The ALNB Artists of Color Show 2 Aftermath

In my first essay on this show I questioned the legitimacy of the conceptual basis for this show.
In the second installment I looked at the art and artists.

In this essay, let's unpack whether or not this kind of curation accomplishes what the show claims it does.

Are the Artists Underrepresented?

The best that can be said about this claim is that a few of the artists exhibiting may be new (and just starting) to the Art League of New Britain (ALNB). But many - those holding and exposing the most mature body of work are well known veterans of the Central Connecticut gallery ecosystem. They show and get accepted regularly to the shows they enter. The idea that they are "erased", "invisible", or otherwise marginalized is the by-product of the ineffective politics of the hegemony of exclusively Democratic governance. Non-white voters are conditioned to feel oppressed and they are trained, like Pavlov's Dogs,  to pull a single party lever come election time.

As a storied art gallery that is part of the Central CT Arts ecosystem, the ALNB could care less about the identity politics of anybody who pays their money, enters a show, and has anything they claim to be art that isn't a rancid fraud - You'e In! Now that may come as a huge disappointment to race baiters and hustlers who can and do make a pretty penny on selling reverse bigotry as a hot commodity. 

But the broader truth of the matter is that all Connecticut artists (tho there are exceptions in the rich New York suburbs and country hideaways) very much are poorly represented, undervalued, and systemically ignored both in exposure and grants funding. For decades and decades I've followed and documented (to the degree that I can) the obscene mistreatment of artists who pay taxes and live in Connecticut and get jack-shit representation from larger arts organizations, government funding operations, and State programs. An audit of all of these organizations is LONG overdue but they are protected by the immutable jackboot of Democratic thugs running the State.

The Art profession has been under assault for almost a half-century with agit-political groups feasting like termites at the foundations of local arts groups. These groups are weak and often imprinted with victim mentalities and sympathies that wholly distort their purpose. 

What this show illustrates is that there is no single cultural cohort of people who constitute a coherent set of historical victims, shared common aesthetic consensus, or long term commitment to sustaining and nurturing a more so-called "equitable" arts scene.

This is the first show I have ever attended at the ALNB that has empty wall space. Wall space is everything to artists. Wasting it is an organizational sin. But it also exposes the weakness of the premise of the show's pretense. The color of any artist's skin has nothing to do with the stuff in the gallery or with the idea that there is a volume of work that is being suppressed.

Is There a Hidden Culture Out There?

Well, there may be but does that culture have an artistic veracity to its existence? Galleries like the ALNB are better equipped to organize art shows that might split up the multiple gallery spaces. Why not dedicate a gallery to modern American Urban art regardless of who contributes work? Why not one dedicated to suburbia? Or the Polish influence - Italian - Puerto Rican, and so on?

The idea that artists should be divided by bigotry based criteria is a disservice to all of us. If there is a demographic that represents who we are its called "Talented Individuals". And the individuals who show up are the only ones that matter because the rest of the world doesn't give a shitt about any of us.

Does the Show Succeed

Both of these shows have had some really fine art exhibited and have been well judged respectively.

Both have failed in their socio-political promises. While they do filter by skin color, skin color is a lousy way to describe the Connecticut Arts scene or any Arts scene for that matter. Most of the artists in these shows were far more vanilla American citizens than representatives of the their neighborhood vibe. Artists don't roll that way - well, some do but the by-product is more propaganda than art.

The answer to improving participation in all art shows is *Participate MORE* - that's it. Show up, be there.

And if you have a victim narrative - talk about it. But if you do don't be surprised if the person next to you doesn't say, "Hold my glass of wine." and bends your ear with their own. 

The ALNB Artists of Color Show 2 Art Critique

 I visited the Artists of Color Show II today. I commented on the show's existence in an earlier post.

This is a wildly eclectic show and a bit of a mixed bag in terms of quality. Add to this the fact that a few of these artists are friends or well known peers. I will do my best to present an objective set of observations.

Darryl Oates, one of this country's finest portrait artists, judged the show and the task was a difficult one. But the unintended consequence of judging leaves the show short any work he might have contributed and that's a shame.

The show featured many portraits or pictures of individuals or advocacy poster designs. All of the prize winning pieces were portraits of one kind or another.

First prize was awarded to a portrait by Stanwyck Cromwell that didn't click for me - an abstract hodgepodge of colorful silhouettes that was pleasant enough with nothing to say and nowhere to go. On the other hand, his other entry, Give Peace a Chance, I thought was far more artistically interesting because of its aesthetic coupling to artistic practice like Rauschenberg's Combine objects. 

The Cromwell pieces expose a chronic weakness with all messaging or virtue signaling art and that is that the juvenile imagery and utopian lecturing can bring even well crafted and artistically sound art objects into the realm of American Kitsch which is its own ocean of commercially successful but intellectually questionable material.

Many other artists in the show had similar pieces that broke out into 3 dimensional space using assemblage techniques.

