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Remembering Christina Spiesel

Lucy Gellman | June 28th, 2024

Remembering Christina Spiesel

Culture & Community  |  Arts & Culture

Back_To_The_Future_Gala_256 (1)

Defining Studios Photo. Courtesy Helen Kauder.

Christina Spiesel taught people to see. In her classrooms at Quinnipiac University, Yale, and New York Law School, she influenced generations of law students who brought her teachings on to the courtroom. In Mount Carroll and Chicago, her brilliance in the classroom was often singular. And in New Haven, she helped transform the city’s art scene under multiple mayors, through economic hardship, and with a verve that came from living in its midst.

She saw books that had yet to be written, and poured herself into them. She saw kids that needed a little extra care and became a surrogate mother several times over. She saw fringe festivals halfway around the world and brought them to New Haven. If she saw a problem, she could also envision the solution.

Those are just some of the ways that friends and family are remembering Spiesel, a champion of New Haven’s artists and arts organizations who died of pancreatic cancer in early June. An educator, author, visual artist, former arts commissioner and adoring mother and grandmother, she left an enduring mark on the city, from City Hall to Quinnipiac University School of Law to Artspace New Haven. She was 82 years old.

“She was just so generous,” said her husband Sydney Spiesel, a pediatrician and immunologist to whom she was married for over six decades, in a phone call earlier this month. “And I was so lucky.”

“We talk about Renaissance Men—people who have all these skills—and she was quite talented like that,” remembered artist Linda Lindroth, who first met her in the mid-1980s. “Even though she wanted to be called an artist, she was also an intellect, a scholar, and a very, very fine writer. She had a lot to say with a clarity and a confidence that could produce wonderful things to read, to look at and to think about.”

That path to the arts began at Shimer College, a small liberal arts school in Mount Carroll, Illinois where she enrolled after just two years of high school. The daughter of a professor, John Bennett Olson, Spiesel lived at home and pursued a bachelor of arts, which she ultimately earned in 1962. Based on the philosophy of Robert Maynard Hutchins, Shimer provided “a brilliant liberal arts education” in which she thrived, Sydney recalled. 

It was also there that the two, who became inseparable, first met. For two years, “we were absolutely best friends,” Sydney recalled—including driving 50 miles to see an Ingmar Bergman film, and traveling through miles of Illinois farm country together. And then one day following his graduation, they became more than friends. They had parked, Sydney recalled, by the banks of the Mississippi River for what was one of their winding, complex conversations. “We talked and talked and somehow talking changed. And that was it.” 

It marked the beginning of their life, defined by a profound and humbling kind of love that criss-crossed multiple states, degree programs, careers, children and grandchildren. After graduating in 1962, Spiesel joined Sydney in Chicago, where she pursued a graduate degree in the humanities at the University of Chicago and became a mother to their son, Elie. While she excelled in graduate school, she didn’t particularly like it, Sydney recalled—mostly because she knew that she wanted to be an artist.

After her graduate studies, Spiesel accompanied Sydney to New Haven in 1965, where he pursued graduate work in public health and immunology. As they settled into their Everit Street home, she became fast friends with several “major players” at the Yale School of Art, he said. It wasn’t just that she was a social butterfly or a cultural luminary—although she was both—they genuinely respected her intellect and her artwork.

Before she even had her own workspace, which she ultimately found in a building across from the old Clark’s Dairy, she was weaving herself into the city’s arts landscape, and into her role as a cultural educator. She taught drawing to Yale University students and found a place in Bard’s Language and Thinking program. She branched into large-scale paintings—colleagues remembered a series of animals—and abstractions.

During that time, she was also building her family. When her daughter, Sirri, was born in 1968, Spiesel threw herself as avidly into a two-kid household as she had into her artwork. At home, she raised her two small children alongside pets that ranged from dogs to guinea pigs to salamanders (in written remarks earlier this month, Sirri remembered it as “a veritable zoo”). There was nothing, it seemed, that she couldn’t do.

“When Elie and I were little, my mom would sprinkle our lives with magic,” Sirri wrote in a eulogy that she shared earlier this month. “She sewed stuffed animals and beautiful clothes for us, she organized pies with whipped cream after my brother and friends said they were curious about getting a pie in the face, she took us on NYC adventures regularly, and she would help us to make molasses pull candy.”

More than that, Sirri wrote, she was an extrovert who “believed strongly in building community,” and leaned into that value at every chance she got. Sometimes, it meant chatting up strangers “everywhere she went,” whether it was the grocery store or City Hall. Others, it looked like welcoming new neighbors to the city she had learned so easily to love, as she did for Linda Lindroth and Craig Newick when they moved to the city in the early 1980s.

Their first Passover Seder in New Haven was at the Spiesel’s home. By the time Spiesel was exhibiting in Lindroth’s State Street gallery a few years later, the couples were both East Rock neighbors and friends. “Her relationship to the city that she lived in was very, very close,” Lindroth said.

She was also endlessly warm, with a huge capacity for care. Claude Cahn, now a human rights officer at the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), remembered growing up in New Haven alongside Sirri, and having Spiesel as a sort of second mom. After his own mother died in the 1990s, “she stepped into the role of surrogate mother,” and later, surrogate mother-in-law to his wife and surrogate grandmother to his daughters.

