Getting back on track
Real Art Ways has big plans for the future with a full gallery, regular cocktail hours
Real Art Ways feels real again. It’d be wrong to say that Real Art Ways is making a grand return, since that happened well over a year ago when the galleries and indoor movie screenings resumed in October of 2020 after a period of outdoor film and performance events.
But with all the galleries filled, the Creative Cocktail Hour happening for several months in a row after an omicron-induced pause, and the cinema running features and shorts that are all the buzz for the impending Oscars this month, RAW feels fully back on track.
The future already looked bright. Real Art Ways is deep in the planning stages for a major renovation that will add several more movie screens, reconfigure the gallery spaces, add a “really nice cafe” and increase the opportunity for more live performances, says Executive Director Will K. Wilkins.
The upcoming renovations are the result of Real Art Ways buying the 56 Arbor St. building that it has been leasing space in for decades. The purchase was finalized in December and RAW is about to kick off a fundraising campaign. Wilkins hopes the renovations will happen within the next two years.
Meanwhile, Wilkins says, “it’s encouraging to see people come back.”
RAW’s decades-old tradition of Creative Cocktail Hours continues to happen on the third Thursday of every month. The gallery schedule has stabilized after a period when certain shows were extended or postponed because of COVID.
Crowds are gathering again, but the latest gallery exhibit explores isolation. New Haven
based, Michigan-born photographer Merik Goma’s “Your Absence is My Monument” series brings beauty and grace to visions of loneliness and despair that have become painfully familiar in the age of COVID. Goma says he actually began the series before the pandemic.
“I started in 2019. I was thinking about it since before COVID happened, then started thinking about it more, using the experiences I and others I knew were having. “
The artworks are large photographs of dour or distraught people in dark rooms. Goma creates environments for these precisely staged images that have the intricacy of theater sets, then lights them exquisitely to bring in enveloping shadows. He even uses a smoky haze effect in one.
“I’m very meticulous about the light,” says Goma, whose next exhibit in the area will be at the Amistad Center for Art & Culture in 2023.
“Your Absence is My Monument” joins four other artists currently on the Real Art Ways wall, all of them thematic series of artworks. Two artists who are both in their 70s, Peter Waite and Ken Morgan, each have dozens of their small brightly colored works on adjacent walls, complementing each other neatly even though the subject matter and media are wildly different.
In another space, Elizabeth Flood blends actual earth and grasses from historic Civil War battlefields into her oil paintings.
“It was really a special experience for her, going through that strata,” says RAW’s full-time visual arts manager Cody Boyce.
Goma and Flood are among the 2021 winners of Real Art Ways’ Real Art Awards, and the first two of those six winners to receive gallery exhibitions at the space this year; the other four will be shown in coming months. The winners often show a mix of old and new work, Boyce says. The 2022 Real Art Awards winners will be announced in the next few months.
In the most central gallery at the end of the RAW lobby, where concerts and other live events are often held, Tina Freeman has done photographic diptychs that contrast images of the Louisiana wetlands with the frozen wastelands of the Arctic.
Freeman’s artworks will be the backdrop for a series of discussions about the environment held at Real
Art Ways this spring, organized by Trinity College Professor Susan Masino. The first event is April 9 and includes a talk on “Lost Forests of New England: Celebrating Old Growth Forests” with Old Growth Forest Network founder
Dr. Joan Maloof and Native Tree Society co-founder Bob Leverett, a morning walk in Keney Park and a screening of the film “The Lost Forests of New England.”
Music concerts at RAW also make use of the art on the walls. Performers have been known to set up in front to specific artworks that add atmosphere to their sounds. This includes experimental jazz guitarist Joe Morris and the changing ensembles he assembles for his monthly “Improvisations Now” concerts. The next two concerts are April 24, when Morris is joined by trumpeter Peter Evans and violist Mat Maneri; and May 15, when the guitarist’s guests are cellist Tomeka Reid, vocalist Kyoko Kitamura and cornettist/composer Taylor Ho Bynum.
Other upcoming live events at Real Art Ways include a March 31 book signing by Harvey Fierstein, the actor and Broadway writer and gay icon whose autobiography “I Was Better Last Night” was published earlier this month. Fierstein’s appearance is a good example of the community Real Art Ways has built up over the years. Fierstein is an old friend of Wilkins and is holding an “intimate conversation” at the space despite making other book-signing appearances in the state already.
Wilkins has headed Real Art Ways since the early
‘90s, when the local arts scene was quite different.
“When Real Art Ways started in the mid-’70s, several other arts organizations started in Hartford at the same time,” Wilkins says, mentioning Peace Train’s outdoor concerts, Sidewalks’ street theatrics, the Artworks Gallery and Company One. “Real Art Ways is the only one that’s survived.”
When he took over in the 1990s, taking the gig to assuage a romantic partner who wanted him to find work in Connecticut, “the entire economy collapsed the day I arrived.”
He’s talking of turmoil in the local munitions industry following the end of the Cold War as well as major lay-offs at the insurance companies, but also of drastic cuts in federal arts funding and certain politicians challenging the work of certain performers and artists. Many of the victimized artists were targeted, Wilkins saw, because of their sexual orientation or sexually provocative work. His response was to invite those artists to Real Art Ways.
“Every time [Conservative North Carolina Senator] Jesse Helms denied someone funding, I invited them to Hartford,” Wilkins says.
“That alternative sensibility is something we continue to have today. Having four movie screens will allow us to be more edgy. We already present some of the best musicians in the world here, and will be able to do more of that. In the ‘90s we had to create a new business model. We built that over time, and now we have over 3,000 members. It’s a place where all kinds of people feel comfortable. We’ve worked on that. A lot of arts organizations, for instance, are supporting trans issues now, but we’ve been doing that for over 30 years.”
“The main thing that’s been missing with COVID is that people weren’t hanging out the way they used to. That’s going to change. There’s so much good stuff going on.”
Real Art Ways is at 56 Arbor St., Hartford. For more information, including a schedule of upcoming events as well as film screenings, see the RAW website at realartways.org.