Tuesdays, November 4, 11, and 18 | 5:30 to 6:30pm
Individual Class: $49 Member; $55 | Full Three Class Series: $108 Member; $120 | Limited seats available
“Getting” Contemporary Art is an interactive class series designed to connect today’s exhibitions with the deeper currents of art history. Each session explores the art historical and cultural contexts of artists currently on view at The Aldrich, blending storytelling, close looking, and discussion to help participants uncover new ways of seeing contemporary art. No prior experience with art history is required, only curiosity and a willingness to dive in.
“Getting” Contemporary Art is led by Kristen Erickson, art history teacher and Director of the Luchsinger Gallery at Greenwich Academy.
Attend all three classes or a single class!
Classes
Tuesday, November 4 – Nickola Pottinger: Jamaica, Memory, and Folklore
This class delves into the history and folklore of Jamaica to better understand Nickola Pottinger’s shape-shifting sculptures. Through a gallery walk, participants will examine the mix of spiritual and personal symbols in her works, which include casts of her own body and family heirlooms. Group discussion will encourage participants to uncover the layers of meaning carried by these spectral figures, which merge ancestral traditions with contemporary stories.
Tuesday, November 11 – Zak Prekop: Music in Abstraction
Have you heard of Song Exploder, the podcast where musicians take apart their songs piece by piece? In this class, participants will “explode” the vibrant abstract paintings of Zak Prekop. The session will focus on how he creates a sense of movement and stillness through color relationships, while also considering art historical precedents such as the “action painting” of the 1950s. Participants will further explore Prekop’s musical influences and how rhythm and harmony appear in his painting practice.
Tuesday, November 18 – Uman: Textiles, Calligraphy, and Transformation
Uman’s kaleidoscopic paintings reflect the story of her extraordinary life. She grew up in Somalia and Kenya, spent her teen years in Denmark, and traveled to Vienna and Paris before moving to New York where her artistic vision blossomed. This class will introduce participants to the art histories that shaped her, including East African textiles, Arabic calligraphy, and the work of Gustav Klimt and Sam Gilliam. During a gallery walk, participants will consider how Uman captures her memories, dreams, and personal transformation in visionary paintings that celebrate survival and creativity.
Instructor Bio
Kristen Erickson has been teaching art history and curating exhibitions for the past three decades. She spent eight years working in the curatorial field at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the Smith College Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art before turning to teaching. Kristen currently teaches art history at Greenwich Academy, where she also runs the campus art gallery. She holds degrees in French and art history from Vassar College and Oxford University. A resident of Ridgefield, Kristen loves making contemporary art come alive for new audiences.
Thursday, December 11, 2025 | 6 to 7 pm
Free: Members; $10 General Admission; $5 Seniors/Students
Join Diana Bowes Chief Curator Amy Smith-Stewart for an exclusive after-hours tour of Uman: After all the things…. The exhibition includes new and recent paintings, a mural, and sculpture. New York Magazine recently hailed the artist’s work as “a reminder of what painting can still do.”
Members, please join us at 5:30 pm for refreshments with Amy Smith-Stewart prior to the tour. To become a member, email hhart@thealdrich.org or join online here.
Experience Mikailwitl For Generaciones Perdidas, a new performance by Marcela Torres in The Aldrich’s Sculpture Garden. Featuring Mitotilliztli danzantes, traditional danza, sound, reggaeton rhythms, and ceremonial elements, the work honors lost lineages and the sacredness of land while paying tribute to the Ramapough Lenape Nation and Lunaape Munsee Delaware Nation. Guests are invited to bring a flower or bouquet as their offering and admission to the collective altar.
Throughout human history, clouds have occupied a unique place at the crossroads of observation, imagination, and inquiry. From ancient sky-gazers to modern meteorologists and engineers, our engagement with clouds and the perpetual motion of the atmosphere reveals both a desire to interpret the world visually and a need to understand its physical processes.
The panel will explore perspectives at the intersection of art, science, and engineering: What is the role of clouds and the turbulent atmosphere in art, science, and engineering? Clouds are always transient: How do we observe, analyze, and understand ephemerality? Clouds and their role in environmental change, from extreme weather to climate change impacts: what are opportunities and challenges in visual communication and public engagement? The panel is held in conjunction with the exhibition Clouds: A Collaboration with Fluid Dynamics.
FREE. Everyone is welcome.
RSVP appreciated.
PANELISTS
Ann Fridlind is a Physical Scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Dr. Fridlind’s studies have concentrated at the intersection of detailed models and rich observational data sets to advance understanding of the clouds that are most relevant to Earth’s climate. She has used a wide array of airborne in situ and ground-based and satellite remote-sensing data to study stratiform clouds from Arctic to Antarctic, tropical to mid-latitude deep convection, mid-latitude continental cumulus and synoptic cirrus, and subtropical stratocumulus. She is also a developer of cloud microphysics schemes in computational codes, such as NASA’s ModelE3 climate model.
Helen Glazer is a visual artist whose work bridges photography and three‑dimensional sculpture. Helen ‘s photography and sculpture made from 3D scans are profoundly influenced by scientific insights into the physical forces that shape ecological environments, including human activity. A 2015 participant in the National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, her solo show of that project, “Walking in Antarctica” is currently touring US museums and galleries. She is working on a photographic landscape history of Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, focused on the impacts of a US Cold War air base and climate change.
