Memorial for Joan Gardner Sun., Mar. 9, from noon to 2 p.m.

John Slade Ely House Center for Contemporary Art
51 Trumbull Street, New Haven, (203) 624-8055
Memorial for Joan Gardner
Sun., Mar. 9, Noon—2 p.m..

From Anna Broell Bresnick and Paul Clabby, director and curator at the John Slade Ely House comes an announcement of a memorial event for Joan Gardner, a gifted local artist who passed away Feb. 16:

The John Slade Ely House is hosting a Memorial Event for Joan Gardner on Sun., Mar. 9, from noon until 2 p.m. We hope that many of you will attend and that some will share a memory or two of your mutual friendship. Her husband, Frank, will join us and will most surely enjoy seeing a number of friends again. We look forward to seeing you there.

From Anna Broell Bresnick's announcement of Joan Gardner's passing:

It is with great sadness that our cultural community has lost one of its most vital artists. Joan Gardner passed away on February 16th at Hospice. She had been living at The Grimes Rehabilitation Center in New Haven for the past year and a half with her husband, Frank Gardner. She and her husband lived and worked in East Haven, and also maintain a loft on Bowery St. in New York City for many years.

Joan Gardner has been making art for over 40 years, and her primary interests have included painting, printmaking and bookmaking. Her creative ventures also included explorations in film and shadow puppetry. A puppet production of "Rooms" by Andrew Drummond was performed at the 42nd Street Theater in New York. She had been a member of 55 Mercer Gallery in Soho since 1973 until its closing at that location in early 2000.

Joan Gardner at Erector Square during City-Wide Open Studios, 2007

Joan Gardner’s prolific career as a painter has focused primarily on the world of fantasy and parody. The unrestrained creative energy of her work is achieved through the use of playful and whimsical imagery interspersed with the darker side of fantasy. Her vocabulary is grabbed in bits and pieces from all over the art world as well as from her own autobiography. This material is brilliantly painted, colored and collaged into large and small theatrical allegories. Medieval imagery, Bruegel, Rousseau, the artist’s friends and lovers, Indonesian tales and chimeras (like the monkey and lion) all find a place in Joan’s richly painted narratives. Her profound love of paint, vigorous gesture, rich psychological content and art historical references were the sources and inspirations of her remarkable work. Vibrant colors and whimsical imagery lure us into the paintings—they capture and delight us with their enticing, nightmarish humor.

"My images come from many sources including a large collection of masks and puppets from around the world. I have developed a style of intensity with color, form and gesture, which enhances the mood, mystery and ambiguity in my work. Humor plays a major role in my work as well. It must be subtle. I would like evoke a smile but never laughter."

Joan Gardner’s education included a B.F.A. and M.F.A. from the University of Illinois, and a Yale-Norfolk Summer School fellowship. She taught at Connecticut State University, The University of New Haven, Kent State University, Lane College, Jackson, Tenn. and The University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah.

Not only was Joan Gardner a highly imaginative, gifted painter, she also explored to great success various other mediums such as printmaking, bookmaking, installation at and film. Her two dimensional work has been shown in solo and group shows in New Haven, New York and in many museums and galleries across the United States including The John Slade Ely House (a solo retrospective, and one in conjunction with her husband), Artspace, Real Art Ways, Clock Tower, Tuthill Gimprich Gallery and 55 Mercer Galleries, all in NYC, as well as the New Britain Museum of American Art, the Akron Museum, Akron, OH, and the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, Cleveland, OH.

In the late 60's and early 70's Joan and her husband, Frank, made a number of experimental films. Her own stop motion animation films as well as those made in collaboration with her husband were shown and won numerous awards in many film festivals across the United States including Yale (three), Monterey, Harvard and two Ann Arbor Film Festivals. Lawrence Alloway praised Joan's film, "JigJag," in The Nation and ArtNews, and it was mentioned again in a review of her work in Art in America 20 years later. frankandjoantherobotproject.com is a website-in-progress created in remembrance of Joan as well as in preparation of a documentary about their film making process.

