Young Bristol artist making his mark

I may not know much about art, but I know an artist -- Bristol's own Joe Bun Keo, who graduated this year from the University of Hartford and is beginning to make his mark as an artist out in the real world. Back in the day, he was a Tattoo mainstay and he was, is and ever shall be a real friend.
Read about his latest in Underground Art School here.

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Copyright 2009. All rights reserved.
Contact Steve Collins at scollins@bristolpress.com

Artist Glo Sessions to sign calendars on Sunday

A press release from the New England Carousel Museum:

Glo Sessions Limited Edition Calendar Signing
November 30, 2008
2:00 PM-5:00 PM

A special limited edition 2009 calendar has been created by the New England Carousel Museum to honor Glo Sessions, a beloved Connecticut artist of international reputation. Please join Glo at the New England Carousel Museum on Sunday, November 30, 2008, for a special calendar signing. The calendar signing will coincide with the Museum’s annual art contest for children awards ceremony and its annual Santa Sunday holiday celebration. Admission is free to the Museum between 2:00 and 5:00 PM.

Glo Sessions' work is on display in universities, museums, corporate offices and in many private collections throughout New England and across the globe. Her prints and paintings have been included in juried and invitational shows from Washington, D.C. to Maine. She has been awarded more than forty prizes since 1975. Her work has been showcased in the Glo Sessions Gallery, located in the Carousel Museum building, in Bristol, Connecticut, since 2000.

The calendar features a wide and varied selection of beautiful paintings and prints, including popular selections such as Snowy Boulevard, a silk screen print of the beautiful Memorial Boulevard in downtown Bristol, Westwood Wildflowers, Down Willis Street, and the Last of Downtown Bristol.

Glo Sessions is a member of the Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts, the Connecticut Watercolor Society, the Connecticut Women Artists, Inc., the Boston Printmakers, and the American Watercolor Society. She is known for her painting and print making, and her versatility and love of painting people, scenes of Bristol and spectacular still life with flowers are the hallmark of her work.

Glo became a Board member of the Carousel Museum upon its formation as a non-profit, educational organization in Bristol in 1991. She was an active Board member for many years and has remained a friend of the Museum to this day. The Carousel Museum purchased the building in which it currently resides in 1999, and immediately began an extensive expansion project. The Museum created two fine arts galleries, one of which became a permanent gallery dedicated to work by Glo Sessions.

In 2007, the Carousel Museum created a new Award for Bristol entitled ACE. The Art, Culture and Entertainment award was created to honor an individual(s) or organization(s) who have contributed to the art, culture and entertainment in the greater Bristol community. Glo Sessions, along with Carlyle "Hap" Barnes, became the first recipients of the award.

The Glo Sessions limited edition calendar is on sale at the Carousel Museum or by mail. The price of one calendar is $20, 6-10 calendars cost $18 each and 10 calendars or more cost $16.00. Orders of 10 calendars or more will be delivered in the Greater Bristol area.
For further information, or to order your calendars, please contact:

The New England Carousel Museum
95 Riverside Avenue
Bristol. CT, 06010.
860 585-5411
info@thecarouselmuseum.org
www.thecarouselmuseum.org

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Copyright 2008. All rights reserved.
Contact Steve Collins at scollins@bristolpress.com

Haunted art gallery in Middletown

On Saturdays, sometimes I have to range far afield to write what my editors want for Sunday's Herald Press. It only happens every couple of months that my number comes up so I can't complain much.

So even th0ugh I doubt there are too many people in Bristol who would care, I give you this Saturday story, about an art gallery in Middletown:

