Top: Creative Arts Workshop, including Shea Sin's White America. Bottom: Linda Mickens' 2025 Unclaimed. Lucy Gellman Photos; all artwork by the artists.
The gesture is so universal it doesn’t need words. Seated in the window of the Hilles Gallery, the woman leans in, closing her eyes as if she is about to pray. Her head tilts to one side; her mouth relaxes, but never goes completely slack. Her hair, a head of gentle curls, glows bronze in the light. Behind her, bright buttons and beads hang from a pair of wire wings, marking the moment as divine.
But something isn’t right here. The wings are home to dangling bracelets, necklaces, watches that all feel like they should belong to someone. Where another warm body should be, she holds a pile of shoes to her chest. There are loafers and heels and sandals, some small enough to belong to kids. More shoes pour down past her feet, as if they are just waiting for their owners to come pick them up.
Linda Mickens’ Unclaimed is one of over 100 works in Hill Blocks View: Coming Together When Things Fall Apart, a project of Nasty Women Connecticut running at Creative Arts Workshop March 8 through 22. Just weeks into Donald Trump’s second presidency, it marks a fierce call to collective action, using art as a political, didactic and narrative catalyst for change. It opened, just as it has in years past, with a shoulder-to-shoulder reception on International Women’s Day.
It is curated by Luciana McClure Lewis and Sarah Fritchey, both of whom were co-founders of Nasty Women Connecticut in 2016 (that crew also included Valerie Garlick, then director of the Institute Library, and a small army of artist-activist helpers that filled a Chapel Street space with artwork). The two also credit artist and curator Aimée Burg, Lyman Allyn Art Museum Curator Tanya Pohrt, artist Aude Jomini, and several art handlers from the Yale University Art Gallery for helping install the show.
Lewis and Fritchey.
“I think we’ve been expanding and rethinking,” Lewis said at a walkthrough of the exhibition on Friday morning. “What are the guiding voices, what is the ancestral knowledge, that is going to get us through this [moment]? What are the tools that we need?”
“If we don’t find a way forward that is rooted in solidarity, we’re not going to make it,” she added, framed by Sarah Falman-Florez’ massive Vessel of Life, a pair of oversized mixed-media breasts that attendees can crawl beneath and into. “And if we’re gonna build a movement, it has to have care at its foundation. That’s it. That’s all we have. It is each other.”
The show marks a full-circle moment that curators never wanted to have. In early 2017, Nasty Women Connecticut launched as a response to Donald Trump’s first election and presidency. At the time, Trump was just weeks into his first term, and had already put into place bans targeting immigrants and refugees in majority-Muslim countries. Then, just as now, the moment marked the continuation of a campaign defined by violence towards women, anti-immigrant rhetoric, and an erasure of LGBTQ+ lives that has intensified under his second administration.
So when the Knockdown Center in Queens announced that it would be holding a “Nasty Women” exhibition—so named for an insult Trump lobbed at Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton during a debate in 2016—Lewis put out a post on social media, asking if anyone wanted to do something similar in New Haven. She didn’t expect a Facebook post to become a movement, she said—but rose to the challenge with her collaborators when it did.
Top: Becky Bailey's Ceremonial Chair of Support and Receptivity, seen from outside the building. Bottom: Sweater, by Dennis Carroll.
That first year, the show ran in the space below the Institute Library, which now houses The Devil’s Gear Bike Shop. Since, the collective has graced spots including the Ely Center of Contemporary Art, the Yale Divinity School, MarlinWorks Building, and most recently the Lyman Allyn Museum of Art and Connecticut College. It has, in that time, welcomed poets, visual artists, theater-makers and composers into its ranks. When Covid-19 forced a virtual pivot in 2021, the team also took the exhibition online.
But after 2022, Nasty Women took a break. Lewis and Fritchey were tired. The U.S. was in a different political moment. They both had full lives, including scholarship and kids and artistic and curatorial projects of their own. When President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, both felt—at least temporarily—optimistic about the presidential election for the first time in months.
But when it became clear to them that Trump was going to win the presidency, something changed. The two mobilized. “We could feel the gravel slipping,” Fritchey said. “So what do we do to come together in this moment?”
The answer is in the exhibition itself, a collection of close to 100 works that are often in conversation with each other, with their viewers, and with the historic New Haven institution in which they are installed. Even before a viewer steps into the gallery, they are forced to contend with this show, face-to-face with an upside-down, greyscale image of Elon Musk that looks out onto Audubon Street.
