Culture & Community | Arts & Culture | New Haven Museum | Visual Arts
Ava Orphanoudakis with her own work. Solé Scott Photo.
In the center of Anthony Barroso’s painting Stoic, two open eyes rise over a sea of orange and yellow flames, their stare insistent, penetrating. Around them, the woods burst into bloom, a carpet of grass still green despite the burn at its center. A dog, unattended, looks off into the distance. The eyes never flinch.
It’s a fitting tribute to the artist Ava Orphanoudakis, who has become a friend and mentor to a growing list of artists and creatives in greater New Haven. Last Thursday night, many of them gathered at the New Haven Museum for “Quantum Color,” a night to honor and celebrate her work. At the center was a focus on her practice, which is rooted in a deep respect and reverence for nature.
She plans to hold an upcoming solo exhibition from Oct. 3 to Nov. 23 of this year at Mercy by the Sea, a retreat center in Madison. The exhibit will be called Memories Of A Musical Space Art Show. It reflects on over five decades of artmaking, during which the 78-year-old artist has championed both nature and the vibrant, endangered biodiversity of the globe as we know it.
“I think everybody that has a passion for art should follow that passion and follow their own direction,” she said. “Because it is important that their soul, their being, their spirit is expressed in a way that they feel represents what they are trying to share.”
Artists included Ricardo Gutiérrez (whose work also lives in the New Haven Museum’s collection), Elizabeth Taylor, Anastasia Mastilovic, Anika Stewart, Anthony Barroso, and Marta Martinez. Orphanoudakis, who was born in Boston and now splits her time between Greece and Guilford, spent the evening soaking it all in, both surprised and delighted by the event.
“Creating a space where artists could respond to who Ava is becoming felt very honest and very human,” Gutiérrez said in an exchange after the event. “There’s something really special about giving someone their flowers while they can actually feel them.”
In part, the praise for Orphanoudakis is owing to a long and bright career from which artists can learn a great deal. While she was born in Boston and earned her first degrees in Massachusetts, Orphanoudakis has called Greater New Haven home on and off for decades. In the late 1970s, she pursued environmental studies at Connecticut State College, which is now CT State Gateway. By the 1980s, it led her to host a public access t.v. show called “Meet The Animals,” introducing young people to the richness of the world around them.
When she began to split her time between Greece and Connecticut in the 1990s, that work exploring the natural world only deepened, with both artwork and collaborations that ranged from the Peabody Museum to the Eugene O'Neill Theatre Center to a medical center in Heraklion, Crete. Her paintings, drawings, and mixed-media artworks reflect the sheer breadth of that experience: some explode into sunset-hued, fiery color, while others are the same luminous blue of the Mediterranean waters that she’s learned to call home.
That ultimately brings a viewer to Thursday’s event. In 2022, Gutiérrez met Orphanoudakis at an exhibition in Guilford, and instantly clicked with her. The two, whose work spans the globe from Colombia to New Haven to Greece to Guilford, connected over a shared love of nature, and a growing concern for the health and future of the natural world. The rest was history.
“From that very first encounter I built a connection with her,” Gutiérrez (pictured at the left) said. At some point, he began to pull in other artists, many of whom travel in the same circles. When he began to envision a celebration of her work, he knew he wanted to fête “her presence, her energy, and the impact she’s having right now,” he said.
That sense of excitement radiated through the evening. When guests walked in, six paintings greeted them in the front of the room, each work propped up on its own easel. Stewart, for instance, leaned into Orphanoudakis’ flair for cacophonous, whimsical, vibrant and abstracted forms, with different hues of blue replicating the ocean.
In her piece Pieces of Blue Water, swirls of plants and seaweed float through the frame, uninhibited. An eye bobs between the waves, making clear that the water is a living entity. To its left, Barroso’s Stoic beckons, the same eyes catching a viewer by surprise. Gutiérrez’ Universe of Ava, inspired by Orphanoudakis’ vision of life, resonates with it further down the row of paintings, with a huge, open eye at the center of a pink circle, flora and fauna filling in the space in between.
“I feel like there is a lot of chaos in the world currently and inside of me sometimes, so I wanted to kind of reflect that in a natural setting,” Barroso said.
“She’s nature, she’s very planet, she’s very human,” Gutiérrez added. “She’s very connected with nature and I created a little bird inside the eye, it represents power.”
All of the artists, in fact, honed in on Orphanoudakis’ deep love of the world around her. In Mastilovic’s Nature’s Gaze, a spray of pink, yellow, purple and orange gives the plant theme a euphoric feel as viewers stare. Nearby, Taylor uses a palette of green, blue, black, white, orange and yellow to create an ecosystem. Martinez’ canvas, titled Immerse, is a tree with vines and flowers that showcases the beauty of nature while being surrounded by the night.
“I feel like there is music in everything in life,” Martinez said when it was her turn to speak, getting choked up as she thanked Orphanoudakis for the inspiration. “There’s that energy inside of you and you take that energy and you have to tell yourself every day that this is who I am, this is what I am going to create.”
By the end of the night, each artist had received a plaque with a picture of their artwork and certificate of recognition. Orphanoudakis—the star of the evening—accepted both flowers and a special award. In a short speech, she said she was deeply grateful to each of the artists that had attended.
“I am so touched and moved, just first of all by meeting you and seeing these wonderful paintings and hearing the stories about the paintings,” she said. “This feeling of connection, meditation, contemplation and finding ourselves in a better place so that when we’re in this chaotic situation that we find ourselves in now, we know that there is so much good in this world.”
Around her, emotions remained high for some artists as they struggled to describe their work in front of the woman of the hour. Taylor, shaking off her nerves, directed the audience to her multimedia canvas, resilient and poised as she spoke about the impact of Orphanoudakis’ work on her own.
“I’m here because I believe in connections, and that's what my piece is about,” Taylor said. “You have a little bit of the sun there, water, some leaves; just kind of how everything recirculates.”