A Connecticut Commission On The Arts Grant, Yale Law School Film Grant and a N.E.T (New Hampshire) Film Grant are among Joan Gardner’s awards, and her work is in many private collections as well as those of Franklin Furnace, Lyman Allyn Museum, Yale University and The Museum of Modern Art.

"Hers (Joan Gardner) is a deeply original and inventive art." Michael Rush – Art New England and The New York Times.

"Joan Gardner has been producing an accomplished, diverse, and innovative body of work for almost four decades. She deserves a place of prominence in the annals of Contemporary American Art." Lawrence Campbell

We will very much miss Joan's vibrant contributions to our art community. She leaves behind her husband, Frank Gardner, and condolences may be sent to him at Frank Gardner, Grimes Rehabilitation Center, 1350 Chapel Street, New Haven, CT 06511.

Joan Gardner: "Virgin and Chimp"

 In 2010, I reviewed a retrospective show featuring the works of both Joan and Frank Gardner at the Ely House for the New Haven Advocate. As the corporate owners of the now-defunct Advocate haven't bothered to maintain an online archive, I will quote here from what I wrote about Joan Gardner's works in that show:

Joan Gardner's work pulses with emotional immediacy. Her paintings overall are characterized by darker subject matter and a darker color palette. Many of her drawings and mixed media paintings set figures and landscape against a black background or sky. Like fever dreams in a spooky children's book, her images feature trickster figures like anthropomorphic monkeys and cats, barking dogs, wild-eyed birds. In one painting, corpse-like face float in a steamy sea. Dragons, demons, bizarre masks, chaos haunts many of her tableaux.

In "In the Soup," the meal of two diners -- possibly the Gardners themselves -- is disrupted by one monkey chasing another across the dinner table, knocking over a wine bottle vase filled with flowers. Like many of her paintings, the pleasure of "In the Soup" derives from more than just the absurdity of the scene. Using a combination of paint, oil stick and crayon, she layers shade upon color shade, investing the static moment with vigorous energy. Similarly, in "Virgin and Chimp," the marks and colors seem to dance within the frame. It's mysterious and beautiful, rife with intimations of the unconscious.

Joan's passing is a tremendous loss. She was a truly gifted visionary artist. My condolences go out to her husband Frank Gardner.

Nurturing the creative, positive spirit in prison

John Slade Ely House Center for Contemporary Art
51 Trumbull Street, New Haven, (203) 624-8055
Prison Arts Program Annual Show
Through May 29, 2011

Their bodies may be caged but their imaginations are running free.

Started in 1978, Community Partners in Action's Prison Arts Program is holding its 33rd Annual show of artwork by inmates—and some former—inmates of Connecticut's correctional system. The Prison Arts Program affords inmates a positive, creative outlet for expression, a means to channel pent-up energy, thoughts and emotions in a constructive rather than destructive manner. Community Partners in Action, established in 1875, is dedicated to the successful reintegration of returning inmates into the community. The art program is just one of the many things the organization does. CPA services also include educating clients in life skills, monitoring clients for the criminal justice system, substance abuse counseling and education and overseeing community service commitments. While some of the inmates with work in this show will never leave prison, most will get out. Both for those who remain incarcerated and for those who complete their sentence, the art program offers a way to contemplate their life and possibilities.

That being said, it is understandable that there might be people—particularly family and friends of crime victims—who might take offense at this show. But I think one of the things this show demonstrates is that human beings are complex; our natures aren't black and white. John Slade Ely House director Paul Clabby says the response to the show has been overwhelmingly positive. He notes that many families of inmates have come to the show, which offers them a way to see their loved one represented in a positive light.

As imagery goes, it is a decidedly mixed bag. There is a fair share of kitsch and a lot of work derived from fantasy and tattoo iconography. That makes sense. Jeffrey Greene, who coordinates and manages the program as well as leading some of the workshops, encourages inmates to draw on their imaginations. The inmates create art that references that with which they are familiar. Many of the drawings have a decidedly folk art feel, albeit with an edge.