Top: SISTERESIST, by Atelier Cue. Bottom: A post-performance tableau from Howard el-Yasin & Meg Bloo's Watermelon Works. "Watermelon is a historical symbol of resistance for African American and Palestinian people, and in many cultures its seeds represent women’s fertility. We offer you watermelon as a gesture of queer hospitality. The sharing of its seeds represents communal solidarity toward a future where we can all thrive. After consuming the fruit, participants are asked to drop the seeds into one of the glass containers in the gallery for their future value TBD," the artists write in a text for the exhibition.
In the upper register, thousands of people rally around President Donald Trump, their signs bobbing amidst the buzzing roar. Beneath it, Musk—an unelected official who has supported the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party and since January begun a precipitous and unprecedented gutting of the federal workforce—is giving what appears to be an enthusiastic Nazi salute. Behind him, an American flag fills the background, so magnified that only a small portion of its stars and stripes are visible.
It’s a call to white supremacy and xenophobia that feels, perhaps, uncomfortably and deeply American. But the artist, Sacred Heart University student Shea Sin, doesn’t stop with the gut-churning impact of the images themselves. Over Musk’s chest, the words Fight Back stand out in clean, capitalized white letters. Above them, also flipped, another message: It Doesn’t Go Away. It’s cheeky and sharp: Sin pictures two serial offenders in action, but zaps them of their power (at least, in this place and time) by turning the image on its head. Their gestures, at least temporarily, are as chaotic and backwards as these men are.
“I really hate the orange man and his minions, this poster is to show the horrors of our government being taken over by wealthy fascists that only want white men to have freedom,” the artist writes in an accompanying exhibition note. The floor-to-ceiling windows, which also boast text and allow a peek inside, further amplify the power of the image.
Inside, that sense of a biting and contemplative retort is everywhere, from a protest-themed clothesline from Unidad Latina en Acción to a paper lantern from Atelier Cue printed with photos and names of fierce, nasty ancestors who have come this way before. Beyond an Elon Musk doormat—a nod to artist Kayce Lewandowski, who has superimposed buck teeth and furry rat ears onto Musk’s face—work fills the gallery, commanding the space without ever making it feel too crowded.
Take, for instance, Becky Bailey’ Ceremonial Chair of Support and Receptivity, a wingbacked chair that Bailey inherited when her grandmother went into an independent living facility, and later into hospice. On the chair—which Bailey chose not to discard after putting it temporarily out at the curb—she affixed dozens of stuffed fabric arms and legs, a gesture to the hands that care for those who are at the end of their lives (in the U.S. , those hands overwhelmingly belong to women—daughters and sisters and in-laws, but also home healthcare workers who are barely paid a living wage).
The work is physically imposing, but it also feels like it’s supposed to take up exactly this amount of space. It’s also interactive: a viewer sits there, amidst these soft, welcoming limbs, and they get to share in a site of labor and memory that is specific not just to Bailey, but to the matriarchs who paved the way for her to exist. Or in Bailey’s words: “The result is something unsettling and strange, but that beckons with many hands to move towards, to be embraced.”
And indeed, something has shifted here: the conceptual strength of the works in Hill Blocks View often feels more profound and more coherent than in years past, or maybe just punchier. That doesn’t mean it's always loud: works like Margaret Roleke’s 19th and Ann Burke Daly and Marion Belanger’s Night Studio (For Vera Rubin) are meaningful precisely because of their layered, rigorous but quiet approach to praxis and to history.
Top: A detail of Ann Burke Daly + Marion Belanger's Night Studio (For Vera Rubin) 1900/2025, beside Dennis Carroll's Seeing and Not Believing and Yolanda Petrocelli's Deseredando on trouble times n resilient. Bottom: A detail of Laura's Pole Dancing.
In the second, the two artists have researched and gathered astronomical files—information about the night sky—and fused it with a deep, velvety pigment print of trees as they reach their bare branches to the heavens. On the print’s surface, numbers float through space, rough and stark enough that it looks like they have been drawn in white out.
The result is something of a map, in which the viewer may try to locate themselves, or these woods, or something else entirely. The print is named in honor of Vera Rubin, an astronomer whose research on galaxy rotation helped support theories around the existence of dark matter.
In a month that has seen photographs of women stripped from federal websites, it feels like a powerful reminder that it is on us, the viewers—not those in power, for whom profit may be the greatest goal—to educate and amplify each other. So too in Roleke’s 19th, a cyanotype that layers the fight for women’s suffrage (hence the nod to the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution) with the current battle for sanctuary and fight to keep immigrants safe.
In Jeff Slomba’s 2022 Doric Collapse, meanwhile, the message is more explicit. On an old-school tube t.v., viewers watch a building’s classical facade fall apart and come back together, its body framed in a screen that looks like it once hosted Lawrence Welk and Leave It To Beaver. In reality, Slomba has rigged and filmed a push puppet—normally a thing for child’s play—in a cycle of destruction and rebirth that plays on loop for 16 minutes.
