Top: nico w. okoro. "Instead of a thematic show with overly heady content, the theme is just us," she said. Bottom, from left to right: Nile S. Okoro, Untitled #1, 2026; Michell Clark, Eyes on the Road, 2024; Ebony B. Mckelvey, Untitled, 2019; Michelle Beaulieu Morgan, Sisterhood Is Powerful and Period 3/4 Society and Entertainment; Merik Goma, Light Study (nico), 2020; Nadine Nelson, By the North Star: Reading Signs In Uncertain Times; David Jon Walker, No Gains, 2024; Aly Fox, Squares at the Table no. 1 and no. 2; Jason Ting, Fluorescence, 2024. Lucy Gellman Photos; all work by the artists in the exhibition.
On the walls of 838 Whalley Ave., over two dozen pieces of art are speaking to each other. In one, a black-and-white photograph from 2018, a mother sits tenderly over her daughter’s parted hair, face tilted down beneath a visor, her hands doing a kind of alchemy. A few frames away, a subject in profile looks directly out at the camera, a sleeping infant laid across her chest while another grows in her heavy, round belly.
Beneath the image, two time-weathered hands rest atop each other, the skin ready to tell decades of stories. Nearby, a doll clad in a tiny, detailed leopard print dress turns her head onto the center of the room, as if she is taking everything in. It feels, for a moment, like she’s just getting to know these matriarchs for the first time.
All of them are part of a group exhibition at SOURCE / MATERIAL, a new studio space and sort-of gallery at 838 Whalley Ave. that is part of the nascent Artists’ Bloc. An initiative of the bldg fund with support from artists across the city (and, increasingly, the region), it is organized by artist and curator nico w. okoro and printmaker Dani “silencio” Ramirez, who both also have work in the show.
Last month, it opened during Westville's Artwalk Weekend, just after a visit from letterpress printer Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr. It runs through June 21, with events that are posted to the bldg fund’s Instagram. Of the 53 artists that currently belong to the Artists’ Bloc, it features 27 member artists and a few additional names, including okoro and her young son, Nile.
“Instead of a thematic show with overly heady content, the theme is just us,” okoro said in an interview at the studio-gallery, which sits directly next to Manjares restaurant in New Haven’s Westville neighborhood, last month. “We have amazing artists who come from our city. This is New Haven, through New Haven’s eyes.”
The story of Source Material is also the story of the Artists’ Bloc, which the bldg fund launched formally in the spring of this year. Last year, okoro collected over 50 responses from an artists’ needs assessment in the New Haven region, in which multiple artists and cultural workers asked for more creative spaces where they could engage with each other, exchange ideas and materials, and exhibit their work.
Susan Clinard's Journey Boats with postcards by Amos Paul Kennedy.
okoro, who is no stranger to how fragmented the city’s arts landscape can be, began building out a new spot that was part incubator, part library, part rotating gallery and part salon-style gathering space. Unlike the Orchid Gallery, a hallway space that the bldg fund curates and runs at the LAB at ConnCORP, SOURCE / MATERIAL weaves in an invitation to stay a while, with couches, comfy chairs, and tables for artists who want to take a load off.
As it came together, “I thought, let’s match what artists are asking for with what they don’t already have,” okoro said. Part of that, she realized, was a space for artists who were (and are) just reclaiming that title for themselves, despite the fact that they’ve been doing artistically and culturally relevant work for decades.
She learned, for instance, that Muffy Pendergast—queen of Westville’s giant puppet parade—was just starting to self-identify with the term. So too Westville Village Renaissance Alliance (WVRA) Director Lizzy Donius, who has worked to keep the neighborhood’s cultural heart beating for years, and BLOOM Owner Alisha Crutchfield, who has cultivated and nurtured a creative haven and booming flower shop just blocks away on Edgewood Avenue.
Then she started thinking about resources that she could provide to artists, including an arts library that she has built up (and contributed to) over years of doing curatorial work, with information on everything from media and techniques to changing museological practice. In addition to creating a gallery space and resource library, she folded in a “trading post” where artists could exchange materials—and opportunities—and identify the right institutional partners to work with.
Member artist Michelle Welsh, for instance, came into the space with extra materials that another artist was able to use for their work, without having to spend extra dollars on a new project. Someone dropped off frames that okoro was able to pass on to First Haven, the new space on Dixwell Avenue that ConnCAT and ConnCORP plan to unveil to the public later this month (she is also helping curate art in the space).
Muffy Pendergast's creation, which in early May doubled as an advertisement for Westville's Artwalk Weekend.
