrated arts education can be an effective tool to strengthen school reform efforts-boosting academic achievement and increasing student motivation in schools facing some of the toughest educational challenges in the country. Follow up studies confirm the value of an arts rich education, especially for low socio-economic status students, in academic achievement, completion of high school and college, and becoming contributing members of their community. Yet recent Department of Education Surveys indicate that students from low income areas are being disproportionately short-changed on arts education opportunities in their schools. Every child deserves a chance to feel special and to excel in something, especially when they are not performing well in other areas, (i.e. reading, writing and arithmetic).

Charles Thomas "Chuck" Close was born in 1940 in Monroe, Washington. He received his B.A. from the University of Washington, a coveted scholarship to the Yale Summer School of Music and Art, and his BFA and MFA from Yale in 1964. Close achieved early fame as a painter through his large-scale painted portraits, mostly of family and artist friends. Throughout his career, Chuck Close has expanded his artistic contribution to portraiture through the mastery of varied drawing, painting, printmaking, handmade paper collage, photography and Jacquard tapestries. Although a catastrophic spinal artery collapse in 1988 left him severely paralyzed and he relies on a wheelchair, Close has continued to work with a brush strapped to his wrist. His work has since been the subject of more than 150 solo exhibitions including a number of major museum retrospectives. Close's work is in the collections of most of the great international museums of contemporary art, including the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Tate Modern in London, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He is represented by Pace Gallery and Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York, White Cube, London and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles.

For further information contact Robbin Zella, Director of the Housatonic Museum of Art at or (203) 332-5052.

This exhibit has been funded in part by

• The Werth Family Foundation
• A generous donation made in memory of Edward and Millicent Best
• Suzanne Kachmar and John Farwell in honor of art teachers Barbara Check Carr and Elizabeth Check Kachmar.

Pins and Needles

Curated by Suzan Shutan, Professor of Studio Art, Housatonic Community College

January 21 through February 20, 2014

Pins & Needles Brochure

The wolf stopped the girl and asked, "Where are you going? What do you carry?"
"I'm going my grandmother's house," said the girl, "and I'm bringing her bread and cream."
"Which path will you take?" the wolf asked. "The Path of Needles or the Path of Pins?"
"I'll take the Path of Needles," said the girl.
"Why then, I'll take the Path of Pins, and we'll see who gets there first,” said the Wolf.

This excerpt from the French story “The Grandmother’s Tale,” recorded by Charles Perrault and retitled “Little Red Riding Hood” by the Brothers Grimm, is thought be a coming of age story for young girls passing from childhood into adulthood. Indeed, rural maidens would often toss pins into fountains wishing for a sweetheart and boys, in turn, would “pin” their beloved.

Pins and needles are the humble tools long associated with sewing and spinning which has been, and continues to be, an essential part of women’s domestic and industrial labor. Curator Suzan Shutan has brought together ten women artists who employ these common fasteners as a means of creative expression. Pins and Needles explores a variety of subjects including memory, mapping, beauty, nature, pleasure, loss, pain, absence and presence, poetry, scripture and spirituality.

Pins and Needles Artists

Kim Bruce, Canada
Janice Caswell, New York City
Beth Dary, New York City
Valerie Hallier, New York City
Tamiko Kawata, New York City
Belle Shafir, Israel
Karen Shaw, New York City
Suzan Shutan, New Haven
Jill Vasileff, Stockton, California
Erwina Ziomkowska, Poland

Pop! Andy Warhol and artists from the collection of the Housatonic Museum of Art

Bridgeport, CT - The Housatonic Museum of Art presents Pop! Andy Warhol and artists from the collection of the Housatonic Museum of Art on view in the Burt Chernow Galleries, 900 Lafayette Blvd., Bridgeport, CT, from March 6-28, 2014 with a reception open to the public on March 6th from 7:30-8:30 pm. The Burt Chernow Galleries are free and open seven days a week. Visit the website, www.HousatonicMuseum.org for gallery hours.

