Metro Arts Studios in Bridgeport will feature Kathleen Telesco as its Featured Artist from May 31 to July 18, 2026. Telesco, who previously focused on realistic still lifes and portraits, has shifted to expressionist and semi-abstract painting over the last five years, working with acrylics and charcoal. Her inspiration comes from nature, ancestry, and dream narratives, and she also volunteers as a wildlife rehabber and birder.
The Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury, Connecticut, balances art and local history, serving as a community hub. Director Bob Burns has integrated school programs reaching 7,000 local students annually, community art shows, contemporary works by artists like Yayoi Kusama and Simone Leigh, and a major exhibition "About Face: 250 Years of American Portraits" curated by Rebecca McNamara. The museum also features hyper-realistic paintings by Wende Caporale-Greene and a gallery of Waterbury's industrial past, with a focus on inclusivity after removing a physical barrier to Main Street in 2019.
Artist Linda Colletta has transformed her studio practice within Bridgeport’s historic American Fabric Arts building, a former lace factory, by blending painting with labor-intensive weaving. Drawing inspiration from the site’s industrial history and the teachings of Bauhaus artist Anni Albers, Colletta repurposes drop cloths and tears apart her own canvases to weave them back together. Her recent work explores the materiality of paint and the concept of "Thought Forms," a visual language for emotions influenced by early 20th-century Theosophy.
The Yale Center for British Art is set to debut its 2023 acquisition, Rina Banerjee’s monumental sculpture "Take me, take me, take me . . . to the Palace of love," in a dedicated exhibition running from February to July 2026. The work is a translucent, pink cellophane reimagining of the Taj Mahal, suspended from the ceiling and filled with a mix of colonial relics and mass-produced consumer goods like plastic beads and foam balls.
An exhibit opening at the La Grua Center in Stonington, Connecticut, celebrates the work of local artists Dennis Sirrine and Tom Frohnapfel. The show, which runs through the end of February, features their representational and abstract paintings, mixed media, glass works, and furniture, reflecting over four decades of creative exploration. Both artists moved from the Midwest to New York City in the 1980s before settling in Stonington in the 2000s. Sirrine, who manages the Velvet Mill Gallery, presents works ranging from early cityscapes to recent abstractions, while Frohnapfel, a Pratt Institute graduate, showcases his design-and-build furniture, glass blowing, and paintings.
An exhibition titled "Bringing Natalie Home" has opened at the Flanders Nature Center in Connecticut, showcasing the artwork of Natalie Van Vleck for the first time in the newly renovated Van Vleck Gallery. The gallery is located inside the historic saltbox house that Van Vleck urged her parents to purchase in 1926, where she later built her art studio in 1928. The comprehensive exhibit, which began on February 7, 2025, will display her work throughout the year after decades in storage.