The resulting show from the group, hopefully the first of many, is as thrilling as it is accessible and deeply, visually rich, in a way that asks viewers to both linger and come back early and often. At the entrance, a paint-splattered, cacophonously bright puppetmobile from Pendergast greets attendees, giving them a whimsical welcome that suggests there may be far more magic inside.
Several feet behind it, visible through the street-facing windows, Susan Clinard’s larger-than0life “Lady Liberty” wilts inside the confines of a too-narrow, coffin-like box, her head smushed against her fist and shoulder. Her torch, its flame extinguished, and handheld, inscribed tablet, rest broken at her feet.
Surely, a viewer thinks, this cannot be the same figure who once towered over New York Harbor, the image of charity and aid that the huddled masses looked to with awe, because she is so exhausted, so hobbled that she is hanging on by a thread. The juxtaposition is arresting: the unfettered, pint-sized joy and energy of the puppets in the window, against this bleak symbol of Democracy withering on the vine.
Top: Jasmine Nikole, A Little Birdie Told Me, 2026; Aisha Nailah, Naija Knots, 2023; Jeremy Grier, Rue de Rocher, 2021. Bottom: Bottom: Work by Candyce "Marsh" John and Susan Clinard are installed side by side.
That’s just one of the ways artworks chat with each other across the walls, telling a story of New Haven that is as diverse, layered, and multigenerational as the city itself. On a wall to the right of the door, chunky white letters swirl against a red background, spelling out the word V O T E over two registers in a canvas by artist David Jon Walker. It's only when a viewer looks closer that they see the words “No Gains" in blue beneath them, obscured by the allure and ease of the white text. Beneath it, grace à artist Jason Ting, bands of fluorescent, sunrise-colored light cut across aluminum, blending into each other until a viewer can’t tell where one color ends, and the next begins.
Between the two, Ramirez’ “Tile (A+B),” a candy-toned duet in monotype with silkscreen, feels right at home, with almost-twin images that explode into starbursts of orange and pink, purple and cornflower blue. So too A. Fox’s gallnut-dye-on-linen “Squares at the Table,” completed this year, which seem at once to riff on Josef Albers’ Homage To The Square and hold court with Ramirez’ bright, electric forms.
Lean in close, and it’s almost possible to hear the pieces whispering back and forth across the frames, exchanging notes on color and shape.
Dani "silencio" Ramirez, La Ventana, 2025.
Artists, it seems, are just getting started. Beside Clinard’s “Lady Liberty” on the back wall of the gallery, Candyce “Marsh” John’s 2025 acrylic-on-canvas “Disjointed” is unlike most things in the artist’s oeuvre that have ever been on display, showing a mastery of form that plays with the idea of space and time, just as she does in many of her better-known pieces.
In the lefthand corner and center of the frame, a horse’s full chest and shoulder turn just slightly to the side, muscles huge and rippling beneath its glossy coat. As the animal strikes a pose, a person’s eyes jump to the rider sitting side saddle, or maybe frozen mid-dismount. Blue jeans, the color of water on a clear New Haven day, hang over the person’s legs. Something about them is soft, limp, as if they are dressing a ghost. Above them, the rider’s torso is a mere suggestion of a torso.
As shapes and letters swirl around the figure’s feet, questions emerge: Who is this person? Why are they here? What life story, what confluence of events, has brought them to this moment? In a classically Marsh move, the canvas feels full, but never busy: even swaths of black space are more nuanced the longer a person looks, with a scored, lighter background and array of shapes that comes through the paint just beneath it.
Particularly powerful—although not specifically planned—is a body of pieces in which mothering, maternity and matriarchy become a through line, from Jeremy Grier’s moving “Keila holding Zenith and Zion” to Clara Nartey’s mixed-media “Standing On The Shoulders of Others” just a few feet away. In these artworks, installed around the gallery, viewers get a whole breadth of experience, each image worth coming back to many times over.
Arvia Walker, These Hands - Auntie Mae, 2016.
Take, for instance, Arvia Walker’s photograph “These Hands - Auntie Mae,” a black-and-white photograph from 2016 that is part of her work as both an artist and an archivist. In the image, two hands lie gingerly on top of each other, the fingers on the right overlapping with those on the left. Everything here is beloved and pristine: Mae’s neatly painted nails, the time-weathered skin, so thin and soft you can nearly feel it through the glicée paper, a purse inscribed with The Lord’s Prayer in airy, cursive script.