This exhibition features works on paper by Andy Warhol and notable Pop Art era artists, including: Arman, Christo, Chryssa, Roy De Forest, Jim Dine, Sherman Drexler, Philip Guston, Alex Katz, Claes Oldenburg, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Ed Ruscha, John Wesley, and Tom Wesselmann.

Andy Warhol is widely regarded as an innovative contemporary artist and principal figure of the Pop Art movement with the incorporation of popular culture imagery and utilization of mass production techniques in his artwork. This exhibition, which includes recent gifts from The Andy Warhol Foundation of the Visual Arts, will bring together iconic works on paper from throughout his career: Campbell’s soup cans and portraits of American royalty (Elizabeth Taylor and Jackie Kennedy) from the 1960s, repeating flowers from the 1970s, and colorful, expressionistic iconographic prints from the 1980s.

The Housatonic Museum of Art’s collection contains over 5000 works of art spanning ancient through modern times and is one of the large permanent collections of any two-year college in the Northeast. Exhibitions and programs are funded in part by the Werth Family Foundation, Institute of Museum and Library Services, CT Commission on Culture and Tourism, Fairfield County Community Foundation, Target, and individual donors.

Anna Held Audette: Requiem for the Industrial Age
June 12 through July 25, 2014

MIA BROWNELL: DELIGHTFUL, DELICIOUS, DISGUSTING

September 25 - November 17, 2014

Delightful, Delicious, Disgusting
Paintings by Mia Brownell 2003-2013 at the Housatonic Museum of Art

Still Life with Double Double, 2006

Luscious and sensuous, Mia Brownell’s paintings invite us to indulge in “earthly delights” and are themselves ripe with sexual innuendo. Jennifer Anne McMahon writes in her essay, Beauty, that “evolutionary psychologists explain beauty as the kinds of tones and contrasts and shapes which are a sign of fecundity in a person (usually a female). Beauty is conceived as simply a sublimation of desire whose original teleology is procreation.” The surfaces of her canvases, laden with gorgeous fruit at the peak moment of perfection, allude to carnal appetites. Author Elspeth Probyn says that “…sexuality is often paired with food as a way of exploring different modes of sensuality.” Brownell walks a fine line between the artistic and the interesting, whetting the viewer’s appetite by stimulating the senses yet creating a space for detached contemplation.

And what Brownell asks us to contemplate is the brevity of life. “We begin in the madness of carnal desire and the transport of voluptuousness,” wrote the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, “we end in the dissolution of all our parts and the musty stench of corpses.” Seventeenth century Dutch still-life paintings of tables laden with gastronomic delights served to remind viewers that all things perish but Brownell’s fruits invite us to relish the sweetness of now.

Still Life with Sweet Dreams, 2010

But Brownell’s subject matter also raises contemporary issues surrounding the politics of food: sustainability, genetic modification, commodification of life (plants and animal) as well as the policies affecting production, distribution and consumption. Food, like art, generally provides pleasure if not in the making of it, most certainly in the consuming of it and, as we begin to feast our eyes on her appealing images, we realize that something is amiss—these offerings, though beautiful, are unpalatable. Disgust, an emotion, affects every aspect of human activity, from political affairs to affairs of the heart.  It occupies the space between death and life, both ever-present conditions. By juxtaposing the natural and the artificial Brownell critiques the biotech industry: ripe apples and juicy grapes look manufactured rather than vine-grown and the double helix alerts us that they may be the strange mutations of transgenic organisms.
Brownell’s subversive use of an established genre fuses the known with the unusual “offering us excitement—visual pleasure, and as Baudelaire says, ‘The beautiful is always strange,’ by which he means, of course, that it is always strangely familiar and vaguely surprising.” [1]

[1] Hickey, Dave. (2012). The Invisible Dragon. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, p. 11

Housatonic Museum of Art Presents
David Hayes: Modern Master of American Abstraction

December 3, 2014 through February 8, 2015

Join Housatonic Museum of Art for the opening reception of David Hayes: Modern Master of American Abstraction in celebration of this important Connecticut sculptor whose career spanned six decades. David Hayes continued to paint, sculpt and exhibit until his death on April 9, 2013. The drawings and maquettes on view here are studies for his monumental sculptures and include the biomorphic and geometric forms that comprise his signature style. This event is free and open to the public and will take place in the Burt Chernow Galleries at the HMA on Thursday, December 11 from 5:30 – 7:00pm. The exhibition will run December 3, 2014 through February 8, 2015 whne the college is open. Click here for Gallery Hours.