Top: Erin Michaud's Beauty Revealed, alongside which is Anna Marie's Rage and Hangoul Choi's Her World. Bottm: Detail, Bianca DeSimone's The Shitty Mirror.
It’s a commentary wrapped within a commentary: Slomba is showing how fragile, how collapsible the project of democracy is, on the thing that totally changed how politics and media are consumed and metabolized. As the video plays, he leaves it up to the viewer to decide what they want to do with that information.
It’s not all fire and fury: many of these artists have been at it long enough to know that if they do not take a breath, they will burn out well before the fight is over. In a corner filled with woven rugs, plush pillows, a pollen-colored chaise and writing desk, multimedia artist and Global Local Gourmet founder Nadine Nelson has installed 12 bright, Warhol-esque portraits of Black women leaders, from Ida B. Wells, Octavia Butler, and Toni Morrison to Harriett Tubman.
In creating such a specific and visually lush container, Nelson invites both rest and repair (and rest as repair), a nod to Nap Bishop Tricia Hersey that she acknowledges above the desk. Across the room, Laura F.’s Pole Dancing feels like a living reminder of why this rest is so necessary: the artist has chronicled her years-long battle with chronic illness—and the stereotypes that often accompany it—on a sterile silver pole hung with IV bags and pill bottles.
“I created this installation as a space for reflection, resistance, and rest—three things that Black women have always had to balance,” Nelson said in an accompanying exhibition text. “Inspired by Shirley Chisholm’s iconic words, I wanted to challenge the idea that Black women should always fight for a seat at the table. What if, instead, we chose rest as resistance? What if, instead of a folding chair, we brought a chaise lounge?”
Around Nelson’s installation, Fritchey and Lewis have installed three pieces that seem to have always belonged together, despite the newness of their coexistence. In a small but moving diptych, artist and curator nico w. okoro has paid tribute to her Great Aunt Harriett, who passed away at 100 years old in 2016.
Top: Nadine Nelson's A Table of Our Own: Rest, Reflection & Radical Imagination, with works by nico okoro and Rachel Liu. Bottom: Detail, nico w. okoro's …to measure time in centuries, not election cycles (Harriet F. Cralle, 1916 - 2016).
In photographs matted side by side, okoro brings the viewer into Harriett’s sitting room, where her face remains in soft focus beside a fake orange tree, and her kitchen, where her hands are palm-up over the table, shelling peas. In her fingers, the peas are deep green, in such sharp focus that a viewer can nearly hear their crisp snap.
okoro, who now leads the bldg fund, explains in an exhibition note that family members were only allowed in the sitting room—a site largely dedicated to artifice and presentation—on Christmas, while the kitchen was “the real social epicenter of both our home and the neighborhood.”
“I juxtapose the sharp focus on the fake fruit with the soft focus on Harriet's ancient hands shelling peas to comment on our present moment, where the fake threatens to eclipse the real and illusions of togetherness are seemingly valued over the ongoing work of social cohesion,” she writes.
Nearby, Rachel Liu’s multimedia Belonging invites a viewer to see themselves in the work, as two mirrors flank a collage of photographs from the artist’s Bloodroot Sessions and black-and-white images of women throughout history. In the images, Bloodroot participants embrace each other, stand shoulder-to-shoulder, hold each other’s hands, smile so hard it is almost palpable. Just feet away, a freestanding grid of Bloodroot photographs adds texture and voice to the mix, pulling a viewer back in after they’ve walked away to see more of the show.
That momentum continues on the second level of the gallery, where multiple salon-style walls live alongside sculpture, photography, video and multimedia installation. On one, so close to the door it is easy to miss, photography by Odette Chavez-Mayo, Kaitlin Tan Fung, Helen Kauder and Roxy Savage all build and riff on Venus imagery, which for entirely too long has been informed and managed by overwhelmingly white male artists.
Each artist, in their own way, breaks from this, and there is absolute magic in the result. In Chavez-Mayo’s Inanna, for instance, a photographer stands naked behind an old-school camera and tripod, one arm raised towards the heavens as the other hangs at her side, wrist flexed. Her body is there—heavy, full breasts with blooming, dark areolas, thick curves that lead to her hips and legs, a thicket of cherry blossoms over her lower regions—but it doesn’t feel overtly sexual.
Anna Russell, everything felt macro and micro all at once.