“She really was just very generous,” he said in a Zoom call earlier this month. When Cahn and his wife visited New Haven, the Spiesels always had room at their table, ready to tell old stories of his parents that often revealed new, vibrant details of their lives. When Sirri announced in her eulogy that “I’ve lost my best friend,” he felt it to his core.

At a time when New Haven was transforming, Spiesel also played a role in the city’s municipal development. After the election of Biagio DiLieto in 1979, she was named to and ultimately chaired the city’s Cultural Affairs Commission, a position she held for nine years. During that time, she helped steer the renovation of the Shubert Theatre, which had closed in 1976 and reopened under city ownership in 1983 (“it was kind of this political hot potato,” and she handled it with grace, Sydney recalled).

She championed a then-nascent Audubon Arts District and the birth of Artspace New Haven in 1986. All the while, she also exhibited her own work, including at Lindroth’s Gallery Jazz at 1015 State St. When her own studio was broken into and her canvases vandalized, she used it as fuel to fold more abstraction into her style. It was a testament to how perceptive she was, both Sydney and multiple New Haven artists said.

“There’s almost like a scuola de New Haven of women artists who had an affinity for the same spiritual art,” Lindroth said, mourning the loss of both a friend and a neighbor, and a chapter of New Haven history that is becoming increasingly harder to access. “I’ve known her since I got here, which is half of my life.”

“She really was the bridge between artists and city leaders,” said Helen Kauder, the former executive director of Artspace and brain behind the first City-Wide Open Studios. In the 1980s, Spiesel secured Artspace’s first $25,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, making the organization’s first brick-and-mortar home possible.

A decade later, she worked alongside Kauder on what became City-Wide Open Studios, dreaming the long-beloved “Alternative Space Weekend” into being. When the organization honored her during its 30-year anniversary in 2016, Mayor Toni Harp praised Spiesel’s long vision as helping revitalize the city’s arts scene for decades to come.

“Tonight we celebrate the legacy of a civic leader, artist, teacher, and ‘shaman’ whose critical eye and artistic flourish emerged as Artspace today,” Harp wrote, noting the sheer impact that a single dedicated civil servant can make on a community. “Together with Artspace, your City celebrates your remarkable efforts to promote freedom of expression in a world that so often forgets the true impact and social value of the creative voice.”

Her teachings, which were vast, also extended to the graduate classroom. Over two decades ago, Spiesel taught her first class at the Yale Law School, structured around visual literacy and the practice of law. In the classes, for which she designed and taught the curriculum, she was able to bridge the act of looking—visual perception and communication—with the practice of law.

“She assembled a vast array of readings – two full office binders’ worth – on every aspect of visual perception, visual understanding, visual communication,” wrote Neal Feigenson, Lynne L. Pantalena Professor of Law at Quinnipiac University School of Law, in an email to the Arts Paper. “There were some legal applications, of course, but it was her visual exercises, along with discussions of the readings, that I remember as the heart of the course.”

Feigenson later taught “Visual Persuasion and the Law” alongside Spiesel for 23 years at Quinnipiac. “She was just the inspiration, the designer of the pedagogy, the intellectual heart of the course,” he said in a phone call earlier this month. “It is the most rewarding teaching experience I’ve ever had, and that was largely because of her.”

As the two taught alongside each other, their work was often defined by deep, mutual respect and intellectual rigor. During the course, students had to create an example of what is called demonstrative evidence—a photo array or a chart used to illustrate someone’s testimony. In addition, they had to create a five-minute video argument, a final assignment for which they learned both legal and video production techniques.

Spiesel often pulled from real-life examples, priming her students for the courtroom in ways that they couldn’t have imagined before her class. In one, for instance, students created a visual to show what happens to the human brain when it experiences hyponatremia, or a sodium imbalance that can be fatal. In another, students came up with visual ways to display racial discrimination in the juvenile justice system.

Over the years, their work together became the foundation for several papers, conference presentations, and a book, titled Law on Display: The Digital Transformation of Legal Persuasion and Judgment. In addition to teaching at Quinnipiac, Spiesel took her work to New York Law School, where she had an appointment for years.

“Every class she was in, I thought, ‘I hope the students appreciate what a gift this is,’” Feigenson said. “Not just the accumulated wisdom, but these sparks of intelligence and creativity.”

Those sparks of intelligence are still dancing through the universe, trying to make sense of a world without her in it. Artist Cynthia Beth Rubin, who first met Spiesel in the 1980s, praised her insight and support for the city’s artists, who benefitted from her vision for a thriving cultural landscape.

“We'll really miss her as a rock in the New Haven arts community,” she said. As the two cycled in and out of each other’s orbit, including sharing a studio during CWOS, they became close. Even when they didn’t touch base for months, “I did think of her as kind of extended family.”

Kauder, who had breakfast with Spiesel shortly before her cancer diagnosis, remembered how vibrant and sharp her friend remained until the end. Years after she was an active member in city politics and of the group WOWPac, Spiesel was still aware of the churn and upheaval in New Haven’s arts scene, from the physical closure of Artspace’s Orange Street home to controversy that had roiled the Ely Center of Contemporary Art last year.

“Right to the very end, she really believed in the impact of having civic leaders and advocates in the arts,” she said.