It’s so intimate, this image of a matriarch’s hands, and yet so universal: a person can study the image, and feel like they know Auntie Mae a little better. Or maybe they know their own version of Auntie Mae, and seek to be just like her one day. Or maybe they are auntie Mae, which is to say that they’ve arrived. In and around the frame, both Walker and okoro imbue the looking space with a sense of holiness: these hands seem both heaven-sent and like they have spent a lifetime doing sacred work, the work of caring for others around them.
On all sides, they feel of a piece with the works around them: not just Grier’s portrait of maternity, shot in an interior space that makes the viewer aware of how intimate this moment is, or Nadine Nelson’s “By The North Star: Reading Signs In Uncertain Times,” but also Clinard’s Journey Boats, faces etched with exhaustion, and Jasmine Nikole’s “A Little Bird Told Me” across the room, the subject still young, with soft, wide eyes that are ready to take in the world. Likewise, there's a kinship with two early sculptures from the artist Linda Vauters Mickens, who seems to deliver a masterclass in emotion every single time.
Top: Detail, Clinard's Lady Liberty. Bottom: Clara Nartey, Standing on the Shoulders of Others, 2025.
This is the kind of close looking that SOURCE / MATERIAL enables: a viewer (or at least, this viewer) walks away reminded of the sheer power of looking in a space where artists can also gather, break bread, and trade ideas and feedback with each other. There’s something specific about interacting with these media (yarn, acrylic, digital photography, fabric, and all manner of printmaking) in real life: the works have the sense of being alive and dynamic, and so very present in physical space.
For many of the artists in the show, Source Material has also been an awakening and a chance to find and sustain community. In “TorSoul B (female)” and “TorSoul E (male),” Crutchfield presents two forked maple wood stumps, carved from wood she foraged in her own backyard. Completed this year, “these pieces were born from a period of significant personal transition, a time when I turned to the outdoors to navigate the complexities of a changing love life,” she writes in an accompanying statement.
The title is meant to be the verbal, visual and emotional portmanteau of “Torso” and “Soul.” The idea of the torso—"the core of our being”—was important to her. “It is the center from which we love, grieve, and grow.” So too was the connection to nature, where she is able to pause and reflect in her otherwise jam-packed schedule of running a business, supporting friends and collaborators in the community, and being a mom.
But the works also tell a love story: together, they form the word BE. It’s a story of these two sculptures falling in love with each other, and also a story of Crutchfield falling back in love with nature, with making, and with her own creative potential and ability to work independently as an artist.
Detail, “TorSoul B (female)” and “TorSoul E (male)."
“Honored and a bit surreal,” Crutchfield said in a text message Tuesday, when asked how it felt to be in the exhibition.” I don't consider myself an ‘artist,’ but as I've spent more time self-reflecting, I've come to believe that creativity exists in many forms, and perhaps my work deserves a place in that conversation. Being part of the art show felt like validation—not just of the pieces I created, but of the journey that led me to create them.”
“It pushed me to see myself differently and to embrace the idea that art isn't just about technical skill or formal training; it's about expression, vulnerability, and connection,” she added. “Displayed among other artists—many who I greatly admire—and having people engage with my work is both humbling and empowering.”
Back across the space, okoro’s own “Couldn’t be better. You?” seems equally right on time, the kind of piece that meets this mind-bendingly-hard moment we are in with wit and barbed humor. From afar, and even a foot or so away, the piece appears soft, like a chrome-colored beach ball that is slowly deflating. But the closer one gets, the clearer it becomes that this is in fact hard material, a metallic orb to which okoro has taken a hammer, creating dents in its shiny surface. A valve, as if air might come hissing out, sits at the top.
There’s something so relatable in the piece: it’s easy to close one’s eyes and feel the hammer making contact with the orb, its clammy handle and sudden weight against skin, the exquisite satisfaction of knowing something must break before it gives way to something new and evolving underneath.
That’s the general vibe of SOURCE / MATERIAL too—that this is a place for experiments, for artists who are rediscovering the hidden parts of themselves, for connection in a city and region where the cultural scene can feel broad and siloed all at the same time. Like many of the nontraditional gallery spaces that have popped up—cafes and restaurants, yes, but also homes, hallways, and the often-used program rooms at branch libraries—it’s still a spot that a viewer might stumble upon, and then return to many times over.
Unlike some of those spaces, though, and thanks very much to its location, it also feels like a destination: an attendee might come in, then stay for a meal at Manjares, then wander around Westville get lost in the lush, late springtime gem tones of Edgewood Park just across the street. On two recent visits to the space, the walls and floor flooded with mid-morning light, that seemed like what okoro was going for.
“This just feels like a container for different types of collaborations,” she said.