Instead, there’s a sense of power and control (and objectively, an extremely sharp eye) that suffuses the piece. In an accompanying text, Chavez-Mayo explains that the work is named for Inanna, a Mesopotamian goddess whose protection extended to women and trans people, and who was invoked in the work of poet Enheduanna. Millenia later, the moment is one that calls for both of them.
“The rampant persecution, oppression and desecration of women and trans folks under our current fascist right wing government will be avenged by Inanna,” Chavez-Mayo writes. “Justice will prevail. May we all be protected under her. May we all feel her power and her protection. As we gather to relish in reverence for life with care, connection, beauty and art, may our hearts be filled with the joy and perseverance to not only survive, but to thrive as the magical living beings that we are on this precious Earth.”
So too across the gallery, on a long, busy wall that weaves through time and space to tell at least a dozen stories. There is, for instance, Anna Marie’s fiery Rage, a striking contrast to the soft and even child-like Her World beneath it, a painting that the artist Hangoul Choi has dedicated to her daughter. Or Kymberly Noone’s Reflection and Christian Miller’s Looking For Hope In The Shadows, which seem to talk to each other as they take on the very essence, evolution and fragmentation of female and maternal identity. In the center of it all, Anika Stewart Devout pulls a viewer in with its deep reds and rich blues, giving the space a sense of having been blessed or sanctified by something female and divine.
There are so many pieces like this, well worth a close look (or many). Biana Simone’s The Shitty Mirror invites a viewer to see themselves among these works and this show, extending them a chance to be part of this movement. Joan Fitzsimmons lets her viewer sit uncomfortably with loss and death, probing something real and visceral, in The Aftermath. Anna Russell documents history as it is happening, reminding her audience to do the same before it is too late.
In Ilana Harris-Babou’s Decision Fatigue, a video that runs just over eight minutes, Harris-Babou films her mother as she embarks on a drawn-out, increasingly ridiculous beauty routine, turning a ritual coded as feminine—and the idea that women cannot face the world until they have adequately painted themselves into palletability—into the performance that it is as silly as the expectations placed routinely on women.
If there has to be an ending to this show, Lewis and Fritchey land it squarely, with some of the same open questions and persistent, thrumming rage that Hill Blocks View begins with. At the end of the second-floor gallery, Jennifer Rae’s acrylic-on-canvas and aluminium Steadfast Serenade packs an emotional punch, as effective as it is affecting as it protrudes from the wall. In the piece, the artist poses with their infant, eyes closed and cheek pressed to their infant’s head.
It’s a Madonna and Child, imagined for this moment. Any parent can feel this feeling: the warmth and softness of a child’s skin, that evolving baby smell, the exquisite miracle of tiny toes and thighs that crease with baby fat. Rae presents the image on a raised, round aluminum surface—a shield, not unlike that in Lisa Peterson and Denis O’ Hare’s An Illiad—suggesting even in this softness that it may be time for a battle.
Jennifer Rae's 2025 Steadfast Serenade.
And it is: Rae explains that the past year has been a medical whirlwind of pregnancy and birth against the backdrop of Trump’s election. What seemed like a gesture of wild hope—the decision to have a child—has now hardened into a different shape.
“My partner & I both have college degrees and years of career experience, and yet we have to rely on WIC, SNAP, and Medicaid for our new family’s most basic and essential needs,” Raw writes. “The budget proposal that just passed in the House will cut these programs drastically, leaving our food & health security very uncertain. “
Rae has put a freeze frame on something huge and intangible: the feeling that your heart lives outside of your body, that the world is careening out of control, that you will not, despite your best efforts and intentions, be able to protect the person who you care most about, whose existence is inextricably bound up with yours, who is perhaps the only person you would die for without hesitation.
And in a moment where everything is uncertain, they choose to fight with the tools they have.
“I choose to keep singing a serenade of hope, to bring love, and powerful magic into our baby’s life,” Rae writes of the piece. “I will help them access secure rest, continue to hold them in strong & soft arms, and teach them that to fight for justice, is to love deeply and safeguard what is most vulnerable & precious.”
Isn’t that, after all, what we are all here for? For our sisters and our daughters and the matriarchs who made this possible? For our brothers and our sons, too? Aren’t we supposed to be thinking seven generations ahead? Isn’t it on us to raise men who do not rape and pillage and plunder because they know there’s a better way? Aren’t we supposed to find our armor in times like these, when the going gets tough?
Isn’t that why we are fighting for this thin and fragile thing we call progress? Isn’t that why we haven’t given up yet?
"There's a choice in doing nothing," Lewis said Friday. "I don't think we can afford that. You don't just stand there and take it. I always go back to thinking about what art can teach us, what art can do for us."
For more from the exhibition, listen to an episode of WNHH Community Radio's "Arts Respond" recorded in the gallery.