Creative Arts Workshop Student and Faculty 2026 Exhibition
Creative Arts Workshop
New Haven
Through Nov. 15
Q Bridge is a painting, above all, of atmosphere: a foggy night, light dissipated by clouds, wrinkled by water. It's a study in complementary color, too, the blue from the bridge and the wan yellow from the sulphur streetlights below it throwing sparks off one another. It's also a recognizable depiction of a local landmark, the Q Bridge that spans the mouth of the Quinnipiac River. But Eric March doesn't just show us what the bridge looks like. He puts us there on a specific night, looking at the bridge from a specific place in New Haven Harbor. He's pointing our eyes at the bridge, but he's planting our feet in the city.
Q Bridge is a part of Creative Arts Workshop's annual student and faculty exhibition, running at CAW's Hilles Gallery now through Nov. 15 and occupying two floors with the work of dozens of artists. The show itself is, in turn, part of Open Studios New Haven, a month-long celebration of visual artists in New Haven with ongoing shows and a series of events across the city. CAW's show, like a few other large group shows around town, serves as a snapshot of what's in store for the month, as Open Studios events ping pong from Fair Haven to Westville, as well as how New Haven artists are practicing their craft and connecting to each other and where they live.
Perhaps we can blame I-95 for cutting us off from the ocean; imagine if New Haven's city streets still ended right at the shore, like the did before the highway went in. As it is, in our day-to-day experience, it can be easy to forget that New Haven is a coastal city. Our artists help to remind us. Like March, printmaker Jennifer Van Elswyk is drawn to New Haven's shore, but her choice of medium leads to a different angle on it. She prints a map of a local tidal marsh (of which there are several) but is interested in more than cartography. With successive layers of printers, she gives a sense of the wildlife that might be found there, just a glimpse of a reason to visit, and a reason to cherish and preserve it.
Painter Heidi Harrington trains her eye on two specific local residents. Her choice of titles feel astute. The people in the paintings may be public figures, or people you know. Harrington treats them simply as people. She asks us to look at them as if we've just been introduced ("hello, I'm Seth; hello, I'm Thabisa"). But the expressions on their faces, while restful, aren't neutral. In her brushwork, Harrington captures a sense of their internal lives, some tension and perhaps struggle, but also, a mood of abiding it.
Erin Griffin's drawing Characters of Your Life, meanwhile, explodes with energy. Her characters may not be realistic depictions of people; through her eyes, the social world is a rich cartoon. But her use of animals serves a purpose, in creating a lively mosaic of movement and action. New Haven may be a place surrounded by quiet beauty, and filled with people with rich interior lives, as the previous artists remind us. Griffin's piece gets at what it can be like to walk its streets, meeting person after person, some old friends, some acquaintances, some strangers we've just met. It's a parade of personalities, of creative people doing work, and Griffin's piece — like Open Studios New Haven overall — reminds us to get out there and dive in.