The Second Place winning entry was also a messaging piece by illustrator Jaii Mark Renee whose work is available as posters.:

The Third Prize piece, Jo-Sam by Pedro Valentin is the most compelling of the pieces in the Prize winning category. Valentin is a fine artist who is delivering the goods. The Jo-Sam painting makes use of the canvas, negative space, and gestural and expressive emotion to create a truly moving piece. This is a bit of a Black Swan entry in that there's nothing particularly impressive about style, innovative material application, or the usual aesthetic metrics involving painting. This piece just works, damn.

Valentin's second entry, Harriet, is equally impressive. The use of the aura in both pieces has deep historical roots in religious iconography, pointillism, and Benjamin's modernist theories. Here, it just works. The one curiosity that may be co-incidental are Harriet's hands that look a little too much like an AI glitching hallucination - this a minor observation. The just-off-center positioning of the figure also just works despite coming perilously close to a defacto bullseye perspective.

The Honorable Mention is also a damned fine piece of work. Abel by Christopher Baskerville is an incredibly well-crafted drawing and an uncanny piece of artwork. Baskerville's drawing employs Perlstein's figure cropping technique to constrain the attention on the subject. Abel is looking at you and trying to get a better look. The treatment of the ears is sublime - it's the gaze that's important. And look at those eyes - they are super charged - somehow enhanced to really LOOK-AT-YOU. Study the reflections off the eye. Superb.

Here's where the show gets into the ALNB's Black Mirror territory (it simply goes where it goes).

An outstanding picture for your consideration is Desire for Rebirth by Maurice Robinson Somee. I have a soft spot for the German Expressionists and Somee's picture of a woman's apparition is a blast from that past. This is the stuff that going to art shows is all about. It's a piece that pops and  isn't about to get confused as wallpaper. See if you agree.

But Somee's piece is simply a hold-my-beer challenge for Fior Rodriguez whose With Good Intention explores the complex psyche of the individual subject. In full disclosure, I'm becoming a fan of Rodriguez's work, it's strange and exposes video game stacks of questions and riddles. Here, a dream state or cyber state suspension of reality. Her comfort zone is a vacant apartment with a lone picture on an incompletely painted wall. Also, like Valentin, only the useful body parts are illustrated as if Elon Musk's observation that the only important thing about any of us is not the body but the mind.

There is another cohort of artists who are best described as outsider artists. Maurice D. Robertson's contribution to this show, Ocean Beach, is one of the strangest and most inspired photographs I've ever seen him exhibit. Ocean Beach is channeling the late David Lynch here. Robertson who is the ultimate CT arts scene insider is eternally the phantom documentarian of all things happening culturally in New England. An outsider who knows the territory.

The Ocean Beach photograph is different. I mean really different. First, it's a vertical picture of what should be a horizontal landscape scene. And it has an imperceptive quality to the scene - is this real?

The back foot of the boy rushing out of the picture looks as if something from an underworld is attempting to keep him there. Just behind him a white object looking like the top of a skull looks on.

And the horizon line is nothing more than a human wall of nondescript people - people like us but not us. And the sky above them looks mighty unhappy. An ancient Greek looking into those clouds could name you the Gods who are visiting. And is there even one grain of sand that hasn't been moved for human convenience? Something is written on that sand.

Gerald Kilyaw contributed a couple of pieces more along the lines of naive Outsider art. Lumberjacks illustrates an encounter between a black person dressed in perfunctory African colors and some Canadian lumberjacks. One can only guess why that memory is being memorialized here.

The rest of the show featured more material than I can cover in one review. Needless to say there were silkscreen prints, many more portraits, and some wonderful craft items including a carved sitting bench by Ira Halliday.

Check the Art League of New Britain website for further information.

The ALNB Artists of Color Show Part 1 Year 2 Critique

 For the second year in a row, the ALNB has sponsored another Artists of Color (AoC) show. I reviewed last  year's show in two parts and I'll do that again this year. This year I'll examine the Overview and Importance statement used to justify an exhibition whose eligibility is exclusively having nothing to do with actual art and everything to do with the skin color of the artist. The complete statement is fair use copied at  the end of this essay.

The Sizzle

This year's show is billed as " this show centers artists whose voices have historically been marginalized, yet whose work speaks powerfully to the present and future".

This requires a lot of qualification. First, to the best of my knowledge the Art League of New Britain has never (historically speaking) marginalized any art or artist. In fact this is a minor bone of contention among some members.

Personally, I prefer shows that emphasize artistic quality while most often shows are judged to allow novices and outliers to be shown alongside more serious artists. Who the artists is. again to the best of my knowledge, is not a criterion.

Also, none of the artists in this show have likely ever been personally marginalized as artists. Somebody in that group may believe that but I'd need some hard empirical evidence to believe that claim. As far as I can tell, this cohort of artists have been regularly shown, belong to the great middleclass, and have been around the art block many, many times.

The chances that these artists as a group speak "powerfully to the present and future" is hopeful but highly unlikely - we'll see in part two.

