First Aldrich Decennial shows off a world of artists in Connecticut

In art – as in real estate and life – location is everything.

Artists have found Connecticut “just right” for more than 100 years. The state has been home, refuge, and workplace to a long list of art history titans: Anni and Josef Albers, Kay Sage and Yves Tanguy, Louise Bourgeois, Alexander Calder, Jasper Johns, Barkley Hendricks, and Sol LeWitt.

Contemporary artists are following in their footsteps in big numbers.

They’re coming for the same reasons: proximity to New York without the rat race, room to spread out, countryside, teaching jobs at the state’s numerous colleges, good schools for children, Yale’s esteemed MFA program.

They’re coming for new reasons: NXTHVN, affordability, community.

Through 12 years working at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in southwestern Connecticut, Diana Bowes Chief Curator Amy Smith-Stewart thought about all of this. Saw the outmigration of artists from New York accelerate during COVID. Thought about her own time in New York, part of that spent working at what is now MoMA PS1 and its decennial survey of art across the City, Greater New York. She determined to do something similar, statewide, for Connecticut.

“The Aldrich Decennial: I am what is around me” represents the debut of a recurring survey featuring artists living and working in Connecticut. As the state’s only institution exclusively dedicated to contemporary art, the presentation spotlights current artists and practices emerging from Connecticut.

“A decade felt like enough distance to reflect on generational shifts or geopolitical events or technological changes; we also tend to measure an artist’s career in decades, so it felt like the right cadence,” Smith-Stewart explained to me of her motivation for producing a decennial as opposed to more commonplace art biennials or triennials. “This type of exhibition making is very different than a biennial because that’s a fast pace, and it’s also bringing artists from around the world to one place. This is acknowledging place as an extension of, or how place informs the imagination; it’s very much rooted to the local.”

Smith-Stewart took the title, “I am what is around me,” from the opening line of Wallace Stevens’ 1917 poem, Theory. Stevens lived in Connecticut’s capital city of Hartford for 40 years.

“We tend to forget how much our own everyday settings have an impact on the scale, the materials that we have access to. We think about biography. We think about our history. We think about different personal mythologies, but we don’t always focus on the setting in which artists are working and how that impacts their approach and the content in their work,” Smith-Stewart said. “I also didn’t want to have this exhibition be driven by a curatorially crafted theme, but something generated by the work itself. This idea of focusing on place, which was the genesis for doing the exhibition, felt like a great find.”

Smith-Stewart and Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum Assistant Curator and Publications Manager Caitlin Monachino conducted over 100 studio visits across the state. Place stood out not only in terms of geography, but setting. Personal place/space. The curators were surprised by the variety and types of studio spaces and environments they encountered artists working in.

“It’s a very different experience with studios that are in urban, suburban, and rural areas. Curators who work with contemporary art tend to go from one urban environment to another, and so a lot of the studios look the same, or are in warehouses or factories, sometimes garages,” Smith-Stewart explained.

Not in Connecticut where she found studio sheds, outbuildings, and large spaces purpose built on property artists also live on.

“That’s another reason why artists were drawn to working outside of New York, the possibility, which doesn’t really exist anymore in New York – unless you’ve been in New York City for a very long time and you’re an older artist – to live and work in the same place, and you certainly can’t live and work in the same place and have your studio be in its own setting,” Smith-Stewart explained. “(Connecticut has) artists who are working in plein air who are literally working outdoors on their property within nature. It was surprising to me how much the environment in which they’re working changed their work or had an impact on how they were making their work.”

The dynamism of Connecticut’s landscape has long provided a respite for artists who have chosen to work outside the pressure and expense of major metropolitan art centers like New York or Boston.

A World of Artists Comes to Connecticut

Smith-Stewart and Monachino focused on finding an intergenerational mix of artists for the decennial. Artists at different stages of their careers. Artists distributed across the state, beyond its most artsy enclave of New Haven, home to Yale. Artists native to Connecticut and transplants.

An astonishing global diversity of artists are featured. Again, a result of proximity to New York, Yale’s MFA program, and NXTHVN. Nigeria, Chile, India, China, Sudan.

“We ended up with an artist from Venezuela and Iran in the show during a time where political events were happening between our nation and their nations,” Smith-Stewart said.

And an artist, Gary Burnley, who lives walking distance from the museum in Ridgefield the curators were unaware of.

Common themes running through the artworks include migration and hybrid identities, memory and trauma, an interest in Americana, regionalism, and craft traditions, the intersection of technology and the natural world, as well as portraiture and marginalized histories.

Themes and artists simultaneously global and local.

“People think of New York as a global city with intersecting diasporic communities, but they don’t necessarily think about that when they think about Connecticut,” she added.

The diversity, number, and caliber of artists across the state – a state oft overlooked as an arts destination – served as a prime motivator for Smith-Stewart from the outset. Showing off Connecticut art and artists as it exists now, standing on the shoulders of so many giants.

“Artists are living and working everywhere, we just associate artists and artistic practice, and even contemporary art exhibitions, with happening in major urban centers,” Smith-Stewart said.

Art, whether for maker or admirer, shouldn’t be limited to big cities. It shouldn’t be a luxury good or enjoyed by the public only on vacation. It’s not thanks to places like the Aldrich.

“It’s important that contemporary art exists in suburban and exurban and rural communities, where there’s less access, and especially because we don’t have as much art education in our schools; sometimes this impacts people so much that it changes the entire direction or course of their lives,” Smith-Stewart said. “Contemporary art especially, and all art forms, builds empathy. It also is a way to diversify your life experience. You can learn about so many different cultures, so many different histories.”

“The Aldrich Decennial: I am what is around me,” through January 10, 2027, spans the full footprint of the museum’s 8,000-square-foot galleries, three-acre campus, and sculpture garden.