Parkville Art Gallery
Hartford
Through Aug. 8, 2025
Miguel Jose Matos is not your typical patron of the arts.
He showed me around Parkville Art Gallery, a cavernous, 4,000 square foot space that he owns with his wife. Matos is here in Hartford. After 35 years as a Wall Street banker, and a second career working in local government, he has become both an arts curator and a renowned artist in his own right.
He started Parkville Art Gallery because he felt that traditional art spaces in Hartford don’t cater to the grassroots artists of the city — people of color, poor people, and those who can’t get into the rooms where grant awards are decided.
“We don’t have a space where we can share, gather, and belong,” he said. So he started one, funded initially from the proceeds of selling his own work. Matos has also eschewed the usual model of non-profit status for his gallery, incorporating as an LLC to sidestep what he describes as the cutthroat world of arts funding. Instead, he seeks support from private donors.
“How long will this last?” he asked rhetorically. “We’ll see. It’s an experiment.”
The experiment has allowed some truly remarkable artwork to be displayed.
Take the work of Jonathan David Frechette (pictured above), who creates his work using tabletops. I didn’t even notice that they were tabletops because I was so focused on the image itself. The blue hues of the woman in his image conveys a depth of emotion, and the lines that define the form are like a separate work of art on their own. Frechette’s artist note next to the image is a perfect example of the idiosyncrasies of the artspace itself, a handwritten chronology of his journey across the country:
“Born Hartford April 6 1957
Lived in Unionville till 8th grade
Farmington through High School Farmington High
Yale 1975 – 79 majored in Art & Soccer”
It goes on until ending in “moved Back to Hartford 2014?” The question mark made me laugh, because as I’ve gotten older myself, dates and important events have begun to blend together to the point where, yes, I too question when major events in my life occurred.
Another Connecticut artist, Mark Schebell, used his artwork to help him face the mental hardship he endured during his transition away from the United States Marine Corp in 2014. His psychedelic chimera comes to me at a particularly difficult time in my own life. What could be more fierce than a flying lion? Yet as you look closer at the artwork, you can see the single tear on the chimera’s cheek. The juxtaposition of the bright colors with the somber imagery challenges the conventions of art in the same way that Frechette’s pieces do, with colors meaning much different things than the audience normally assumes.
My favorite piece was a striking work (pictured at the top of this article) by Antony Zito, the associate director of the gallery. Zito and Matos collaborated on the pictures of the famous footballers, with Matos painting the backgrounds and Zito handling the portraits. Here we see a woman blasting out energy from her ear, which is a reversal of how we typically think about energy entering the ear in the form of sound. Her green tinge and crimson dress stand out against the midnight purple background, and the eye in the center of her palm gives the painting a mystical feeling. I know I’m seeing more here, but I’m just not sure what that is.
Which is probably exactly what Matos wants. His approach is to challenge and engage, whether it was during his time on Wall Street or during his current life as an arts curator. He’s challenging the way things are done in the arts community in this city, and I’m ready to watch him work.
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The current exhibition at Parkville Arts Gallery runs through Aug. 8.
Jamil accepts the final Mission: Impossible.