Tucked away in a little art space on the north end of Middletown’s Main Street is a collection of ghouls, monsters, devils and death.
They’re all at the Middletown Artist Cooperative’s MAC 650 Artspace Gallery.
Lining its walls through Halloween are a widely varied collection of paintings, drawings and sculpture that include spiders crawling on eyeballs and brightly-colored demons.
“They put together something really, really nice,” said artist Adam Polsz, who has a couple of little pen and ink drawings included in the show.
Enza Giannone, a theater artist who lives at the cooperative, said that she “really likes the monsters,” a few creepy creatures that look like they came out Jim Henson’s “The Dark Crystal.”
Carrie Swider, a Hartford artist, said her favorite piece is probably the “Vampire Blood Transfusion Device” that perhaps could be vampire blood.
“It’s just the idea of it and the fact that it actually does work,” Swider said.
The show, called “The Haunted Gallery,” opened Friday and pulled in a crowd of nearly 200, Swider and Giannone said.
Two of the most striking exhibits are oil paintings by retired Wesleyan University professor John Frazer that show a man’s body with a snake head, in one case, and a bear head, in another.
“I don’t know if they mean anything,” Frazer said. “Maybe that all men are snakes or all men are bears.”
He said he was delighted when asked to contribute to the October-themed show and figured, “I’ll give you something that’ll knock your socks off.”
Frazer, who lives in Middletown and taught Swider, said he painted the large oils about five years ago after running through a series that included nude men with “all sorts of foliage growing out of their heads” and another that put skulls atop the nudes.
“Then I thought, let’s put the animal on top of them,” he said, adding that he simply follows his instincts.
Though they were done “as a lark,” Frazer said, “They’re surprisingly powerful. I look at them and get a little uncomfortable.”
Open Saturday and Sunday afternoons, the gallery has a special “Sunday Family Funday” event planned today.
It will include such free seasonal activities as pumpkin carving, face painting, cider, apples, and candy. Those who wear a costume will get a prize.
Though the gallery has been open in various incarnations for about six years, the Middletown Artist Cooperative has been in it for less than a year. It bills itself as “a progressive group of young artists who aspire to create a friendly and healthy atmosphere for Middletown residents.”
Polsz said that he sees great promise in it.
“Middletown is a great little city and it needs a little revitalization in part,” he said, especially in the struggling north end.
Middletown’s north end, he said, “just really needs somebody to get things going down there to make it something it should be” to take advantage of its “wonderful people and beautiful architecture.”
Polsz said that Joseph Dinunzio, who gallery coordinator, is doing “a helluva job” bringing it to life and making it a vibrant part of the community.
“It’s a great scene,” he said. “It seems like it’s going the direction it should.”
Open Saturdays and Sundays from noon to 5 p.m., the gallery depends on volunteers and the money it gets from renting space “really, really cheap,” Giannone said.
The exhibits change monthly and the themes jump around wildly.
“Next month, it’s robots and Twinkies,” Swider said.
For more information, the 650 Main Street gallery’s phone number is (860) 347-0834. It has a blog that also provides a lot of information at mac650.blogspot.com.

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Copyright 2008. All rights reserved.
Contact Steve Collins at scollins@bristolpress.com

Prudence Crandall takes her spot in the Capitol

Reporter Jackie Majerus wrote this story:

The new bronze statue of state heroine Prudence Crandall – installed Tuesday in the Capitol – is clasping a book and standing calmly next to her student, the two of them looking bravely forward.

Rather than perched atop a pedestal, the teacher and student are at eye level, which is exactly the way sculptor Gabriel Koren wanted it.

"I don't want to do any sculpture up high," said Koren, dismissing the use of a pedestal as "a very old fashioned idea."

People can't identify with someone perched way up high, said Koren.

But when the statue is at eye level, people have an easier time relating to the subject, and may say, "'Oh, she is just like me,'" said Koren. "The next step is, 'Maybe I can be just like her.'"

That kind of inspiration is what made the statue – to be officially unveiled in the coming weeks – possible after a decade of waiting.

State Rep. Betty Boukus, a Plainville Democrat who led the drive to see the statue become a reality, said it all started about 10 years ago with students at Hubbell School in Bristol.

The students wanted to know why Nathan Hale, the state hero, had a big statue in the state Capitol but Crandall – a white teacher who faced racism and terror after she opened her school for girls to black students – did not.

Boukus talked with the students about how they could get involved. 

"I represented them just as I represent their parents," said Boukus.

They wrote letters, testified in hearings and did their best to make the case for Crandall.

"We really wanted her to have a statue," said Leo Rausch, who was a fourth grade student at Hubbell when he and his classmates first asked Boukus why Hale had a statue and Crandall didn't.

"We collected money. We tried to let everyone know about it," said Alitha Krolikowski, now a senior at Bristol Eastern High School who was a Hubbell School fifth grader when she went to Hartford to lobby for Crandall.

"I think that it's really neat that what we did all those years ago actually amounted to something," said Krolikowski, who said she wants to attend the unveiling ceremony.

Rausch, who is now a freshman studying software engineering at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, N.Y., said in a phone interview Tuesday that he was glad to hear about the statue.

He felt good that a bunch of kids could "do something actually good" like put a statue in the state Capitol, Rausch said.

Boukus said she, the students and other supporters "lobbied everyone in the General Assembly" before she won a $100,000 state grant to support the project.

The children pitched in to help raise money, too.

In a campaign called "Pennies for Prudence," children raised more than $3,000, said Boukus. She said she didn't want any student collecting more than 10 cents.

It was a way they could make a contribution, an investment in the statue, said Boukus, and learn that if they wanted something, they might have to pay for it.