A Hardcover Catalog is Available for $10.00

Born in Hartford, he maintained a home and studio in Coventry, CT where dozens of his sculptures are situated throughout fifty-plus acres of bucolic farm and woodlands. The influence of his mentor David Smith and his friend Alexander Calder are visible in the playful welded steel polychrome works on display in the gallery. Hayes drew his inspiration from nature, translating delicate foliage into lyrical, brightly painted industrial strength sculptures.

Seal, 1973
Painted, welded steel with rotating element.
90 x 65 x 92 inches. 

David Hayes (1931-2013) earned his MFA from Indiana University where, as noted above, he studied with internationally renowned Abstract Expressionist sculptor David Smith. He was the recipient of a Fulbright Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His works are included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, the Brooklyn Museum, Everson Museum, Carnegie Institute and Fitchburg Museum, Detroit Institute of the Arts, and the Wadsworth Atheneum as well as numerous corporate and private collections.

A Hardcover Catalog is Available for $10.00

Rick Shaefer: Drawing the Line 2015

February 12 - March 27, 2015

Exhibition Program

February 12–March 27: Rick Shaefer: Drawing the Line. Working primarily in velvety black-and-white, large-format compositions and multiple-paneled pieces are where Rick Shaefer feels most at home. With his background in photography influencing his careful tonal decisions, the Connecticut-based artist often chooses charcoal on vellum to execute his striking and detailed depictions of both animal and nature. Through an elegant use of line work, Shaefer’s subjects exude texture and dimensionality in both the physical and emotional realm.

BELGIAN BLUE by Rick Shaefer

GELBVIEH BULL by Rick Shaefer

LIVE OAKS by Rick Shaefer

Gallery Installation

Housatonic Museum of Art Reinvents the Past

June 11 through July 24, 2015
Reception Thursday, June 11 from 5:30 – 7:00 pm

The Housatonic Museum of Art presents Remythologies: New Inventions of Old Stories curated by Stephen Vincent Kobasa. This exhibit will be on view in the Burt Chernow Galleries, 900 Lafayette Blvd., Bridgeport, CT., from June 11 through July 24, 2015 with a reception on Thursday, June 11 from 5:30 – 7:00 pm. The Burt Chernow Galleries are free and open to the public. Click here for gallery hours.

How do we account for the survival of stories? Poets and cultures die, but their necessary and remarkable lies still continue to be accounted for. Although the forms these works are given also have a history, it is what they contain that is the most accurate measure of our defining memories.

There is no art-making that does not confront the past, but there is art which reinvents that past without abandoning it. A struggle against tradition still depends upon what it opposes. As the writer Berger Evans once noted, “We may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us.” This exhibition is meant as a study of what our past still demands that we must either embrace or defy.

Artists included in this exhibit: Jason Buening (New Haven), Susan Classen-Sullivan (Canterbury), Jaclyn Conley (Brooklyn), William DeLottie (Pomfret), Kevin Harty (West Haven), Will Holub (Mystic), Brian Huff (New Haven), Nathan Lewis (Seymour), Phil Lique (New Haven), Nomi Lubin (New Haven), Willard Lustenader (New Haven), Margaret Roleke (Redding), Joseph Saccio (New Haven), Kyle Staver (Brooklyn, NY) and Mark Williams (New Haven).

For further information contact Robbin Zella, Director of the Housatonic Museum of Art at or (203) 332-5052.