Connecticut’s Artists Have Been Hiding in Plain Sight
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum's inaugural decennial exhibition showcases works by 40 artists in the state, all made in the last decade.
RIDGEFIELD, Connecticut — Connecticut has been home to a thriving community of artists, including Sol LeWitt, Louise Bourgeois, Jasper Johns, Barkley Hendricks, Alexander Calder, Yves Tanguy, and Josef and Anni Albers, among many others. But new generations of artists have been making ambitious works in leafy college towns and sleepy suburban enclaves unbeknownst to many of their neighbors.
That’s about to change. Over the next six months, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum is showcasing 40 artists based in the Constitution State in its inaugural survey, The Aldrich Decennial: I am what is around me.
The museum’s mission has supported artists at different stages of their careers, with a particular emphasis on feminism and public artworks — as in its landmark 1971 exhibition, Twenty Six Contemporary Women Artists, the first feminist group show in the United States, and the more recent homage 52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone, which included a number of female and nonbinary participants.
For its decennial, Chief Curator Amy Smith-Stewart wanted to share the spirit of discovery she experienced working on MoMA PS1’s Greater New York in 2005 and observing the Hammer Museum’s Made in LA series. An annual or biennial compendium did not seem appropriate for the Aldrich, but Smith-Stewart also wanted to assemble pieces that grappled with a volatile period of United States history.
“All artworks were made within the decade, and I liked the idea of exploring how geopolitical events infiltrated the lives of artists and ended up in their work,” she told Hyperallergic.
Smith-Stewart visited roughly 100 studios across the state before whittling down her cohort to 40 artists. Their works fill every corner of the museum’s early 21st-century exhibition space, required to be set back from Ridgefield’s historic Main Street, not far from a site where British forces broke through a Revolutionary brigade in April 1777.
