Best Video Film & Cultural Center | Culture & Community | Hamden | Arts & Culture | Visual Arts
Patricia C. Vener, who stepped in to help organize when polymer clay artist Nancy Nearing needed an extra set of hands. Lucy Gellman Photos.
Artist Patricia C. Vener looked out from under the wide brim of her sunhat, scanning the parking lot of Best Video Film & Cultural Center for new visitors. Around her, strains of flute and guitar filled the air, listeners jamming from where they sat at a nearby patio. Beneath a tent, earrings glimmered in the afternoon sun. Beams of light poured over the ornate beadwork, making it glow.
The scene—and the sound—came to Whitney Avenue Saturday, during Spring Glen’s second annual Art Walk. Rescheduled after rain washed out the original date earlier this month, the festival featured painters, textile artists, ceramicists, beaders, woodworkers and silversmiths posted at almost a dozen locations, from quiet front porches to buzzing Hamden sidewalks. In all, 16 artists and two music groups participated in the event.
For Vener, a retired dancer and astrophysicist who helped organize Art Walk, it was a chance to celebrate the variety of art and artists in Hamden, a town that has been her home since 2006. This year, she took over planning after the date shifted, and polymer clay artist Nancy Nearing needed someone to help. While she loves New Haven, Vener said, she often feels like Hamden gets the short shrift when it comes to arts and culture.
Top: Artists on the sidewalk outside of Cantean Coffee & Tea on Whitney Avenue. Bottom: Members of Parker's Tangent outside of Best Video Film & Cultural Center.
“One of my goals is to make Hamden an art destination,” she said, joking that the town already has better parking working in its favor. “New Haven is not [all of] Connecticut. It’s not all there is and it’s not all there should be.”
Saturday felt like a small, still in-the-works testament to that goal (Art Walk is still getting its sea legs: the first iteration was only last November). As artists set up from Greenway Street to Haverford Street to Spring Glen Terrace, they showed off everything from woodwork to delicate macramé, the knotting so small and gentle it drew a viewer in close. Outside of Cantean Coffee and Tea on Whitney Avenue, a few easels appeared out of nowhere, and suddenly plein air painting was part of the afternoon.
As Parker’s Tangent played in front of Best Video, Vener buzzed around the table and chatted with fellow artist Megan Maxwell, a jewelry designer who was vending in Hamden for the first time since moving to the town four years ago. Every so often, a strong wind blew through the space, and the two scurried back to their respective tables to hold their artwork in place.
Megan Maxwell: Beading is therapeutic.
A history teacher at The Hopkins School, Maxwell moved to Hamden in 2019, after a decade teaching history and human rights in Baltimore and her home state of New Jersey. While her professional work may be the classroom, “making things, it makes me happy,” she said. Twenty years ago, she started beading when tendonitis forced her to put down her knitting needles for good.
She never stopped. For her, it’s extremely therapeutic: she beads when she gets home, when she’s listening to the radio, when she has the t.v. on and needs to do something with her hands. Saturday, attendees could see the sheer volume of her work in real time, from dainty blue hoops with silver squirrels and acorns to brightly beaded, tiered danglies with multicolored tassels at the end.
She praised Art Walk for bringing artists and makers together in their own town.
“I never thought I’d live in New England,” she said. Now, she doesn’t see leaving anytime soon. Art Walk gives her another opportunity to meet people in her community.
Top: Some of Vener's work. Bottom: Friedman's photography.
Back beneath a wide, shaded tent, Vener’s delicate beaded earrings, bracelets, and necklaces sparkled beside her bright miniature paintings, all waiting for curious onlookers. Nearby, photographs from artist Scott Friedman peeked out, the colors dancing against the blue sky. In one, a swirl of rust seemed so bright and alive that it nearly emitted light.
Laurie Sweet, herself an artist and at-large representative on the Hamden Legislative Council, gently kept watch over them after a family emergency called Friedman away from the event. After meeting Vener through her advocacy at Hamden’s Town Hall—“she doesn’t miss a meeting!” Sweet said—she was happy to help.
“I mean, we’re never going be on par with Westville’s Artwalk, but we do have living artists in Hamden,” Sweet said. “It’s only the second year and I think it’s already evolving.”
Inside Best Video, Executive Director Julie Smith said she was thrilled to offer up the venue as part of the second iteration of the event.
Best Video Executive Director Julie Smith: It's what we're about.
Since beginning her tenure last year, Smith has focused on both supporting Hamden artists and creatives, and knocking down some of the self-imposed geographic barriers that she sees between towns and cities in Greater New Haven. Already, she’s thinking about how she can better use the parking lot and storefront to host more artists when Art Walk returns in the fall.
