"What art does is it coaxes us away from the mechanical, and towards the miraculous." - Jeanette Winterson

On Wednesday we hosted Governor Ned Lamont, House Speaker Matt Ritter, Mayor Luke Bronin for a press conference announcing and celebrating the $9.1 million award Real Art Ways has been awarded from the State’s Community Investment Fund (CIF).

Joining those leaders and our Executive Director, Will K. Wilkins were Board member Derek Hall, CIF director Matt Pugliese, and our Learning and Engagement Manager Cai Diluvio.

There was a terrific energy with sixty guests, members of the press, politicians, and staff.

Click below to check out the full press conference on our YouTube channel!

Full Press Conference

In Our Galleries

sub-marine: jeweler of memory

Simon Benjamin

sub–marine: jeweler of memory is an installation by Jamaican artist Simon Benjamin that consists of video, photography, and sculpture. Through the project’s lens, the Caribbean is reframed as expansive, relational, and interconnected over multiple geographies, transgressing colonial divisions. Within the project’s framework, the sea is a unifying body rather than one that divides, reimagining dominant colonial narratives.

Simon Benjamin is a recipient of a 2022 Real Art Award.

Tubular Times:

Camp, Horror, and Music Television: Video Art 1981-1993

Curated by Terri C. Smith

Tubular Times: Camp, Horror, and Music Television: Video Art 1981-1993 is a group show that explores innovative, often humorously irreverent video art made during the years of Vestron, a Connecticut-based video distribution and film production company.

Exhibiting artists are: Peggy Ahwesh, Max Almy, Ericka Beckman, Gretchen Bender, Dara Birnbaum, Cecelia Condit, Cecilia Dougherty, Ulysses Jenkins, Nam June Paik, Ann Magnuson, Pipilotti Rist, and Michael Smith. It also includes a satellite installation featuring thematically-related work from the 2000’s by contemporary artists Am Schmidt and Willie Stewart.

Ayiti, I Saw It In A Dream

Steven Baboun

This photographic exhibition spotlights the diversity and complexities of Haitian identity and communities. Originally from Port-au-Prince, Steven Baboun cherishes his homeland of Haiti as a playground for self-exploration, an arena for political analysis and dissection, and a space for world-building outside of the Western gaze. This installation allows the viewer to enter Baboun's Haiti, a state between dreaming and consciousness, between Haiti today and the dream of a utopian Haiti for all Haitians.

Steven Baboun is a recipient of a 2022 Real Art Award.

El Disco Es Cultura

Adrian Martinez Chavez

Adrian Martinez Chavez's exhibition focuses on labor, love, celebration, and migration, and what it looks, sounds, and feels like to experience Mexican culture in the Northeast of the United States, using images of his father in his family's restaurant, Monte Albán, in Hartford.

Adrian Martinez Chavez is a recipient of a 2022 Real Art Award.

Gallery Information

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