Hamden | Arts & Culture | Eli Whitney Museum & Workshop | Hamden Art League
Top: Jeanette Wimmer, Elizabeth (Liz) Scott, Brenda Burt and Rosemary Serfilippi. Bottom: Lois Ramunni’s Chess Player. Lucy Gellman Photos.
Maybe it’s the mosaic, pulsing with color and depth, that stops a viewer in their tracks. On one side, the tiles seem to dance, catching in the light as a man’s face comes into view. On the other, the world is abstract but orderly, with checkerboard-like squares of yellow and red, imprecise dots on a glossy black background. A saw-toothed row of chess pieces beckons from below. In a nearby frame, a wise owl looks intently outward, as if it is sizing up the viewer right there on the spot.
Lois Ramunni’s Chess Player is one of over 140 works in the Hamden Art League’s spring 2024 exhibition, running now through Sunday at the Eli Whitney Barn in Hamden. In its second year in the space, the organization has continued to grow its footprint, with around 80 artists and 17 art students from Hamden High School, Cheshire High School, Sacred Heart Academy and Amity Regional High School.
As the show opens, it doubles as a reflection on how far the league has come—and the work it still has cut out for itself—in just the past few years. The exhibition opened Thursday and runs Friday and Saturday from 1 to 7 p.m., and Sunday from noon to 4 p.m.. Entry is free; more information is available here.
Top: Nini Munro-Chmura's Predator Owl and Carol Aiello's Pointsetta. Bottom: Susan Hayward's Bending Horse, Patricia Hawley's Golden and Jennifer Riley's Chelsea Morning (Past tenses).
“It’s been quite a good ride,” said painter Jeanette Wimmer, a retired special education teacher who lives in Guilford, and makes the drive to Hamden each week for workshops and classes. “It’s been wonderful. The way everybody pulls together is amazing.”
That spirit of collaboration began months ago, when the organization first started planning its spring exhibition as a way to gather and celebrate artists in the greater New Haven and Hamden communities. Inspired by last year’s inaugural barn show (read more about that here), board members put out a call for entries, moving up the date to avoid last year’s sweltering temperatures. Meanwhile, they invited senior museum preparator Greg Shea into the mix to judge the work.
The response was overwhelming: close to 80 artists, both members and nonmembers, submitted work that ranged from oil painting to fiber art to installation. Burt, who is a retired science teacher, also reached out to several high schools in a bid to attract younger people to the group. An all-volunteer, seven-person “barn show team” set aside funding for awards—a first this year—and began working around the clock to make the show happen.
“Not only is it a great venue, it’s also this historical space and we’re bringing attention to it,” said Rosemary Serfilippi, nodding to fellow team members Brenda Burt, Wendy Kohli, Sharon Morgio, Liz Scott, Wimmer and Mary Wargo. As the seven coordinated everything from art drop off to hanging and installation, the team at the Eli Whitney Museum & Workshop jumped in, building a new ramp and handrail to make the barn more accessible.
Top: Sharon Morgio’s mixed media Finding Her Voice, which won an award. Bottom: Miguel Valdovinos' Visual Voice.
“I think we’ve helped them see the potential of this barn,” Burt said. Last year and again this May, the League used a hanging rail-and-rod system that leaves the barn’s sturdy, wooden walls unscathed. With signage for the show, artists also increased foot traffic to the barn, with some visitors who were simply driving by and stopped in to see what the show was all about.
In the centuries-old building, where the roof beams are wrapped in twinkling, honey-colored lights, the art has again become the star of the show. Just beyond the entrance, Sharon Morgio’s mixed media Finding Her Voice is a sort of warm welcome, the color vibrant against the barn’s dark walls. In the work, a woman leans forward, lips pursed as she raises a brush gingerly to her canvas. Her eyes furrow beneath glasses and thick red frames, focused on the scene in front of her. In her other hand, a dish of paint waits for her next move.
It’s a very New Haven sort of painting: this figure is fashion maven Todd Lyon, a member of the New Haven Brush & Palette Club who was part of last year’s show. Perhaps in an homage to Lyon herself—she is one-half of Fashionista Vintage & Variety—Morgio has mixed painting and collage, with pieces of printed fabric that pop out from Lyon’s crisp blue button down. Around her, the walls are punctuated by blocks of pastel color, making it painting of a painting of a painting.