But much of the work in the show evinces rich, technical skill and an accomplished eye. Two drawings by Vincent Nardone—"Year of the Fin" and "Breakfast Family Style," rendered in stippled ballpoint pen—are vivid recreations of moments in a day back in 1959 when Nardone was eight years old and on his way to go hunting with his father and uncle. There is almost a spookiness to the level of detail: the swirl of reflections on the chrome bumper of the garishly tailfinned 1959 Cadillac and the 1957 Plymouth and 1959 Chevy in the background of "Year of the Fin;" the diagonal rays of sunlight coming through diner windows and the Knights of Columbus patch on the jacket of one customer in "Breakfast American Style."


A diner also figures in another powerful work—Andrew Wilson's "Orange Whip Diner." It's an interior scene of customers at a counter from a perspective behind the counter and in the foreground. Perhaps inspired by the experience of prison confinement, the drawing has a dark, crowded, claustrophobic energy.

Not all the works are drawings or paintings. There are a number of sculptural works, some of which—particularly given that they are made with tight constraints on the materials and tools the inmates have access to—are among the most impressive pieces in the exhibition.

Christopher Blanks' "1987 Mack 'R' Model 6x6 Highway Plow Truck" is just what its title says it is: a scale model of a truck crafted out of paper and cardstock. But it's also more. Blanks resisted any temptation to color the sculpture. Left completely white, the viewer is free to appreciate the intricacies of the form, the attention to detail. This is powerful machinery as ghost-like presence.


Scott Deojay has several sculptural works on both the first and second floors of the Ely House. His "Queen of the Dragons: Gathering of the Bones" on the second floor is stunning. Although fashioned out of paper and soap, it looks like a sword and sorcery fantasy carved out of ivory. "The Dream House," composed of mixed media, is a masterful work of the imagination, a multi-tiered doll's house diorama for which Deojay even created artwork for the walls and faux children's drawings to post on the refrigerator. Deojay is serving a life sentence for the kidnapping and murder of middle-school social worker Judith Nilan in 2005.




Other impressive works:

• Kelly Donnelly's "Nameless" and "Where Chakras Meet" are crafted out of sheets of paper towel colored with watercolors and rolled into yarn-like lengths of twine. "Nameless," in particular, reminded me of Van Gogh's "The Starry Night."


• John Wagner's "Super Nova" is an almost psychedelically detailed color drawing composed of countless concentric illustrated circles.


• Jason Peters' "The Spetuagint—Freedom and Liberty" is a fine point pen drawing of 70 men's faces, mostly African-Americans including Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., over which is drawn the three hands of a clock. Peters is a talented portraitist and a fine draftsman.

• Although Ross VonWeingarten considers himself a Buddhist, he created an Islamic temple out of paper. "Temple" has a deeply contemplative beauty.


The 33rd Annual Prison Arts Program Show will be on view through this Sunday, May 29.

Art as burning passion

John Slade Ely House Center for Contemporary Art
51 Trumbull Street, New Haven, (203) 624-8055
Figures in the Carpet: Work of Edward Castiglione
Through Nov. 14, 2010

Artist Edward Castiglione, according to Figures in the Carpet co-curator (with John Slade Ely House director Paul Clabby) and longtime friend Stephen Kobasa, "painted only for himself, always." Castiglione died earlier this year. He spent decades painting and drawing in his New Haven studio yet rarely exhibited his work. After Castiglione's death, Kobasa, with the cooperation of Castiglione's estate, examined the works left behind. Conscious as he was of Castiglione's immense talent, Kobasa writes, "I was unprepared for what I found in his studio after his death. Turning one canvas after another from the wall was like being in some new cave at Altamira with its pageant of visions."

Kobasa describes the show as "a miscellany" rather than a retrospective. Castiglione neither signed nor dated his works; the creation dates for many of them are speculative.

Whether the imagery is figurative or abstract, an inner flame of intense passion lights Castiglione's work. What animates these canvasses and works on paper is both virtuosic technique and an incandescent spiritual core.

