Enjoy an intimate 3-course dinner hosted by some of New Haven’s most esteemed artists in their private studios at 14 Gilbert Street, a former print factory. Surrounded by artwork in progress, you’ll have the unique opportunity to hear the artists discuss their ideas and process. Choose from one of five studios—several studios will only be open for this experience. After the meal, everyone will convene for dessert and a champagne toast down the hall at the Westmount Group Furniture Workshop, owned and operated by our former Board Member Jeff Carter.
Each dinner features local and seasonal cuisine inspired by bright flavors, colors, and textures prepared by Small Kitchen Big Taste. Preview the menu, here.
Alex Jackson, Michael Demps and Erica Wessman are 2017 graduates of the Yale School of Art and share a studio. Alex is the recipient of a 2015 Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture residency. His work has been featured in a 2017 solo show at Steven Zevitas Gallery and a 2016 group show at the Elmhurst Museum of Art. Through the investigation of narrative painting, historical research, physical being, Afro-diasporic histories and geographies, and mythology, he attempts to create a nuanced understanding of what it means to inhabit a space and time. Michael Demps’ work translates breath into wind, water into noise, trespassing along the dangerous edges of caricature to reveal an ongoing repetition of trauma. Never singular, the objects—candles cast from a racist trinket, bottles of chocolate milk, magnetic marbles, Motown refrains—interrogate substance to ask something of subjectivity and the complicity of address. Bound, cast, overturned, these indices of identity and history conjure a trajectory where violence remains intimately urgently present. He is included in Fictions, a group exhibition of emerging artists opening September 2017 at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Before coming to Yale, he received his BFA at CalArts. Erica “Wessy” Wessman has been granted residencies at the Atlantic Center and the Vermont Studio Center, attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2015 and Cooper Union before coming to Yale for an MFA in Sculpture.
Artspace is marking City-Wide Open Studios 20th year just as the State of Connecticut’s grant funds have evaporated and the National Endowment for the Art’s immediate future is in peril. We are turning to you, our friends, to help support our festival at a watershed moment. Please join us!
For this special benefit that helps keep CWOS free and directly supports our artists, please help us cover the costs of the ticketing by absorbing the ticket service charge. Thank you!
Libations provided by Stony Creek Brewery, Esperto Wine, and Mionetto Rose & Brut Champagne.
Event Co-Chairs: Artspace Board Members Marion Belanger, Cathy DeMeo and Jane Lubin.