Representation Claims

"Connecticut’s cultural institutions have historically underrepresented artists of color."

Actually. No.

The arguments being made in these paragraphs are will fully ignorant of both Art and the people who make art and the people who buy and contribute art.

First, the demographics of the entire population is irrelevant. True artists are born to follow a calling - to make art. They, as a reality, are only a small population in terms of the entire population. All of that identity politics stuff is meaningless. 

The percentage of any subgroup is in relation to all visual artists and not the population of the United States or the world. Add to that, the number of collectors who bought and promoted the art they spent their hard earned money to buy. *THAT* is what is represented in cultural institutions until recently. Today the cultural institutions are curated and run by woke administrations that pander to identity politic driven special interest groups who have NO interest in the quality of art and every interest in partisan politic narratives. Today, ALL of these groups are vastly over-represented everywhere to the exclusion of intelligent and tasteful interests.

The "Struggle"

In this climate, BIPOC artists struggle for visibility

What? Define struggle. The NEA, NEFA, Real Art Ways, and the parade of CT galleries and museums are proxy ATMs for the entire woke parade of special interests. 

The Social Example

" this is a platform for dialogue and visibility—a space where diversity isn't a theme, but the heartbeat"

 There are a number of platitudes listed in the statement.

The Judeo-Christian ethic of "do unto others as you would have done unto you" is missing here. Bigotry is not a virtue and never was. Passing along this idea to future generations is ... what?.. the shared humanity you want to pass along?

Before anyone speaks the word "equity" they need to actually count the number of art pieces or artists actually being  represented in relation to who and what was entered.

Secondly, the white-skinned artists being excluded here are largely, Polish, Italian, Jewish, and European sons and daughters of working class immigrants whose grand-parents were dirt poor, discriminated against in their own time, had zero to do with racism, and managed to work their way to practice art. A lot of schooltime is spent learning about the civil war. It would be nice if the schools bothered to teach everyone about the struggles of everybody else. We all have narratives.

Appendix, the original statement and rationale:

Overview and Importance

Artists of color throughout the state of Connecticut are encouraged to submit up to three works of art for ALNB’s second annual Artists of Color Juried Exhibit!

This dynamic group exhibition celebrates the talent, vision, and cultural narratives of artists of color across a spectrum of mediums. From bold contemporary statements to intimate reflections of heritage and identity, this show centers artists whose voices have historically been marginalized, yet whose work speaks powerfully to the present and future.

Connecticut’s cultural institutions have historically underrepresented artists of color.
A 2019 Hartford-area arts study found that “people of color are not proportionately represented in Greater Hartford’s art workforce” (hfpg.org), and a follow-up report noted this gap prompted an advisory group to seek ways to “increase opportunities for artists of color” (ctmirror.org). National data reinforce the problem: in 30 major U.S. museums from 2008–2018, only 2.3% of acquisitions and 7.7% of exhibitions were by Black artists (sothebys.com), while African Americans are ~12% of the U.S. population. In CT, even smaller institutions skew white. For example, the Florence Griswold Museum (Old Lyme) reported that of 172 works shown in 2023, just 29 (17%) were by artists of color (florencegriswoldmuseum.org). New Britain is 63% people of color—a majority-demographic city where immigrant and minority communities drive local culture. Yet its arts infrastructure (galleries, museums, schools) has not caught up to this diversity. The Art League of New Britain and the New Britain Museum of American Art operate in a city with one of the lowest median incomes in the state (ctdatahaven.org), suggesting fewer private patrons to support broad programming. Moreover, New Britain’s students and young artists have limited pathways: city schools have had to prioritize core needs (and face $300+ million in funding gaps statewide for high-need districts, schoolstatefinance.org), which often crowds out arts classes and visits to museums.

In this climate, BIPOC artists struggle for visibility. For example, before 2024 the Art League had never mounted an exhibition exclusively for artists of color—reflecting an unintentional oversight, given that well over half of New Britain’s populace is non-white.

Organizing a dedicated show of artists of color directly addresses these inequities. It gives local Black, Latino, Asian-American, Indigenous, and multiracial artists a platform they have historically been denied in Connecticut’s art venues. By centering underrepresented creators, the Art League of New Britain's Artists of Color Show begins to redress the imbalance noted by statewide arts studies (hfpg.org, ctmirror.org). Such a show also has immediate benefits: it can inspire youth from New Britain’s diverse communities by putting role models on the wall; attract a broader audience to the League; and build partnerships with BIPOC-led arts organizations working to diversify CT’s cultural scene.

In short, this exhibition is not just timely—it’s essential for equity. As Connecticut’s arts leaders acknowledge, “when artists [of color] are valued, the whole community wins” (ctmirror.org). The Art League of New Britain's Artists of Color Show helps make that winning scenario a reality for New Britain and beyond.

More than a showcase, this is a platform for dialogue and visibility—a space where diversity isn't a theme, but the heartbeat. Join us in honoring the contributions of artists of color and experiencing the transformative power of art that reflects the depth and breadth of our shared humanity.