Flames and anguish are common threads running through this exhibition. For many artists, the act of creation is a form of joy and refuge. Perhaps this was so for Castiglione. Still, the pain of personal existence and the cruelty of social existence is a searing presence in many of these works.

Sometimes this anguish is literalized. In two oil paintings dating to the 1970's that evoke the crime of the Holocaust, emaciated bodies are piled or huddled together. It's almost a travesty to call these works "beautiful," suffused as they are with suffering. But Castiglione's rendering of the figures is so fluid as to imagine him trying to caress and comfort the bared flesh, to offer solace with strokes of his brush. Painted more than two decades before the Iraq War, they also evoke the war crimes of Abu Ghraib to come: prophecy in the form of witness.


In a nearby room, with a series of works made around 1990, Castiglione took a more metaphorical approach. On one wall is a painting of three bundles of sticks—unbound fasces, a symbol of Roman authority adopted by Mussolini's Fascists in the 1920's. Facing the painting are six large drawings in pencil and watercolor. The drawings constitute "a narrative on La Repubblica di Salo, the final manifestation of the Italian Fascist State," according to Kobasa's necessarily fragmentary catalogue for the exhibit. Over the course of these six drawings, the bundle of sticks comes undone, sparks and is consumed in an inferno of orange and yellow flame and black smoke. In the concluding drawing, the sticks resemble bones. The bones of the dead, the poison fruit of war, are scattered and scorched in a miserable gray circle.


As for Castiglione's abstractions—what an immense, commanding talent! On facing walls in one room are two paintings in which Castiglione wedded light, shadow and color to a vision of remarkable depth and emotion. One of the paintings, apparently part of a menorah series dating back to before 1990, is a long, horizontal work depicting eight rectangular panels. The motif of flames illuminates this work, a meditation on gradations of heat and fire. Castiglione has not painted flames in this work. Rather, he painted the idea of flames—their consuming energy, their active motion, their symbolic and spiritual resonance.


On the facing wall is a huge abstract painting that could be a vision of monumental canyon walls. It is a work of complex, thoroughly controlled beauty with nary a brush stroke out of place. Yet, while beautiful, it also provokes deep unease. This is not soothing abstraction for the corporate boardroom. There is the sense, if these are rock walls, that the viewer—or artist—is trapped. The sky may be glimpsed above but there is no way to scale the walls, no escape from this claustrophobic, if awe-inspiring, existential trap.


In his final years, Castiglione worked on a series of paintings inspired by Persian carpets. Perhaps in part a commentary on America's Mideast wars, they deconstruct the patterns on dark canvasses, the imagery sometimes threatening to catch fire. There are hints of fractal geometry, the dark recesses of time and history, the comfort of cosmic order. Although derived from decorative and utilitarian objects, these paintings have metaphysical heft. It is as though the swirling secrets of galaxies are contained within these luminous, ornate spirals. Perhaps, were Edward Castiglione with us today, he would say they are.

Sunday afternoon opening at John Slade Ely House

John Slade Ely House Center for Contemporary Art
51 Trumbull Street, New Haven, (203) 624-8055
Figures in the Carpet: Work of Edward Castiglione
Oct. 17—Nov. 14, 2010.
Opening reception: Sun., Oct. 17, 2—5 p.m.

Also showing Oct. 17—Nov. 14, 2010
Lauren Laudano, Sculpture/Installation
Eric Litke, Photo/Installation
Alyssa Sciortino, Paintings
Opening reception: Sun., Oct. 17, 2—5 p.m.

Press release

For over forty years, Edward Castiglione made a life’s work of drawing and painting in his New Haven studio. He showed his art only rarely, and little of it during the last two decades. This exhibition is an anthology made up almost entirely of that unseen achievement, with its extraordinary range of painterly skill and compelling subject matter. With influences ranging from Caravaggio through Anselm Kiefer, his unique vocabulary has long deserved to be more widely known. It is finally presented here through the generosity of the Estate of Edward Castiglione and the John Slade Ely House.

This exhibit was curated by Stephen Kobasa and Paul Clabby.