Connecticut – Art Spiel

December 2, 2025December 1, 2025, by Jac Lahav

Maureen McCabe: Feminine Surrealism, Witch Culture and the Original Goth

Tod Gangler (b. 1953), Professor Maureen McCabe, 1975, Hand-altered photograph, 5″ × 4⅜”

I’ve never been to a séance; however, walking into Maureen McCabe’s exhibition Fate and Magic at the William Benton Museum of Art invokes strong séance vibes. Artworks on black slate whisper, engravings of shooting stars, goddesses, brew potions, and long-forgotten stage magicians appear at the Benton like reliquaries of the past. For over six decades, Maureen McCabe has been an overlooked alchemist of memory, transmuting her personal experiences and arcane cultural references into this intimate magical retrospective.

April 22, 2025April 22, 2025, by Etty Yaniv

Night Shades

Featured Exhibition

*Nancy Baker, Pretty Circles, 2020, Oil on Canvas, 48 x 48 inches*

Night Shades, a new exhibition presented by daphne:art Gallery and Advisory in collaboration with ODETTA, brings together three artists—Nancy Baker, Claire Seidl, and Geoffrey Parker—whose paintings and photographs explore the uneasy edge between perception and memory, hinting at alternative realities, and brushing against dystopia.

March 17, 2025March 19, 2025, by Etty Yaniv

The Tale of Lost Waters – Susan Hoffman Fishman at Five Points Arts

In The Tale of Lost Waters at Five Points Arts in Connecticut, Susan Hoffman Fishman exhibits seven vertical scrolls resembling satellite imagery. Four are layered in deep, earthy browns—recalling land formations and dry blood—pressing against vibrant blues reminiscent of water. The bodies of water seem suspended between presence and disappearance, drifting toward an undefined space—a light or a void.

June 8, 2024June 9, 2024, by Art Spiel

Mapping the Invisible at the Flinn Gallery

In Dialogue

Patrick Vingo: Mapping the Invisible gallery view 1.jpeg — Flinn Gallery Installation Photo by Patrick Vingo

Mapping the Invisible, the final show of the ’23-’24 season at the Flinn Gallery in Greenwich, Connecticut, showcases the work of Laura Battle, Jaq Belcher, and Amy Myers, each of whom contemplate and explore the mysteries of our existence through the lenses of science, math, and geometry. Co-curated by Francene Langford and Caren Winnall, the show runs till June 19, 2024. Langford elaborates on the curatorial process and highlights the work in this show.

April 28, 2023April 16, 2023, by Amy Brady

Susan Hoffman Fishman in Burning Worlds

HOT AIR

Map

Description automatically generated — Susan Hoffman Fishman, The Earth is Breaking, Beautifully VII: Dead Sea Sinkholes, acrylic, oil pigment stick, cyanotype and mixed media on paper, 51” x 51,” 2023

Susan Hoffman Fishman is an artist who has addressed climate change for many years both in context of her own work as an artist and in her writing on other artists’ work in that arena. Hoffman was first interviewed with Burning Worlds about four years ago and has recently been interviewed there again on her latest series of paintings depicting coastline sink holes and other landscapes impacted by climate change,

October 24, 2022November 2, 2022, by Art Spiel

Five Points – Judith McElhone: Baby steps quickly

Featured Project

Judith McElhone, Founder – Executive Director Five Points Arts

In 2012, Five Points Gallery, a small 744 square foot contemporary art 501c3 non-profit exhibition space, opened in the heart of historic downtown Torrington. Against all odds, Five Points Gallery, has become Five Points Arts, one of Connecticut’s outstanding visual arts organizations and a cornerstone of Torrington’s transition from an old industrial town into a major arts destination. Judith McElhone, the executive director of Five Points Arts, sheds some light on the vision behind her organization.

October 17, 2022November 2, 2022, by Art Spiel

Residency at Five Points – Flood 2.0

In Conversation with Susan Hoffman Fishman

L to R: Judy McElhone (founder and director of Five Points Arts), Susan Hoffman Fishman, Krisanne Baker and Leslie Sobel (three of the four Water Women) at the Center in June, 2022, amongst components of their upcoming multi-media installation, *Flood 2.0.*

In July of 2021, artist Susan Hoffman Fishman began talking with Canadian photographer, Joan Sullivan about the eerie similarity between future apocalyptic flood predictions and the ancient story of Noah and the world’s first apocalyptic flood. The two artists have known each other through writing, both serving as core writers for the international blog, Artists and Climate Change. Both artists have been working on issues relating to water and the climate crisis and are equally interested in mythical stories related to water that resonate in contemporary culture. That led them to weekly conversations throughout 2021 when they decided to collaborate on a multi-media installation project, which they eventually called Flood 2.0.

August 1, 2022December 30, 2022, by Etty Yaniv

Zachary Keeting: Reconciling Layered Energies

Zachary Keeting *coffee and cigarettes* 2016 acrylic on canvas (triptych) 48” x 124” photo courtesy the artist

In Zachary Keeting’s restless and complex paintings swirls of vivid purples, yellows, and reds float by or contained within geometric shapes of subdued browns and pinkish off-whites. Together they orchestrate distinct rhythms and create a sense of luminosity. Keeting’s alluring colors often generate dynamic pictorial spaces filled with an imaginative array of fragmented forms which remind me of mirror shards prisms against a shifting light, particles in a quantum physics lab, or visual transcriptions of sounds. Although each of these parts, whether biomorphic or geometric, appears to assume a distinct characteristic, the overall sense we get is—what we see now is on the verge of changing within the next second.

January 12, 2022November 2, 2022, by Art Spiel

Alignments at Flinn Gallery

Featured Project: with curator Tracy McKenna

Installation view, photo courtesy Flinn Gallery

Alignments at Flinn Gallery in CT is a three-person exhibition featuring abstract work by Meghan Brady, Ben Godward, and Erika Ranee, curated by Tracy McKenna. The work triangulates around shapes and strata. It runs through January 26^th, 2022.

December 4, 2021December 2, 2021, by Joan Sullivan

In the Beginning There Was Only Water

While some of us taught ourselves to bake sourdough bread or to mend socks during the pandemic, the American painter and arts writer Susan Hoffman Fishman plunged herself into her studio and emerged, a year later, with a revised creation story. The result: a magnificent, nearly 50-foot (15 meters) opus entitled In The Beginning There Was Only Water. Currently on exhibit at the Five Points Gallery in Torrington, Connecticut through December 19, 2021, In The Beginning There Was Only Water reframes the biblical creation myth – in which “man” was granted “dominion” over all the Earth’s plants and animals – into a new, non-human-centric story.