Miad Yazdani is a principal fellow at RTRC. Dr. Yazdani is responsible for leading strategic initiatives and defining technology roadmaps particularly pertinent to interfacial physics to ensure RTX’s competitive advantage in key technological areas is preserved and expanded while having impact to business units’ near-term and long-term technological objectives and requirements.
Moderated by George Matheou, Associate Professor in the School of Mechanical, Aerospace and Manufacturing Engineering. Dr. Matheou’s research focuses on computational fluid dynamics, leveraging theory, advanced algorithms, and data to study complex multi-physics fluid flows, with applications in weather forecasting and climate. Dr. Matheou is recognized for his innovative approaches to research and education, including integrating artistic expression to engage students.
Celebrate The Last Green Valley’s Walktober with a walk-through and discussion around our exhibition Exploring America at 250.
Join Curator of Education, Matthew Marshall for a walk-through of the exhibition Encounters with the Collection: Exploring America at 250. The exhibition draws on the museum’s holdings of American art to think broadly about how the very word “American” can be defined: as an identity, a place, and an idea.
Highlights include landscapes and cityscapes by Ansel Adams, Martin Johnson Heade, and Richard Misrach; representations of President Abraham Lincoln across different media; and a salon-style wall of portraits from the 18th century to the present. Also featured are recent additions to the collection by Valerie Hegarty, Jeffrey Gibson, and Sarah Sense.
This presentation of key works from the Benton’s collection will encourage dialogue about American art, culture, and identity. Visitors are encouraged to think about the ideas and ideals that shaped America at its founding while also exploring how they resonate in America today and for the future.
FREE
Register at the website link below.
5pm gallery viewing | 6pm lecture followed by book signing
Grant B. Romer, a leading authority on early photography and former director of the Photograph Conservation Department at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, discusses the breadth of outdoor views captured by daguerreotypists offers insight into mid-19th-century America. Join us before the lecture to view The Scenic Daguerreotype in America 1840–1860. Reservations encouraged.
Free. Registration encouraged.
Presented in partnership with the Daguerreian Society with additional support provided by the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation Fund.
5pm gallery viewing | 6pm lecture
Contemporary Seneca artist Marie Watt discusses her creative process and artwork that explores the intersection of history, community, and storytelling.
Marie Watt (she/her, b. 1967, Seattle, WA) is a member of the Turtle Clan of the Seneca Nation of Indians whose work draws on images and ideas from Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) protofeminism and Indigenous teachings. Her practice is interdisciplinary, incorporating printmaking, painting, textiles, and sculpture. Watt conducts both solo and collaborative projects, but in all of them she explores how history, community, and storytelling intersect. Watt holds an MFA in painting and printmaking from Yale University; she also has degrees from Willamette University and the Institute of American Indian Arts; and in 2016 she was awarded a Doctor Honoris Causa from Willamette University. Selected collections include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Seattle Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Yale University Art Gallery, the Crystal Bridges Museum, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian and National Museum of American Art, the Tacoma Art Museum, the Denver Art Museum, the Portland Art Museum, and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. Watt is represented by PDX Contemporary Art in Portland, OR; Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco, CA; and Marc Straus in New York, NY.
Free. Registration encouraged.
Presented with support from the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation and with additional support provided by the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation Fund at the Wadsworth Atheneum.
Oliver Tostmann, Susan Morse Hilles Curator of European Art, and Erin Monroe, Krieble Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture, share highlights from the museum’s new installation Inventing the Modern: Art 1890-1970, exploring the development of modern art as a complex phenomenon evolving across decades, styles, and continents. Meet outside the Museum Shop.
Free with admission. Registration required.
Stitching Time features 12 quilts created by men who are incarcerated in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as Angola Prison. These works of art, and accompanying recorded interviews, tell the story of a unique inside-outside quilt collaboration. The exhibition focuses our attention on the quilt creators, people often forgotten by society when discussing the history of the U.S. criminal justice system. Also on view in the gallery will be Give Me Life, a selection of works from women artists presently or formerly incarcerated at York Correctional Institution, a maximum security state prison in Niantic, CT, courtesy of Community Partners in Action (CPA). The CPA’s Prison Arts program was initiated in 1978 and is one of the longest-running projects of its kind in the United States. Founded in 1875, CPA is celebrating 150 years of working within the criminal justice system.
* This event is a part of Fairfield University Explores 250 Years of the American Experiment: The Promise and Paradox *
Image: Yongmi Olsen, Breaking Through Narrow, pen and colored pencil on Bristol board, 2008. Courtesy of the artist and the CPA Prison Arts Program
Monuments: Commemoration and Controversy (organized by The New York Historical) explores monuments and their representations in public spaces as flashpoints of fierce debate over national identity, politics, and race that have raged for centuries. Offering a historical foundation for understanding today’s controversies, the exhibition features fragments of a statue of King George III torn down by American Revolutionaries, a souvenir replica of a bulldozed monument by Harlem Renaissance sculptor Augusta Savage, and a maquette of New York City’s first public monument to a Black woman, Harriet Tubman, among other objects from The New York Historical’s collection. The exhibition reveals how monument-making and monument-breaking have long shaped American life as public statues have been celebrated, attacked, protested, altered, and removed.
* This event is a part of Fairfield University Explores 250 Years of the American Experiment: The Promise and Paradox *
Image:Johannes Adam Simon Oertel, Pulling Down the Statue of King George III, New York City, 1852-1853, oil on canvas. The New York Historical, Gift of Samuel V. Hoffman, 1925.6. Courtesy of The New York Historical