Inside Susan Clinard’s Gilbert Street studio on Sunday afternoon, the West Haven space was full of New Haven faces.
People chatted in the corners among the sculptures. One viewer shared a long moment with a figure in a boat. People exchanged waves and hugs. It was all part of New Haven Open Studios’s second weekend, which encompassed Amplify the Arts in East Rock, but reached to the Gilbert Street studios in West Haven as well, where artists threw open their doors — as they will again next weekend, Oct. 19 and 20, in Erector Square and MarlinWorks, and in Westville, NXTHVN, and elsewhere the weekend after that, Oct. 26 and 27.
“The artists have done an amazing job of pulling themselves together,” Clinard said at her Gilbert Street home. “It still requires a lot of work,” from setting up studios to getting the word out. “But the joy,” and “the feeling of community,” are “very much still there.” To her it all seems “very beautiful and natural.”
Down the hall from Clinard’s studio, a group of artists from the West Haven-based Shoreline Artist Collective (SLAC) — Louise Cadoux, Bill Enck, Jenna Gonzalez, Edith Reynolds, Victor Smith, and Pietro Spagnulo — set up a show that represented the fruition of work in artists organizing themselves.