This whimsy resonates across the space, adding pops of bright color and personality to the show. In James Cassell’s Summer, red and yellow shapes explode against a forest green background, in a series of spirals, bolts, splotches and squiggles that make it feel like an enlarged petri dish or slide beneath a microscope. On the opposite wall, Mary Lou Pelligrino’s First Dance radiates with that giddy exuberance of a couple pictured on their wedding night. Somewhere in between them, Candace Klein’s Sunflower Girl feels like an early slice of summer, with butter-yellow hues and a seated figure with sunflowers fixed in her hair.
Top: James Cassell’s Summer (in foreground), beside Ruth Resnick Johnson's Sam II and Tina Santoni's All The Life We Cannot See. Bottom: Scott walks through the exhibition. To her left is Eva Mugno Muneyyirci's Golden Gaze.
Elsewhere in the barn, the lack of a theme becomes the show’s strong suit. Portraits, which are perhaps never not popular, peek out from every wall and corner, so that a viewer may feel that they have dozens of eyes on them at any given time. Animals loll in the grass, nuzzle each other and carry on with their business of birdsong and foraging, completely unaware of the humans in their midst. Quilts flutter just slightly in the warm breeze and sculptures, still few and far between, remind a viewer to slow down, that they might study the fine detail and craftsmanship.
Taken together and apart, these works compel a viewer to stay in the present, with emotions that range from ecstatic happiness to emotional exhaustion.In the barn’s raised, lofted space, for instance, Liz Scott’s We Are Plastic reminds her audience that the material has become omnipresent, at great risk to both the world’s natural resources and its inhabitants. On two metal screens, plastic packaging forms a haphazard display, reshaped into plastic dolls, plastic lettering, and a huge plastic globe encased in a plastic bag.
Above them, a plastic banner with plastic lettering announces the title. It is overwhelming—to look at the amount of plastic that Scott has saved up for the installation, and know that a family of four might go through the same array of takeout containers, bubble wrap, Amazon envelopes, candy bar wrappers and produce encased in shrinkwrap and styrofoam—in a week, maybe less. But not all is lost: the sweet smells of wood, rain, damp earth and grass fill the barn and swirl around the installation, reminding a viewer of the need to safeguard what remains of the natural world.
Top: Elizabeth Scott's We Are Plastic. Bottom: Diane Chandler's Summer of '23.
“I’m disgusted by the amount of plastic in everything we buy,” Scott said Thursday afternoon, during a walkthrough of the exhibition that also included her award-winning watercolor Plain on Print. She gestured to an informational sheet on PFAS (Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), synthetic “forever chemicals” that have entered everything from air and drinking water to human blood. “It’s just nuts.”
Some of the show’s most compelling works come from its youngest artists, all high school juniors from across the region. In Leo Vigliotti’s pencil-on-paper Untitled, thick orange banners surround a figure’s face, obscuring his mouth. Across them, red text seems to shout at the subject, announcing work that is past due, deadlines that are fast approaching, reminders not to procrastinate. Looking at it, a viewer can feel the artist’s sense of overwhelm radiating from the page.
That tone shifts in Quinn Clark’s acrylic-on-canvas Father, a rendering of Jesus in a short-sleeved t-shirt, his long hair brushed onto his shoulders. Against a confetti-colored, prismatic background, he presses his palms flat against each other, looking out of the frame and to the viewer. The piece, which comes out of Cheshire High School, vibes with Sia’s nearby mixed media and embroidery Being You, a silhouette surrounded by bright, thin bands of rainbow color and dainty wildflowers.
“One of our goals is to become more diverse and bring in younger people,” Wimmer said of the students’ art. What she and other team members may not have expected was for it to become the wildly beating heart of the show.
Top: Leo Vigliotti’s pencil-on-paper Untitled. Bottom: Student artwork is a highlight of this year's exhibition.
And indeed, the show comes at a time when the League is working to expand its footprint with both programming and a more diverse membership base. Since incorporating as a nonprofit two years ago, the Art League has continued to experiment with new classes and workshops, from weekly plein air and still life painting sessions to monthly artist demonstrations. Board members are also trying to figure out how to recruit younger artists; most of the organization’s current members are retired.
Wimmer, who does publicity for the group, said she is delighted to see the show continue to grow as part of that work. Last summer, she was on vacation during the exhibition, and missed seeing it entirely. On Thursday shortly before opening, she buzzed through the space, pointing to works that delighted her.
She became bashful only around her own paintings, one a watercolor of a cardinal in a rare moment of stillness, and another of a pink peony bursting into bloom.
“I’m just so happy I’m here,” she said.