“How could we not host?!” she said as a barista served up berry tea coolers and biscotti covered in a chocolate drizzle to a steady stream of patrons. “This is what we’re about. It was a no-brainer—this is exactly the kind of thing we want to be doing.”
“We gain so much from being New Haven adjacent, but it’s really fun to celebrate Hamden artists,” she said with a smile. “We’re already in for the next one.”
Top: Artist Nancy Nearing with her daughter Elizabeth. Bottom: Some of the pieces from the one-a-day challenge.
Half a mile away on Hawthorne Avenue, artists Aly Fox, Ericka Saracho and Nancy Nearing spread out across Nearing’s porch and sun-soaked lawn, catching up between visitors who stopped by. For Fox, who began using natural dyes last year, the afternoon was a chance to both vend in a new location and slow down after a sold-out Artwalk appearance in Westville earlier this month.
“The thing I like about it is that at Westville, it’s more of a fair or festival, whereas this is like, neighborhood porch time,” said Fox, admiring a sprawl of strawberry plants that had taken over Nearing’s front garden, and now bore dainty, ruby and carnelian-colored fruit. “It’s different.”
Like Maxwell, she said, she finds making meditative—sometimes so much so that she can’t say where her mind has gone as her hands work. Last year, Fox learned about natural dyeing through Feedback Friday, an online video platform that she started watching as a way to unwind. After “five days of bliss” in a workshop at Sanborn Mills Farm in New Hampshire, she was hooked.
Aly Fox, who runs Foxspark Design.
What she loves about it, she said Saturday, is the sense of “absolute flow” that she can enter when she works. No other area of her life is quite like that (in her day job, Fox is the vice president for community impact at the United Way of Greater New Haven).
“It’s just, you don’t even think,” she said, describing the cochineal, Brazilian wood, sumac, marigold, buckthorn, and home-grown garden mint that go into her dyes, used for cotton scarves, wraps and bandanas. “It’s so free.”
On the porch, Saracho looked completely at home among shiny green, blue, violet and terra cotta glazed bowls, hand-poured candles and ceramic garden markers labeled neatly with the names of herbs—oregano, fill, chives, thyme cilantro and catnip—one might plant around this time of year. As one half of Bright Raven Studio with artist Gabriela Margarita De Jesús, they said they were grateful to share the day with Nearing, who they met at Westville’s Artwalk last year.
Ericka Saracho, who runs Bright Raven Studio with their partner in life and work, artist Gabriela Margarita De Jesús.
Bright Raven Studio grew out of a love for pottery that Saracho and De Jesús, who are now partners in both life and work, shared after their time as students and close friends at Yale University. In 2019, Saracho took their first class at Creative Arts Workshop, and soon found that pottery relaxed them (“I didn’t even get on the wheel the first time!” they remembered with a laugh on Saturday).
De Jesús, who grew up in New Haven's Hill neighborhood, also loved the art form. It was only a matter of time until the two were working together professionally.
Saturday, Saracho stressed the importance of meeting and partnering with other makers in the area, who are also navigating artistry, entrepreneurship and the specific logistics of pottery. Unlike painting or beading, ceramics require a large, hot furnace called a kiln to finish pieces. For most artists, an in-studio kin is prohibitively expensive.
For Bright Raven’s work, Saracho and De Jesús usually work at home, and then fire pieces at the Amity Road spot Clay Date or MakeHaven's downtown hub. They said that both spaces, and the fellow artists they’ve met along the way, have made it more exciting to be working in New Haven. They added that the hardest part of the business is parting with pieces that they’ve grown to love.
“It’s been very exciting to see pottery grow in New Haven,” they said. While Bright Raven is still very much a side hustle—they work full-time at the Yale School of the Environment, and play rugby seriously in New Haven—“We couldn’t have done this by ourselves.”
Nearing echoed that sentiment as she tidied up her porch, showing off a series of tiny, whimsical polymer figurines no taller than her index finger. The works, which live among her polymer owls, plague doctors, delicate tiled pots and tiered, vibrantly marbled earrings in her oeuvre, come out of a one-a-day challenge that she set for herself earlier this year. It helped get her out of a creative rut, she said.
After helping plan both the first and second Spring Glen Art Walks, she was excited to see how the festival had turned out. For her, “it was more about the people and the connection than selling,” she said. “I loved having these two [Fox and Saracho] here.”
“And we loved being here!” Saracho responded instantly, beaming as they began to pack up.
In an email Monday, Vener said that she hopes to do another Art Walk in the fall, followed by one on Memorial Day weekend in 2024.
To learn more about Spring Glen Art Walk, visit the event’s Facebook page.