But, she said, "I did not want this to be a children's fundraiser."

Boukus was on hand at the Capitol Tuesday when the statue was set in place.

"It's exciting," she said. The statue is draped now, covered before an official unveiling.

"This is an historic day at the Capitol," said Boukus. "It's been more than 100 years since they put a statue in here."

The statue of Crandall is only the third of an individual to be added to the Capitol. The others are of Hale and former Gov. William Buckingham.

"This is going to be here forever," Boukus said proudly.

Crandall founded a school in Canterbury in the early 1830s for black girls and kept it going for almost a year and a half before concern for her students' safety forced her to close it. 

The school building at the junction of Routes 14 and 169 is now a National Historic Landmark and a state museum.

Initially, Boukus had to fend off a move to put Crandall outside the Capitol.

"I really wanted her inside," said Boukus.

The statue depicts Crandall standing with one of her students, a young black woman.

"We wanted to make the connection with young people," said Boukus, and to show that the teacher, a Quaker, saw no difference between the races.

In Crandall's time, said Boukus, learning wasn't something girls could take for granted.

"It was a privilege to be educated," said Boukus.

Crandall's school was "very revolutionary at that time," said Koren, who said she learned about Crandall after taking on the job of sculpting the statue.

Koren, a native of Budapest, Hungary, studied at the Hungarian National Academy of Fine Art. She came to the United States in 1978 at age 30, said Koren, to live in New York. She said she wanted to live in a multi-cultural, non-European country.

"I wanted to be living in a big city," said Koren. "I wanted to be in the mix."

Sculpting a likeness of Crandall was a challenge, said Koren, because there were no photographs available of her when she was a young woman running her school.

"The photograph, it was not invented yet," said Koren, who said she worked from a painting. The only photo of Crandall, Koren said, showed an old woman with a wrinkled face, not the young schoolteacher she sought to depict.

"It was difficult," said Koren. She said she went to the library and researched what kind of clothes women wore in the 1830s, when Crandall had her school.

The statue was six years in the making, said Koren, because part way through her work she took on another project, a statue of abolitionist Frederick Douglass, which will soon be erected in Central Park in New York.

"I was working on the two commissions at the same time," said Koren, who has a third sculpture to her name. It is of Malcolm X and is on display in the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem.

The picture, by the way, is from Youth Journalism International, a journalism education organization that my wife and I operate that brings scores of young writers from across the world together. You can find it online at youthjournalism.org.

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Copyright 2008. All rights reserved.
Contact Steve Collins at scollins@bristolpress.com

Is this mural still around?

In an old New England Magazine article, Frederick W. Coburn wrote about this mural by Vesper George of Boston. Coburn said it was destined for a bank trust building in Bristol.
In praising the mural in 1908, Coburn wrote, "The spirit of New England husbandry has rarely been more truthfully depicted" and that the work had "a right to critical esteem."
Is it still around somewhere?

The Greenfield Historical Society in Ohio has this little bio of George:

GEORGE, VESPER LINCOLN (1865-1934)
An American artist and teacher, born in Boston, Massachusetts, June 4, 1865. He received his public school education in Boston, and his art education in New York and Paris, studying under the famous French painters, Benjamin Constant, Jules Lefebvre, and Lucien Doucet. He was the owner and director of the Vesper Lincoln George School of Art, Inc., Boston, founded in 1924. Some of his best known mural decorations can be seen in the Public Library, Lowell, Massachusetts, in the Music Room of Mr. Session’s home, Bristol Trust Company, where he has four large panels, representing Commerce, Industry, Finance, and Agriculture. Each panel is about ten feet in length. In the Edward Lee McClain High School, Greenfield, Ohio, are three panels, executed especially for the school. Mr. George resigned from a position as head of the department of design, Massachusetts School of Art, which he held for over twenty years, to organize the Vesper George School of Art in Boston, Massachusetts. He was a member of the Mural Painters’ Society and of the Architectural Society of New York, the Boston Art Club, and the Boston Chamber of Commerce.

So I guess there ought to be at least four of these panels in Bristol. Are they still around?

They seemed sort of familiar to me and now, with a little more sleuthing, I know why. They were in the lobby of the former Bristol Savings Bank building on the corner of Main Street and Riverside Avenue, which I haven't been in for quite a few years.

You can read about the building and the murals in Eddy Smith's classic city history Bristol, Connecticut: "in the Olden Time New Cambridge", which Includes Forestville starting on page 652 right here.

I'm sure someone who's in there regularly can tell me if the murals remain.

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Copyright 2008. All rights reserved.
Contact Steve Collins at scollins@bristolpress.com