RIDGEFIELD, Connecticut — Connecticut has long been home to a vibrant community of artists, among them Sol LeWitt, Louise Bourgeois, Jasper Johns, Barkley Hendricks, Alexander Calder, Yves Tanguy, and Josef and Anni Albers. Yet a new generation has been producing ambitious work in leafy college towns and quiet suburban enclaves, largely unnoticed by the neighbors around them.
That is now set to change. Over the next six months, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum is presenting 40 artists based in the Constitution State as part of its first survey, The Aldrich Decennial: I am what is around me.
The museum has long supported artists at various stages of their careers, with a strong emphasis on feminism and public art. Its landmark 1971 exhibition, Twenty Six Contemporary Women Artists, was the first feminist group show in the United States, and a more recent tribute, 52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone, included several female and nonbinary participants.
For the decennial project, Chief Curator Amy Smith-Stewart said she wanted to recapture the sense of discovery she felt while working on MoMA PS1’s Greater New York in 2005 and while following the Hammer Museum’s Made in LA series. She said an annual or biennial survey did not feel right for the Aldrich, but she also wanted to bring together works shaped by a turbulent moment in United States history.
“All artworks were made within the decade, and I liked the idea of exploring how geopolitical events infiltrated the lives of artists and ended up in their work,” she told Hyperallergic. Smith-Stewart visited roughly 100 studios across the state before narrowing the group to 40 artists. Their works now occupy every part of the museum’s early 21st-century exhibition space, which sits back from Ridgefield’s historic Main Street, not far from the site where British forces broke through a Revolutionary brigade in April 1777.
